Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree--usually an unrecognizable mess--and delights in it. God doesn't hand it back and say, "Come back when it looks more like a tree" or tell us how to improve it, God simply delights in us.
This quote, from Greg Boyle's new book, Barking to the Choir, gave me pause. The teacher in me thought of all the artwork I have received from children throughout my few years in the classroom so far. Each piece delightful in its own way. In fact, I still keep Michael's drawing framed in my bedroom: the cover of The Giving Tree that he made for me. Another student once asked me about my favorite things and gifted me with a precious paper full of sunshine and a river. Yet another drew me St. Benedict after we read The Holy Twins in religion.
As I sat with these lines from Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, I thought about the "mess of myself" that I present to God. I don't mean it in a bad way...I just mean that I am still incomplete...the journey continues.
I think the word "incomplete" often has negative connotations when it comes to being human, which is the problem, I guess, because it's just reality. (And I've had to journey a bit myself, mostly through my novitiate, to write those words on my own free will.) Reality is that, like a child's painting, God doesn't ask me to come back when I look more like my True/whole self. God takes me here and now; I just have to choose to make that reality the real focus of my life.
I know better than to make a New Year's resolution given the odds stacked against them, but I also know I want to be resolute in living from that stance of the reality of God's delight in each of us this year. I want to be resolute in my belief that there is a force of Love at work in this world that meets each of us where we are--in our messiness of being human--and calls us forward, not because we have to improve ourselves, but because we are called to become Love ourselves. I want to be resolute in my call to recognize that I am not the only one presenting my painting to God. I want to be resolute in loving the way a child loves--with reckless abandon--just like God.
Let us walk in the holy presence.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Art of a child.
