What do you struggle to forgive in yourself?

Excerpt from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 81, day 89 (Source: The Passion of God and the Passion Within)

There’s no way we can love until we forgive ourselves for not being perfect, for not being the saints we once wanted to be. To use Franciscan imagery, until we’ve leapt across the chasm and embraced the leper, until we’ve recognized that really the leper is not on the other side of the chasm but the leper is, first of all, the leper within, we won’t really know our passion, or be capable of com-passion. In his Testament Francis said that when he kissed the leper, “what before had been hateful to [him] became sweetness and light.”

His compassion for others coincided with a new compassion for himself. God’s compassion comes from a spacious place where a lot of things are put together and coexist, where we recognize, forgive and make friends with the enemy within. The passionate struggle with our own shadow becomes passion for the struggles of our neighbor.

Current mantra: May I breathe forgiveness