Do Your Own Work

Just before Christmas, I led a retreat at Ignatius House in Atlanta, GA. One of the participants offered this compliment for my book, “It’s all in there.” she said holding it up. “There’s Father Ed Dowling and Greg Boyle and Sister Ignatia…” She continued listing many of my teachers on this journey.

When I wrote the book, I wanted to offer what I was looking for: resources in one place. I am no expert. I am a mom looking for help and these are the experts that helped me. Let me put them into one place and then you can do your own work.

Back when I began writing, I didn’t understand just how important work on myself would be in recovering my relationship to God. I didn’t know that I even needed a relationship to myself. But I had an inkling that I needed help in recovering my relationships to others.

I didn’t understand how similar I am to the folks in my life who are suffering with addiction. Today I believe that we are all addicted to something. Anything I consume or action that I take to avoid a feeling of discomfort is a behavior that we see in our addicted loved ones. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t do this.

Your own work is essential. It is the ONLY power you have. In Greg Boyle’s latest book, “The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness,” he quotes Dorothy Day who wrote to a friend saying:

The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is love them.”

Dorothy Day

As I sit here on this last day of December of 2021, a year laden with devastation, I wanted to try and boil down what I’ve learned; the most useful bit of information I can impart from all the experts and great thinkers that I have read.

If you want to change others, change yourself. It is that simple–and difficult. If you see something in someone else that you don’t like, take a deep look at them. Bring to mind that they are a child of God (just like you). Ask for God to show you how to love them. It might just be a silent prayer or a smile of acceptance of them, right where they are. No judgment. No advice. No manipulations. If you do this, it WILL change YOU.

Keep doing it. Use it as an experiment if you need to. Observe how love changes others. If God is love as scripture tells us, when you love others you are using the most powerful tool available. It may not happen in an instant or in a day or week, but love always changes things. Always.

I would like to end with Father Greg Boyle’s quote in that new book. He was my greatest teacher of how to love.

“Our own awakened sense of lovability within us moves us out to the other. We rest in the abundant acceptance we feel, and it propels us forward. Jesus always thought that the root cause of oppression was our lack of compassion. We receive the tender glance, then we become it. Compassionate and fluent in the whole language. We all belong to each other. We begin there.”

Greg Boyle, SJ, “The Whole Language”