You do not have to be good, you do not have to walk in your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting to be good, wrote Mary Oliver in her beautiful poem Wild Geese. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, I will tell you mine.”

In recent  weeks, the tone of many of the comments I receive has changed.

There is plenty of challenge and disagreement, which there should be,  but much less cruelty or hostility. I hope people are getting sick of cruelty.  I also think this is because I am changing, I do believe you get back what you put out.

Many of these comments are quite thoughtful. We have a contract, I hope to make people think, and I don’t care if they agree with me. In return they make me think, and they don’t usually care if I agree with them.

A good deal.

In the past few days I’ve been writing about what i see as my need to walk softly and gently in the world, there is so much anger and division. Yesterday, I wrote that I had begun to hate both the left and the right, and I hated them even more because of the fact that Ihated them.

I wrote this:

“I’m with Dr. King, I’ve decided to stick to love, hate is just too great a burden to bear, and I’m no good at it. It does seem I am quite out of sync with much of my country and many of my readers. But I do truly hate the Left and the Right and I hope they devour one another completely, as many are beginning to do.”

And in response, Michelle thought I was a hypocrite and wrote this:

“If you truly want to espouse Dr. King’s views and choose love you don’t get to say you then hate people who are on one side or the other even if they attack you. I don’t remember Dr King ever saying he hated the racists that were attacking him and killing people. So if you want to quote Dr. King Please don’t then say you hate people. Because I am on one of the sides. I urge you to truly choose love.”

And I replied in this way:

“Michelle, thanks, Dr. King often used humor  and irony in his speeches and pointed out, as the Dalai Lama did, that he was not a perfect man or angel. He hated, he angered, he was impatient and unthinking, he was unfaithful to his wife. I have read a great deal about him,  he has always fascinated me. Dr. King was essentially very human, he was no saint, as you can discover if you read the wonderful biographies of him, like the one by Clayborne Carson, among others.

Dr. King always reminded people that we are human, and that he was human. That made him wise and empathetic, humble in my eyes. That is what humility is, not pretending to be a saint, or a perfect human. In this way, he related to the rest of us. I use the term “hate” with irony, and how can you hate a whole ideology? But I will never pretend to be perfect, that would just be a lie. I choose love every day in my life, and still often stumble, sometimes hate, succumb to anger or envy. Just like Dr. King admitted in so many of his letters (I recommend Letters From A Birmingham Jail to see how much he could hate, and thus learn to love. I do not aspire to perfection, and I don’t need lectures on love. It’s best that you choose your own words, I’ll choose mine. We don’t need to tell each other what to say.”

Michelle, I would encourage you to learn more about this very real man, the beauty of him wasn’t that he was perfect, but that he wasn’t, he was the very embodiment of what it meant to be human. And if you want to espouse Dr.King, you say what you believe, and from the heart.

Almost every great man or woman who I have read about – Dr. King, Gandhi, Mandela , Washington, Jefferson, Mother Teresa,  the Dalai Lama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eudora Welty,  Merton – were humble people, they were flawed and said so, they were able, as all great  writers are, to see the worst parts of themselves and acknowledge them. They didn’t pop out of the womb noble and self-effacing.

Life taught them to grow and  feel, and even then, they were full of contradictions and imperfections.

Mandela said he had to learn to be humble to survive. Gandhi could be cruel and sexually exploitive. King often wrote that he could hate and feel rage, he never claimed to be a saint. Mother Teresa said she did everything she had to do to raise the money she needed to do good.

If I’ve learned nothing else in recent years, it’s that you don’t have to be a saint to be good. You don’t have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.  You don’t have to feel the awful pressure to be something other than human, and to not feel what it is that a human being feels  – love, hate, envy, resentment, despair.

Sure, Michele, I hate sometimes, and get angry.

You might want to read the Dalai Lama’s hilarious writings about what a pain in the ass he is to work with, just ask his employees, he says. I don’t need to be told to choose love,I choose love every day, and the reason I do is that I very often  don’t feel love, I need to remind myself to do that, I try to be the person I wish to be, not just the person I am.

It’s wrong in my mind to put these awful pressure of perfection on people, it’s too easy to give up the spiritual path, the pathway to love, because it so often seems impossible. You do not have to be good to do good, and you surely cannot be good and do good every minute of your life. When you come to believe you have to be perfect to do good, then it’s to easy to skip it.

Many people in our country hate our President, Mr. Trump, and I’m not wild about him either. But he is capable of doing good things, even for all of the lies and rage that come out of him.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,” wrote Oliver at the end of her poem, “the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

We are human, that is our place in the family of things.