I wake up sometimes, shaking in sweating at the personal horror of my childhood. It has shaped so much of my life. I was assaulted and abused, I wet my bed almost to the age of consent. I don’t say this to complain or dramatize my life – everybody suffers abuse at one time or another, everyone has their battles to fight, so many people had and have it worse.
But learning to accept what happened to me and what I became has become the central work of my life.
They call it radical acceptance.
It’s the right term, it means accepting life on its own terms and accepting what cannot be changed. It is one of the most important ideas in my work to become whole and fulfilled, to find love and fix some of the broken pieces.
“It is our destiny,” wrote the philosopher Paul Tillich in his classic work, The Eternal Now, “and the destiny of everything in our world, that we must come to an end. Every end that we experience in nature and mankind speaks to us with a loud voice: you also will come to an end.” We are the only creatures on the earth who know it.
Tillich doesn’t mean this to be grim or depressing, just the opposite. He means this very blunt reality to be liberating and inspiring. When you consider eternity, our own lives take on a whole different meaning.
Tillich was one of the founders of the very idea of radical acceptance, which has come to be one of the cornerstones of my spiritual searching, and one of the most profound inspirations in my healing and recovery.
“The courage to be, ” writes Tillich, “is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.” Almost every day, I am challenged to accept myself, even if other can’t and won’t accept me. Even if I am sometimes unacceptable.
The most important of Tillich’s writing for me is his writing about how to deal with the past. In the light of the future, he writes, we see the past and the present. But it is only the future that gives us hope and awakens us to the mystery of time, we are the only species on the earth that knows about the future, and what it will mean to us.
The past always held enormous power over me, it dominated my life and nearly undid it, more than once. I saw my life in terms of the past, my anger, my regret, my hurt, my grievance, my mistakes and lost perspective. I was so often mired in it, that there was nothing left over for life and love.
Radical acceptance has taken me out of that tunnel and into the light. There is a long way to go, but I’ve come a long way.
Can we ever banish elements of our past, I wonder, so that they lose their power over the present? In spite of the past, can a man or woman separate himself from it, through it out of the present and back where it belongs?
“We are not inescapably victims of our past, ” wrote Tillich in his classic The Eternal Now, first published in 1963.
“We can make the past remain nothing but past,” he wrote. “The act in which we do this has been called repentance. Genuine repentance is not the feeling of sorrow about wrong actions, but it is the act of the whole person in which he separates himself from elements of his being, discarding them into the past as something that no longer has any power over the present.”
It is the meaning of the facts of our past that can be changed, argues Tillich, and the name he gives this act of change is forgiveness.
This idea went off like a firecracker in my consciousness. If the meaning of the past is changed by forgiveness, than its influence on the future is also changed.
The character of the curse of the past is changed, the curse is taken away from it. It becomes a blessing through the transforming power of forgiveness.
It has worked for me, again and again.
I’ve forgiven the past, my parents, the people who hurt me, the people who dislike me, and most importantly, me. Every time I practiced forgiveness, the past receded, the present advance, I was lighter and freer.
This is a transformative idea for me.
I have learned to separate myself from the elements of the past, I’ve discarded them as something that no longer has any meaning, or any power over my present life. This is acceptance in its purest and most personal form.
My past is empty in many ways now, I rarely go there, the painful experiences fading, their abundance diminishing, their ecstasy and power gone, their fullness, once so suffocating, has become a void with nothing for me to see or feel.
I don’t feel the memories and experiences of the past as curses, I don’t feel them as blessings. They have been swallowed by the past, they have no real meaning in the eternal now.
We live so long, and only so long as “it is still today,” wrote a Hebrew mystic. This idea of the eternal now breaks powerfully into our consciousness, writes Tillich, and gives us the richness of a spiritual life.
In this realm, there is one power that surpasses the all-consuming power of time – the power of eternity, of the eternal. He Who was and is and is to come, the beginning and the end. This is what gives is the courage for what it is to come. This is what gives us rest.
The courage to be is the courage to accept myself, even if I am unacceptable.
