Watch Your Language

One of these days, I’ll get to It’s Not About Food by Carol Normandie and Laurelee Roark. It’s there on my shelf. If I stand up and take a few steps, I can have it in my hot little hand before you blink again. I bought it some time last year after finding a paragraph from it in Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Ensouling Language. No surprise, right?

Today, I came across the paragraph again, because I’m still trying to get through all of Buhner’s book. No, I don’t know how many times I’ve started over. Probably four.

Normandie and Roark write:

If you really wanted to know what a friend wanted for dinner, you would ask, then wait for the answer. You wouldn’t demand that she eat what you tell her to eat then call her a fat pig after all that food went to her hips. If you did, you would not have that friend very long. But this is exactly what we do to ourselves several times a day, around each meal, for years and years. It takes time, trust, compassion, and a willingness first to ask, second to wait, and then to listen to the answer without judgment and without argument. We need to become our own best friends so that we can perform the holy and sacred act of breaking bread with ourselves.

About that passage, Buhner writes:

It is a social given that we should treat others with a certain kind of respect and kindness; Normandi and Roark illustrate that beautifully by describing a powerful act of unkindness. But suddenly we find that they are talking about us individually, not someone else. Suddenly, the unkindnesses we do to ourselves are revealed for what they are. A bright light comes on when we least expect it, revealing shadowy toxins within our culture and ourselves. Why should it be acceptable to treat ourselves in ways we would never treat others?

Similarly, why should we treat ourselves in ways God would never treat us? We are taught that God is Perfect Love. If you were given the chance to design Perfect Love, what would it be like? Would it include judgment, fear, shame, or criticism?