“The Magic of Bothness”
A friend of mine said the following in an email to me this morning:
“Tonight there was this speaker at the event talking about, basically what we always talk about- love, connection, non-self, etc., and he talked about this Native American saying, ‘I am a pitiful relative.’ Meaning, I am beautiful and good and surely loved by HP, and yet… I am a pitiful relative to this world around me, because we all are at some time or another. He said they say it with joy and humility, not with shame or punishment. I think that’s really beautiful. I’m a pitiful relative. I’m also a really good relative. The bothness is where the magic happens.”
People are good, except when we’re not. The recognition of these two facts and holding them in a continual creative tension strikes me as being one of the most important human truths and tasks. If we simply emphasize the goodness, we will not take seriously the very real evil in even very good humans. If, on the other hand, we only focus on the evil in human beings, we will almost certainly become cynical. We may even become completely hopeless about human nature and human beings.
“Simul Justus et Peccator,” said Martin Luther. We are “saints and sinners at the same time.” And what is this magic that happens in the bothness of our goodness and our evil? It is the magic—or better, the miracle—of God’s grace and love. God forgives us of our evil and grows our goodness into maturity.
This is indeed “deep magic from before the dawn of time,” as C.S. Lewis called it. And this magic of bothness is the magic of accepting God’s grace and love daily and also passing it along to others.
May you and I live in and live out this magic every day!
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