I was going through a book I picked up recently named “The Spirituality of Imperfection” by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham and found this piece that I enjoyed, and hope you do, too.

Life, as every alcoholic knows, is unfair. Sometimes it hurts, but it is often in the depth and agony of the hurt that we find our  “way.” All spirituality, but especially those that urge some kind of “perfection,” emphasize finding part of that “way” in God’s–reality’s forgiveness of humans, of us. But a spirituality of imperfection raises the perhaps more difficult topic of another kind of forgiveness, the need we humans occasionally have to forgive God. A story told by a volunteer who works with terminally ill children connects many of these ideas.

The story goes …My idea was pretty simple at the beginning. I started to volunteer in wards with terminally ill children or burn victims — just go in there to cheer them up a little, spread around some giggles. Gradually, it developed that I was going to come in as a clown.

First, somebody gave me a read rubber nose, and I put that to work. Then I started doing some elementary makeup. Then I got a yellow, red, and green clown suit. Finally, some nifty, tremendous wing-tip shoes, about two and a half feet long, with green tips, and heels, white in the middle. They came from a clown who was retiring and wanted his feet to keep on walking.

It’s a little tricky coming in. Some kids, when they see a clown, they think they’re going to be eaten alive. And kids in hospitals and burn units, of course, are pretty shaky……

Burnt skin or bald heads on little kids–what do you do? I guess you just face it. When the kids are really hurting so bad, and so afraid, and probably dying, and everybody’s heart is breaking. Face it and see what happens after that, see what to do next.

I got the idea of traveling with popcorn. When a kid is crying, I dab up the tears with the popcorn and pop it into my mouth or into his or hers. We sit around together and eat the tears.

“…and eat the tears.”  Sometimes, that is all that we can do.  But somehow, when we do that “together,” healing and forgiveness–not only by God” but even of “God”—can happen.

“The memory of things past is indeed a worm that does not die.  Whether it continues to grow by gnawing away at our heats or is metamorphosed into a brightly colored winged creature depends…..on whether we can find a forgiveness we cannot bestow on ourselves.”
–Dominic Maruca