Came across this old piece called "Sincere meditations" by Anne Lamott yesterday and thought you'd enjoy it. It's about a man with severe facial deformities. which he calls "shadows on the outside."
Here's how it begins:
"A friend said mournfully the other day that he'd lived his life like the professor on 'Gilligan's Island.' While he found time to fashion generators out of palm fronds, vaccines out of algae, he never got down to fixing that huge hole in the boat so he could go home. How many people actually do? Sometimes, if you are lucky and brave, you can watch someone who's met with serious illness or loss do this kind of restoration, this work that you may suspect we are here on earth to do. Or if you've ever seen David Roche, the monologist and pastor of the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity, you may have already witnessed this process."
If you keep reading you get to this:
" 'We in the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity do not believe in miracles,' he said. 'But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you've got to put your foot in it.'
...
God, it's such subversive material, so contrary to everything society leads us to believe -- that if you look good, you'll be happy, and have it all together, and then you'll be successful and nothing will go wrong and you won't have to die, and the rot can't get in."
Of course I don't agree with all of it - for example, I believe in 100% sincerity and 100% compassion - I hope that goes without saying.
In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."
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