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A funny thing happened on the way to this Quest issue. We switched our topics from one month to another, and I neglected to notice it when I reached out to colleagues for submissions. I recruited great material for an issue on spiritual practice (which you’ll see next month), happily left for a wonderful two week-break, and thought I was prepared for our editorial meeting the day I returned.

Then, the night before I was coming back, I saw an email from Lynn Ungar, Quest’s editor, reminding the team that we’d be meeting the next day on the theme of … what!?!?!? MISTAKES!!! I had recruited nothing. I had prepared nothing. I had done…you guessed it…nothing! Except that I had lived out the theme, by making a colossal mistake!

Hastily, I reached out via social media to my colleagues to explain this ironic situation…could they please, immediately, without hesitation, send me stuff they’d written about mistakes? With love and humor and willingness, a record number of submissions were in my mailbox within a couple of hours.

My experience, and many other experiences just like it, show to me over and over that when I make mistakes, other people are ready to lean in and support me, to pick up what I dropped, to help me out. In fact, the mistake I made encouraged my colleagues to be quicker with sharing what they had written than if I had asked them far in advance to do so. My own imperfection, I suspect, invited them to send in pieces which, given time, they might judge too imperfect to share.

Of course, I recognize that part of my privilege as a white middle class person is that I am allowed to make mistakes that other people—immigrants, people of color, people who defy gender binaries, poor people—are not allowed to make without punishment. We need only look at who is incarcerated, for how long, for what charge, in order to know that not all mistakes are treated equally. And not everyone has a community ready and willing to support them in times of vulnerability.

Which is one of the main reasons I have spent my life’s work in spiritual communities. We exist, first and foremost, to provide support for one another’s essential nature, which is vulnerability. In spiritual community, mistakes aren’t graded. We aren’t ranked and valued in order of our ability to perform, to act perfect, to measure up to one another’s expectations.

Some years ago I was practicing Vipassana meditation at a retreat with the teacher Sharon Salzberg. Salzberg has brought the practice of Metta, or lovingkindness, meditation to many of us in the west. At this retreat, she said that she has come to define the act of meditation as the lovingkindness we show to ourselves when we notice that, once again, our attention has wandered. This definition brought delight to me because my attention wanders over and over and over. “Oh!” I said, “That means, the more our attention wanders, the more chances we have to be kind to ourselves about it!” She beamed at me. “Yes,” she said.

What if our communities were centered in this same way, that we understood that we were at our strongest and finest when we showed kindness to those who make mistakes? Even bad mistakes? Instead, in the United States, we have become increasingly intolerant, cruel, and judgmental about others’ mistakes, or even perceived mistakes. Too often, social media has become a platform for judgment, indictment, contempt. This is why CLF often says that we like to bring grace to the internet: we affirm people, just as the vulnerable messes of contradictions and spectacular beauty and pain and failure that we are, from birth to death and every day in between.

Can you imagine a time when everyone’s mistakes are the wake up call to lovingkindness, the type of lovingkindness that my colleagues showed to me? Can you imagine a world in which every breath is an opportunity to love again, no matter how far astray our mind has wandered again? Do you, like me, long for a world in which every one of us believes that despite all of our mistakes, we are still worthy of love? As far as I’m concerned, that’s what we’re doing here now, in our own radically imperfect way: Trying to build that world in which love is the constant through all our wandering and our wobbling.

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Rev. Meg Riley

Senior Minister at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Meg has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than twenty years. As a UU kid in West Virginia, she quickly learned to enjoy being "different," which has served her well in a "different" life. Meg lives in Minneapolis, where she enjoys walking by lakes, gardening, reading and writing. She also lives online, where she enjoys hanging out, keeping up with people, and playing the occasional game of Scrabble. She is the parent of a teenager, and the companion of a number of four legged friends.

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