To Love Your Dandelions
This morning before Centering Prayer, Pam and I read from The Gospel of Thomas, a book of the sayings of Jesus discovered in 1945 in a small desert cave near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Some sound word-for-word like other sayings in the canonical Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Some sound totally different, and some sound, well—sort of the same, but with a twist.
Here’s what jumped off the page this morning. Saying 48.
“Jesus said: If two can make peace between themselves in a single house, they can say to a mountain, ‘Move!’ and it will move.”
I knew that earth-moving saying as “For truly I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Matt. 17: 20-21). True enough, I’m sure. But the Thomas version struck me immediately as true in my own experience. The power of the saying was amplified by the context of its hearing: a husband and wife reading this to one another, two people who have been trying for 33 years to “make peace between themselves in a single house.”
The most difficult thing to do in all the world is to love someone without needing to change him or her. We start out in life needing to change and “improve” things, put our stamp on everything. We’re mostly blind to our motives. When you want the other person to “change,” what you really mean is, “I want you to be more like me, be the person I need you to be.” It takes a long, long time to figure out that the reason you have to “improve” all those people out there is because you are not at peace with the person in here—yourself. I have spent untold years hectoring my own self, forcing it—by God!—to be something better, higher, greater. Of course I could hardly help trying to change everybody else around me, especially the people who live with me in this “single house.”
Here’s another “saying.”
A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him.
Finally he wrote to the Department of Agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question: “What shall I do now?”
In due course the reply came: “We suggest you learn to love them.”
“Jesus said: If two can make peace between themselves in a single house, they can say to a mountain, ‘Move!’ and it will move.”
Love this. So true–these days I try to look at my motives when I’m asking someone (someone I love, someone I live with!) to do something I want them to do. Usually I have set up an unreasonable expectation (an expectation, yes, that they be more like me!), and if I just accept and appreciate the differences, we’re all happy. I just wish our politicians could think a little bit more along these lines!
As a wife, married to my husband for 30 years, I understand completely about trying to change my spouse to be like me. This post stirred up alot of thoughts, and made me wonder how much better our relationship could be it I really took this message to heart and just learned to love them….faults and differences included!
Hi David You do write o very well This subject is so vital yet so hard to achieve the balance. Loving one another as we would have then do to us! Blessings clark
Having now been married 45 years, I have come to not believe, but to KNOW that the change needs to come from within. This really, really, really works!
Thanks,Ginny
I loved this piece. I have been interested in reading the book of Thomas for years. Maybe I will give it a try.
It’s an interesting “gospel” to read, because there are no events, no stories, no narrative line. It’s just a series of sayings. “Jesus said:”