Open Writing

ACCEPTANCE
Acceptance—favourable reception, approval, belief

At the age of ten I had a firm conviction that there was one job I would never do— that of being a priest.

In my teens, in the midst of a very active life, I became aware of a growing faith. This led to a commitment in my early twenties and a conviction that from now on, whatever happened, I was going to lead a Christian life. What particularly stimulated me was a quiet but encouraging awareness of the Holy Spirit.

At that time I was wrestling with the problem of what to do in life. Being a solicitor in the family firm had already been considered and rejected. I was keen to work overseas and wondered about applying to Shell, but my heart was not in oil so that was that. Whilst pondering over other possibilities I was suddenly challenged with the thought that if my Christian faith was so important to me, perhaps instead of just living it I ought to be actively engaged in spreading it?

A chord had been struck. There followed a great deal of kicking and struggling. Could I possibly work for such an archaic institution? Much to my surprise, in the space of a few days, my former firm conviction was overthrown and a state of acceptance reached. I was to be a priest after all.

Over the years I have become aware of another area of acceptance which is something of a paradox. It involves at one level accepting the worst that life can throw at you, and at another level, facing disaster in the most creative way possible. Another facet of acceptance is being accepted by God and by other people. The passages which follow deal with both these aspects of acceptance, and so provide us with grounds for hope.

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The beloved of the Lord, he dwells in safety by him; he encompasses him all the day long, and makes his dwelling between his shoulders.
Deuteronomy 33:12

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Job 1:21

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, 'I will never fail you nor forsake you.' Hence we can confidently say, 'The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?'
Hebrews 13:5-6

Therefore put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
James 1:21

It is so, it cannot be otherwise.
Anon.

What will be, will be.
Anon.

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
Martin Luther King, The Words of Martin Luther King, selected by Coretta Scott King, William Collins Sons & Co.,
1986, page 25

The will of God... cannot be simply that we accept the situations of life but must be rather that we go through them and emerge from them.
John S. Dunne, The Reasons of the Heart, SCM Press, 1978, page 26

You often try to run away from your life, but you're wasting your time.
If you sincerely believe that your life is worthwhile and necessary, then you will have accepted it.
Michel Quoist, With Open Heart, translated by Colette Copeland, Gill and Macmillan, 1983, page 183

The self-accepting person has a realistic appraisal of his resources combined with appreciation of his own worth; assurance about standards and convictions of his own without being a slave to the opinions of others; and realistic assessment of limitations without irrational self-reproach.
Arthur T. Jersild, The Psychology of Adolescence, The Macmillan Company, 1963, page 34

One could say that the courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable. One does not need to remind the theologians of the fact that this is the genuine meaning of the Paulinian-Lutheran doctrine of 'justification by faith.'
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Nisbet & Co., 1952, page 156

As I see it, to live a day at a time means to accept the happiness which each day brings without spoiling it by deploring that I may not be able to enjoy the pleasures which I supposed the years had in store for me. It means to do that bit of my task which is within my power today without worrying about whether I shall be able to finish it, and leaving it in God's hands to make what use of it He can. It means bearing the day's suffering, if suffering there is to be, in the strength that the day brings, without wondering how I shall endure the more severe trials that may come, but believing that 'as thy days, so shall thy strength be'.
Leslie J. Trzard, Facing Life and Death, George Allen and Unwin, 1959, page 162

Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality—taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be—by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude toward them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow that are forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides.
Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!
Richard Wilhelm & C.G. Jung, extract from a former patient, in The Secret of the Golden Flower, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, page 126

There is more to be said for the Stoic 'resignation', which takes refuge in a grim refusal to lower one's head under the 'bludgeonings of chance', when the attitude is genuine, and not—as I suspect is more often the case—the mere self-conscious theatrical 'pose'. But I think we all know of a better way, which is followed in practice by thousands of humble souls under burdens more grievous than those which send the sentimentalists of literature to whining or cursing, according to temperament, and the literary Stoics to admiration of their own fortitude. It is possible to do better than to abstain from complaints or to cultivate pride; it is possible, and we all know of cases in which it is finely done, to make acceptance of the worst fortune has to bestow a means to the development of a sweetness, patience, and serene joyousness which are to be learned nowhere but in the school of sharp suffering... But this attitude is possible only on one condition: the affliction must be regarded as 'God's messenger'.
A.E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, Macmillan and Co., 1930, volume I, page 153

Sometimes... a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which we do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.
Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, SCM Press, 1949, page 162

And who will venture to say that the highest insight of the spirit is even half as constant as the highest action of the mind? Ask the saintliest men and women of this world, whether their holy watch was continuous, and their faith and love as reliable as their thought; and they will tell you how long, even when they went up to be with the Saviour on the mount, have been the slumbers of unconsciousness, compared with the priceless instants when they were awake and beheld his glory. In every earnest life, there are weary flats to tread, with the heavens out of sight,—no sun, no moon,—and not a tint of light upon the path below; when the only guidance is the faith of brighter hours, and the secret Hand we are too numb and dark to feel. But to the meek and faithful it is not always so. Now and then, something touches the dull dream of sense and custom, and the desolation vanishes away: the spirit leaves its witness with us: the divine realities come up from the past and straightway enter the present: the ear into which we poured our prayer is not deaf; the infinite eye to which we turned is not blind, but looks in with answering mercy on us. The mystery of life and the grievousness of death are gone: we know now the little from the great, the transient from the eternal: we can possess our souls in patience; and neither the waving palms and scattered flowers of triumph can elate us, nor the weight of any cross appear too hard to bear. Tell me not that these undulations of the soul are the
mere instability of enthusiasm and infirmity. Are they not found characteristically in the greatest and deepest men,—Augustine, Tauler, Luther? Nay did not the Son of God himself, the very type of our humanity, experience them more than all?
Did he not quit the daily path, now for a Transfiguration, and now for a Gethsemene? did not his voice burst into the exclamation, 'I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,' yet also confess, 'Now is my soul troubled'? and had he not his hours on the mountain all night? and what, think you, passed beneath those stars? Ah no! those intermittent movements are the sign of divine gifts, not of human weakness. God has so arranged the chronometry of our spirits that there shall be thousands of silent moments between the striking hours.
James Martineau, Hours of Thought on Sacred Things, Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1880, volume I, page 10

One of the deepest needs of the human heart is the need to be appreciated. Every human being wants to be valued... Every human being craves to be accepted, accepted for what he is... When I am not accepted, then something in me is broken... Acceptance means that the people with whom I live give me a feeling of self-respect, a feeling that I am worthwhile. They are happy that I am who I am. Acceptance means that I am welcome to be myself. Acceptance means that though there is need for growth, I am not forced. I do not have to be the person I am not! Neither am I locked in, by my past or present. Rather I am given room to unfold, to outgrow the mistakes of the past. In a way we can say that acceptance is an unveiling. Every one of us is born with many potentialities. But unless they are drawn out by the warm touch of another's acceptance, they will remain dormant. Acceptance liberates everything that is in me. Only when I am loved in that deep sense of complete acceptance can I become myself. The love, the acceptance of other persons, makes me the unique person that I am meant to be. When a person is appreciated for what he does, he is not unique; someone else can do the same work perhaps better than the other. But when a person is loved for what he is, then he becomes a unique and irreplaceable personality. So indeed, I need that acceptance in order to be myself. When I am not accepted, I am a nobody. I cannot come to fulfillment. An accepted person is a happy person because he is opened up, because he can grow.
To accept a person does not mean that I deny his defects, that I gloss over them or try to explain them away. Neither does acceptance mean to say that everything the person does is beautiful and fine. Just the opposite is true. When I deny the defects of the person, then I certainly do not accept him. I have not touched the depth of that person. Only when I accept a person can I truly face his defects...
I am accepted by God as I am—as I am, and not as I should be... He loves me with my ideals and disappointments, my sacrifices and my joys, my successes and my failures. God is himself the deepest Ground of my being. It is one thing to know I am accepted and quite another thing to realize it. It is not enough to have but just once touched the love of God. There is more required to build one's life on God's love. It takes a long time to believe that I am accepted by God as I am.
Peter G. van Breemen, S.J., /Is Bread That Is Broken, Dimension Books, Inc., 1978, page 9