Blurring Boundaries

If you are a parent, you’re present at important moments of discovery and growth all along the way…. You get to be wise and also glean wisdom from that person forming right before your eyes. Watch, observe, see what is becoming; celebrate the mystery of what is unfolding. Guide as best you can, to keep your child safe, while creating a brave space where they can experiment and become…. Your love—your lavish, fierce love, will surround your child with permission and confidence to be their best self. He will bask in your love; it will morph into love for his own unique and wonderful self. Your love, taken in deeply, will enable your child to stand on his feet and say, “I am enough; I am loved.”

In any relationship, fierce love causes us to cross boundaries and borders to discover one another, to support one another, to heal one another. When we do this, when we go crazy with affection, and offer wild kindness to our neighbor across the street or across the globe, we make a new kind of space between us. We make space for discovery and curiosity, for learning and growing. We make space for sharing stories and being changed by what we share. This is the space of the border, of mestizaje, of both/and. It’s the kind of space where we can enhance our knowing with what the other knows; we can develop this kind of knowing, which W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” We can learn to see the world not only through our own stories, through our own eyes, but also through the stories and worldview of the so-called other. This is the kind of space that changes us, that grows empathy, this is ubuntu…. We simply must open our eyes, look across the room, the street, the division, the border—and reach out to that neighbor, offering our hand, our compassion, and our heart.

Lewis acknowledges that it can be a struggle to love even those closest to us when they do not conform to our expectations:

You know what might be the riskiest, most uncomfortable, heart-expanding, border- crossing work of all? Loving those impossible people who are related to you might be what tests you most. Right there in your home, where your closest neighbors live, are folks who can get on your last nerve. Your teenaged child, who is conflicted every day about who she is, so much so that you want to throttle her. Your back-in-the-nest-again son, who can’t afford his own place…. Your spouse, who is showing you parts of their personality that make you want to pack your bags and leave…. These intimate neighbors also need to be loved. Even though you disagree with them, even though you can’t fix them, when you love them across the borders of difference, when you hold them with grace, you are loving them fiercely.

Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World (Harmony Books, 2021), 109–110, 111–112.

This reflection first appeared on the Richard Rohr website: www.cac.org