A gardening enthusiast who took great pride in his lawn found himself saddled with a huge vexing problem: an uncontrollable crop of dandelions. No matter what he did to eliminate them, they continued to plague him. At his wits end, he wrote to the Department of Agriculture seeking their assistance.
He listed all that he had done and enquired if there were still something he could try because he had to get rid of them at all cost. He just could not enjoy his gardening until that was accomplished. In due course he got the following reply: ‘We suggest that you learn to love them.’

Love Your Enemies?
Some might wonder what we humans could learn from this lesson of Nature – yet there is enough in it to keep us busy our whole life long. As we go through the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, nowhere do we find him insisting that we should be perfect before we can be lovable to the Father. Rather, all his teachings emphasize merely this one point – that the Father accepts us just as we are, warts and all! Rather than wait for us to be perfect and then love us, he says to us that it is his unconditional love freely given that will provide us with the strength and motivation to be better and better each day. St. Paul puts this so powerfully when he says: ‘and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For, while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:5-8).
And yet somehow in the course of the Church’s history the notion of perfection as an absolutely essential element has crept into our concept of the spiritual life. We have been told in no uncertain terms, and that too in season and out of season, that the goal of Christian striving is to become perfect, understood as ‘sinless’ – especially in matters of love and forgiveness. It was for this purpose that from around the fourth century onwards Christians fled the ‘world’ and retreated into the desert to live heroically austere lives seeking to master their evil habits even to the least detail. Their goal was ‘Christian perfection.’ Experience however, shows us that it is not possible for human beings to be faultless, at least not by our own efforts. Mother Teresa is well known internationally as a great saint and soon will be canonized. What she did for the dying destitute all over the world was proverbial indeed! And yet those who knew her intimately confessed that she was ‘difficult to live with’ – and that was putting it mildly. Did this trait which remained with her till her dying day make her less lovable to God or even to people?

Faultless = Lovable?
Nonetheless, most of us have it ingrained in our thinking that we must not be caught with faults or shortcomings, especially if we wish to live the spiritual life seriously. Now we do not in any way wish to insinuate that it doesn’t matter whether we sin or not, or that how sinful we really are doesn’t count because God continues to love us. If we understand truly the meaning and extent of God’s love for us, we would never want to sin even once. Yet our desire to avoid sin should not end up as an obsession making us feel guilty or unworthy if and when we do fall because of our innate weakness.
The tendency to focus on our spiritual purity actually speaks a lot about our preoccupation with the 'Self' which still lurks in the innermost recesses of our being. If our attention were wholly focused on God, where would we have the time to worry about our petty failings? The only sin that matters before God is our conscious rejection of his love and forgiveness. Further, when we do focus on God and his love, wouldn’t we also be a lot more aware of goodness, purity, love, kindness and other Godlike qualities all around us? Our paradigms are what govern our perceptions. So, when all that our paradigms portray for us is imperfection in ourselves, we are more likely to see the same or worse defects in other people and in every situation around us. But it works the other way around too. The more we focus on the faults in people around us, the more we become obsessed with our own failings too.
 

Remedies
But we may ask: Isn’t it a good thing to be without sin? Shouldn’t we strive to become more like God our Father? How then are we to get rid of our sins and failings? Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to realize that these do not make any difference in our relationship with the Father. While he does want us to be and act like him, the Father is not at all surprised that we fail or sometimes even consciously sin against his love. He knows our weakness, but in his unbelievable love and tender mercy, he pursues us with his love and will continue to do so until one day we finally wake up to the reality of his stupendous love and learn to respond generously to it. That will be the day of great triumph and rejoicing for the Father – for he will exclaim: ‘This child of mine was dead and has come back to life, was lost and is now found – Come, let us celebrate!’ Once we get rid of our phobia that our sins are going to bring us eternal punishment, or that God is simply waiting to catch us out at sin and then mercilessly punish us, it becomes easier to relate to God out of love.
In this connection we look again at the injunction in St. Matthew’s gospel: ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.’ This is perhaps the sentence that has led so many to make perfection their goal, their ‘impossible dream’. However, we must realize that the statement is given to us as an ideal towards which we move – knowing all the while that we will never really attain it, certainly not on our own steam and by our own efforts. Besides, once we realize deeply that God has poured out his own inner nature into our beings through his Spirit, it becomes obvious that our behaviour will be like his, even if it takes a long time. Further, the original could be translated in different ways, and Luke puts it rather as ‘be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful. And in any case, the word “perfect” simply means ‘complete’, lacking nothing. Now, we can lack nothing either because we strive to obtain all that is necessary or even by our accepting as gifts all that we would ever need! Never should we read this text as meaning: ‘Unless you become perfect (through your own individual striving) you will not be acceptable to the Father!’
The second help would, of course, be an enlightened reading of Sacred Scripture. We say enlightened because even in the Scriptures, we could focus only on the punitive aspects that are copiously mentioned there. These are certainly part of the Scriptures but distinctly the approach of the Ancient Testament. Jesus came with a totally different message and attitude. His inaugural speech was simply this: “I have come to announce to you all, that this is the year of the Lord’s favour in which all your transgressions have been unilaterally forgiven – repent and believe the Good News!’ But then, if we hear even this message with the mindset of the Ancient Testament (like that of John the Baptist), we will still stand in mortal fear of God. This inaugural statement of Jesus must be the foundation of our relationship with the Father and with one another. We need to focus more on parables like the Wheat and Cockle – notice that in this parable, the Master is confident of his approach when he orders his servants to let both grow side by side. He is positively convinced that he will be able to handle the issue of weeds or cockle at the time of the harvest. No sin or ours is too great for God to cope with and eradicate from our lives – though sometimes he lets the cockle remain, and that too quite prominently to keep us from getting proud and self-reliant.

Genuine Love of Self
Thirdly, we need to train ourselves to ‘love our dandelions’, meaning that we learn to love ourselves imperfect as we are. We see our failings as reminders of how much more we need to experience God’s forgiving, healing and transforming love. When we deliberately choose to sin (refuse God’s love) we certainly will experience the evil consequences of this choice, but never as a punishment from God; rather we must learn to see our negative consequences as a result of our own stupidity in abandoning God’s love. Once we accept that we are not perfect and that it doesn’t really matter whether we are or not, as far as God is concerned, we will find ourselves more at peace – with God, with ourselves and with everyone around us. All that matters in life is that we love in the best way we can, or as closely as the way in which Jesus loved... then we can even laugh at our foibles and they will no longer disturb us. Then will we have come to truly love our dandelions. Only then will we be able to enjoy life here on earth to the full.

"Happy the person who eats bread in the Kingdom of God."