Spelling Errors and Marjorie Suchocki

I can be extremely hard on myself.  I don't know what it is about my personality, but I can go from being completely and utterly self-absorbed and absurdly confident in myself to wallowing in self-pity and doubt in a matter of seconds.  And the thing that might push me over the edge can be the most insignificant thing - like seeing all those nasty spelling errors in my last post made me question if I should ever be writing for public viewing, because why would anyone want to read my mindless dribble, particularly when there are grammatical errors and words missing forcryingoutloud?!?  Geez...

My dear, sweet, long-suffering husband has come to anticipate these giant swings in my emotions. (He no longer asks, "What just happened? You were okay like two seconds ago..."  He just knows.)  Beyond anticipating, he has also taught me how to talk kindly to myself.  The things I psychologically beat myself up over are things I would never think twice about in someone else's life.  Who cares if you make spelling errors?  They don't matter in the grand scheme of things - especially not in a blog, an unedited, somewhat stream-of-consciousness medium.  Beau reminds me that the way I talk to myself sometimes fails to match up with who I believe God is and how value and worth and meaning are formed in the lives of people.  We matter because we matter - not because of what we do or how well we do it. 

Marjorie Suchocki is a feminist process theologian whose work I explored in my senior project (that one on The Poisonwood Bible that keeps coming up here).  Without getting into the nitty gritty details of process thought (that's not even another post for another day - that's another blog entirely), Suchocki is number seven on my list of influential writers because in her theology, relationships and interconnectedness are the heart.  I was going to say that they play an important role, but even that's inadequate - the fact that all of life is connected is the very ground from which her theology grows.  I am connected to you, to God, to Beau, to the mint plant growing in a pot on my porch, to the animals being grown for food in mostly less-than-humane ways, to those people who have died, to those who have yet to be born, to those who have been wounded, and to those who have done the wounding.  Everyone matters. 

And when I get too caught up in my own self-pity, Suchocki's work nags at the corners of my mind.  Sometimes she reminds me that my problems are not more important than everyone else's, and sometimes she reminds me that I deserve kindness from myself too.  She's just that good.