For much of my life, a lot of what Jesus said made zero sense to me. 

Don’t get me wrong, I believed it—I knew you were supposed to believe it—but did I understand it? Not really. I just kind of assumed everybody else knew something I didn’t, or maybe that you were just supposed to give it your best shot and let the pieces fall where they would. Let’s take some of his greatest hits:

“If your right eye causes you to lust, pluck it out and throw it away. For it’s better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna.” Matthew 5:29.

Sure, try telling that to my thirteen-year-old self.

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple…” Luke 14:26.

Would you believe they never asked us to memorize that one in Sunday School?

“Judge not, or you too will be judged…” Matthew 7:1.

This was especially baffling because it seemed to me like judgment was pretty much what this whole thing was about.

And then, there was the big one: 

“You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:43-45. 

In other words, what I heard was that one must only grit their teeth, stop hating their enemies, and love them. Easy peasy.

I’m exaggerating, of course. I’ve since gotten enough backstory to appreciate these sayings for what they are—and they’re brilliant—but I think this last one is still difficult to understand. Love your enemies. It’s not the idea of loving our enemies we reject—the idea makes sense. We can get on board with the idea that love heals, and hate corrupts—with the idea that there’s more freedom when we love than when we hate… We run into problems, however, with the execution. 

We get the what—Jesus went through a lot of trouble to tell us to love one another—but when we get to the how, Jesus can be frustratingly light on detail. It sometimes feels like he stood on a mountainside, raised his hands, and said, “Build a rocket ship!” but then didn’t follow up with any details about how one might go about actually doing that.

This teaching to “love your neighbor” or “love your enemies” is hardly specific to Jesus. It shows up in many traditions as a defining characteristic of healthy spirituality. We hear it all the time in all kinds of different arenas, often coming out in some watered-down version like Be kind! or politicians calling for Unity! or parents telling their kids to Stop fighting and just get along! as if six-year-olds could somehow muster up more willpower than adults. Spiritual gurus will tell us to Forgive people and accept them just as they are…. and I think all of these instructions are getting at the same thing, but the problem is that for most of us, no matter how hard we try to clench our jaw and just get along and be unified and be kind and forgive and love… all that seems to happen is that we become skilled at hiding our resentment really well. 

One cannot conjure love from thin air—at least I can’t—and the more I tried the more I realized it’s not a matter of willpower or faking it ‘til you make it. That being the case, I could never quite figure out what to do with Jesus’s commandment… that is, of course, until Ram Dass.

When it comes to religion, I’m a believer that each of us is born with an innate spirituality, and religion might best be understood as the language we use to try to understand that experience. Different religions, to me, are like different languages—each carrying a unique cadence and poetry—circling around an ineffable spiritual experience without ever quite touching it. Of course, there are those who want to copyright their language as the only official language of human spirituality—usually to turn some kind of profit—but it’s been my experience that the more we learn to appreciate these other spiritual languages, the more fully we can understand and expand our experience. I came to this conclusion, in part, because of the experience I’m about to talk about, and how a teaching from a Hindu teacher made these sayings from Jesus finally make sense to me. In other words, if Jesus told me to build a rocket ship, it was Ram Dass who pointed me toward rocket science.

Ram Dass, if you don’t know him, was a Harvard professor of psychology who lost his job when he got a little too involved in psychedelic research in the 1960s. Later in his life, trying to make sense of his experience, he went wandering around the world in search of someone who, in his words, “knew.” Over the process, he wound up at a temple in India where, quite by accident, he became a brilliant Hindu teacher—combining the spiritual experience of a disciple with the logic of a Harvard professor. 

Now, I’ve listened to several of his lectures and read several of his books, and at one of his talks, I will never forget the way he said this: 

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. 
And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, 
and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. 
And you look at the tree and you allow it. 
You see why it is the way it is. 
You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. 
And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. 
You appreciate the tree. 
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. 
And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ 
That judgment mind comes in. 
And so I practice turning people into trees. 
Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

Ram Dass

When I hear words like this, it feels like I’ve been handed a decoder ring that makes everything else make sense. After I read this, I could suddenly hear Jesus differently—it was like he was saying: “You want to know how to love people? You want to know why judging others just doesn’t make sense? Think of them as trees! When they were saplings, they didn’t know they were loved. When they grew their first branches, they didn’t have a place they knew they were safe. When they were planted, they were planted into the soil of hatred and supremacy that worked its way into their being… so, of course, they grew the way they grew. How could it have been otherwise? 

“How can you look at them and not be moved with compassion? 

“How can you look at them and not love them? 

“You don’t have to force love or rely on willpower. This ‘commandment’ is not a commandment at all. Just a reminder to widen your lens. 

“Understand, and love is the natural consequence.”

So, what I’d like to do here is look at a few ways this bears out—to see different ways in which the work of understanding—of non-judgment—can naturally give rise to love, and how such a solid, stable love is an alchemy that can transform anything.

I’ll admit right out of the gate that when it comes to accepting people as they are, there’s still something in me that takes offense. There’s some part of me that squirms—that feels like I’m betraying my values. Once, when I was pastoring a church in Louisiana, I was talking to a group of deacons, and I said, “This place is beautiful in that we commit to loving people just as they are.” In response, one of our deacons raised her hand and said, “You know, I just don’t think that’s true,” which I was not expecting. She explained, “I mean, if a white supremacist wanted to join, in all honesty, I don’t think I could say I would welcome and affirm him just the way he is.”

Fair point. It’s all fun and games until someone’s a white supremacist.

I get what she was saying, though. After all, what if someone confuses my acceptance with an endorsement? Am I contributing to a system that causes suffering? But at the same time—just for argument’s sake—what if we were to see this person as a tree? 

Imagine, just for a minute, if our starting point was not to judge this person as bad, but to see such a person as the sapling that was conditioned and wounded by fear and insecurity—a child, trying to keep themselves safe in the only way they learned works. Is it possible to see them through those eyes, to see the child at their core, and not be moved with compassion? To not accept them just as they are? After all, how could they be any different? In other words, how could we not love our enemy? 

Don’t get me wrong, we’d probably have a chat about how their actions were causing me and those I love suffering, but can you imagine the difference it would make if that chat were born from understanding rather than judgment? Paradoxically, what if the most effective way to invite someone to change is by accepting them just as they are? After all, can you tell me the last time someone you know was judged into healthy change? When shame or disappointment or a bumper sticker or a Facebook post led someone to say, Oh wow, I should change my ways! Thank you so much for pointing that out!

Or, could it be that transformation happens most effectively when we are loved into being, not judged? 

We draw boundaries, of course, and interrupt injustice and suffering however we can, and also, could it be that the best way to give others room to grow is to understand them, and judge them only as much as it made sense to judge a tree?

You may know the story of Megan Phelps-Roper. She was born into the infamous Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas—the ones famous for protesting funerals with incredibly explicit, homophobic signs. Megan Phelps-Roper is the granddaughter of Westboro’s founder, Fred Phelps, and as she grew up, in addition to protesting, it became her job to handle the church’s social media account (because, of course, she was a nearby young person and, even if you’re Westboro, that’s just how churches do it). 

She took her job seriously though, and for years she tweeted and posted some truly horrific things. While she did that, though, something unexpected happened. Through the outrage-fueled echo chamber that is the internet, people talked back. Not just reactionary, judging people, but kind people—people who had the patience to see her as a tree. Everyone must tell you they hate you all the time, someone once messaged her, that’s got to be hard. How are you?

After years of messages like this—of talking to people who treated her like a human—Megan Phelps-Roper realized something: 

This was not who she wanted to be. 

Then, in 2012, at great personal cost, she left Westboro to start a work of reconciliation. This woman—a fundamentalist, alt-right, homophobic activist—changed her mind, not because enough people yelled at her or sent her compelling stats… but because some incredible, patient, patient, patient people accepted her without judgment, and like the sun finally hitting a tree after years of growing in darkness, it changed the way she grew.

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. 
You look for reasons it is not doing well. 
It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. 
You never blame the lettuce. 
Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. 
But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. 
Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. 
That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. 
If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

-Thích Nhất Hạnh, Peace Is Every Step

It’s a lot of plant metaphors, I see that. The point is, if we work to understand—to love someone else just as they are—then healthy change naturally follows. Maybe the best way to give others room to grow is to accept them, just as they are.

Okay, so there’s accepting others, and maybe you’re on board with that… but I’ve got another one. See if this one sounds just as offensive: 

Can you accept this moment just as it is? 

Think about it. Consider the state of the world with all its suffering and pain and politics and greed… with climate change and wealth disparity and people who don’t like Taylor Swift… it seems like most of us can agree the present moment is not good. At least, it could be better, couldn’t it? Or consider the state of your life. All the mistakes you’ve made… knowing it would be so much better if only you had done something differently… if you were thinner or had a different job or found the right relationship or bought a Peloton… there’s a lot of room for improvement, isn’t there?

I once sat next to someone at a conference, listening to a speaker talk about the Enneagram. Talking about Enneagram Ones, the speaker said, “Your work is to learn to accept the present moment just as it is, with all its faults and missed potentials,” and I remember the person next to me (an Enneagram One herself) literally, physically recoiling. We were talking after the session and she said, “I just don’t get that. This moment could be so much better. I have to work to improve it. How am I supposed to accept it as it is?”

I get that. I’m the worst with that. Part of the reason I left church work was that I couldn’t shake this infuriating vision of how the church could be. How could I love it as it was? But of course, as we’ve talked about, that judgment really only ever leads to resentment and shame, and positive transformation rarely follows. So, what’s the alternative?

Different traditions try to resolve this tension in different ways: Ram Dass might say it’s karma—that history is unfolding exactly how it needs to unfold for each of us to suffer and work through our various karma and move toward freedom, so all we can do is accept this moment. It’s on purpose. I don’t know. Maybe. Some Christians might say that everything unfolds according to God’s plan—that we must trust a great intelligence beyond ourselves that we cannot possibly understand any more than a dog could understand the internet. I don’t know. Maybe.  Even science has a response to this. Quantum physicists will talk about “the Novikov self-consistency principle,” which states that—as best I can understand—in the equations that allow for the possibility of time travel, it is a mathematical impossibility to change the past. History would resolve itself and the outcome would be the same, so all we can do with this moment is accept it—it couldn’t be any different. How do they prove this? I have no idea. But maybe, at the end of the day, each of these approaches—karma, God’s will, Novikov’s principle—is really just a variation of what comedian Lily Tomlin meant when she said, with great practicality:

Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.

-Lily Tomlin

What if we turned the present moment into a tree? Looking at a tree, we can learn from how it grew, we can look at how it might grow differently moving forward, but one thing is certain: we most definitely cannot make the tree any different than it is in this moment. We can kick it and we can hit it, but it’s only our hands that will wind up bruised. We can even cut it down, but its past will go unchanged.

“I’m a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.” 

-Byron Katie

It’s like fighting with a mountain face. “When you argue with reality,” Byron Katie wrote, “you’ll lose, but only 100% of the time.”

Accepting the present moment with non-judgment does not mean the future cannot change, on the contrary, can you imagine how much energy we could free up to direct the next moment if you weren’t so exhausted judging this one? Accepting the present moment just as it is, with all its patterns of injustice, does not prevent the possibility of interrupting those patterns moving forward and bending the arc of the future. It doesn’t mean passive acceptance; it means recognizing that the future is made of present moments, so how we engage this moment determines how we embody the future—with anxious resistance, or with ease. Maybe, paradoxically, the best way to change the future is to accept this present moment without judgment, just as it is. Isn’t that a relief?

All right, there’s one last one. Fair warning, though, it might be the most offensive so far, so brace yourself. We’ve talked about loving our enemies and we’ve talked about loving the present moment, but here’s the last question: 

Can you love yourself just the way you are?

For most of us, it’s not so simple. If you were born in the United States, then from day one, you have been programmed for self-judgment. Our economy relies on it. We’ve grown up in a world that told us we needed to earn acceptance by looking a certain way or buying a certain thing, and can you imagine what would happen to our economy if we all suddenly decided, I’m good. I don’t need anything to improve myself? A whole industry would collapse! Or maybe, like me, you grew up in a church that told you that you were inherently bad and destined for judgment unless, of course, you could appease the will of some Supreme Being (which, if we’re honest, really meant appeasing the will of whatever pastor was preaching or whatever group was bankrolling them). If God isn’t pleased with me—how could I be pleased with myself? But I think an alternative is possible. 

I’ve sat with a lot of people in hospitals, and for whatever reason, I’ve noticed that we reserve far more judgment for ourselves than we do for others. Almost every week I’ll meet someone who can offer grace to just about everyone else on the planet before they can give any grace to themselves. I met a woman last week—let’s call her Jill—who was worried that, after a surgery coming up, she would no longer be able to work. I recognized she seemed to have a lot of self-judgment around this, so I asked her, “Jill, who will you be, in your eyes, if you can’t work anymore?” For a second, she got quiet, then she admitted, “Nobody. I’ll be a nobody.” 

To be honest, it always makes me kind of angry when I hear people treating themselves this way, so I had to take a second to take a breath, and then I asked her, “Jill, what would you say if your daughter” (I knew she had a daughter whom she loved) “had to have surgery and couldn’t work? What would you say to her if you heard her say, ‘Mama, if I can’t work, I’ll be a nobody?’” 

Immediately, Jill’s face changed, and she became a mama bear. “I’d tell her never to say that again!” she answered. “I’d tell her she’ll always be somebody, whether she could work or not!”

“Then why should it be any different with you?” I asked.

In that same talk where Ram Dass gave his line about turning people into trees, he talked about how hard that was to turn that same understanding inward. He said he used to put a framed photo of himself on his puja table, next to a picture of his guru, a painting of Jesus, and a statue of the Buddha. He said, “people would come and say ‘My God, what an ego this guy has got. He has got his own picture on his puja table.’” Then Ram Dass explained, “…really, what it was, was a chance for me to practice opening my heart to myself.” He wanted to be able to see himself—his story—with the same perspective and non-judgment that he could bring to others— to a tree in the woods. What if we saw ourselves that way? What kind of peace might that give rise to? Does that mean we’d lose our motivation to become better? Or, on the contrary, would it set us free to become more the beautiful people that we already are?

Compare the serene and simple splendor of a rose in bloom with the tensions and restlessness of your life. The rose has a gift that you lack: It is perfectly content to be itself. It has not been programmed from birth, as you have been, to be dissatisfied with itself, so it doesn’t have the slightest urge to be anything other than what it is. […] We are not a problem to be solved, nor is there anything we need to fix in ourselves. It is enough for us to simply be watchful and awake. By simply being aware, all that seems false and neurotic in us will drop, and our eyes will open to the reality of joy surrounding us.

-Anthony De Mello

In other words, what if, paradoxically, the best way to change yourself was to accept yourself just as you are?

This is the beauty of turning people into trees. It’s the beauty of non-judgment. The common theme running through these examples points to one of the great spiritual truths: If we can work to understand, judgment gives way to compassion, compassion gives way to love, and love gives way to transformation. “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus taught, “that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.” This is a death blow to any image of the Divine that holds tight to judgment. In this story, with this Divine nonjudgment, every tree gets sun. Every tree gets rain. Every tree gets to grow. Suddenly, Jesus’s words make a lot more sense to me.

So, as we go back out into the world—among annoying people, among people who cause suffering, among the mess that is this world—may we do so as people walking through the woods. May we see trees—some are bent, some straight, some evergreens, some pines—and may we just… allow them. May we see why they are the way they are, and may we appreciate them and love them into new growth. 

May we turn all things into trees, which means accepting them, just as they are.