So far, I suck at this vegetarian thing.

The problem is pretty simple: I keep finding myself with a chorizo burrito in my hand, and oops, I did it again. In the first seven days of 2020, I’ve eaten far less meat, and probably more vegetables, than usual, but I am definitely failing any purity test out there. And not intentionally; it’s just that 40 years of habit is hard to break, and my specific commitment to the not-eating of meat is at the moment a shallow one.

So, deal off, right?

Not at all.

Do you at least feel like a failure?

Ha. No.

And I also don’t feel like a vegetarian, exactly. What I feel like is a work in progress, and I trust that. I trust my ability to learn and grow. I trust myself to lean toward my commitments, and I trust my body to build the muscle to do it better day by day.

I have a shallow commitment to not eating meat, at least at the moment. But I have a very deep commitment to trying to live in fuller concert with my values and with the earth. I’m also profoundly interested in exploring the question of what can be leveraged by consumer-level choices. There’s a lot holding me here in this experiment. None of which dies of imperfection.

And I’m going to level with you: the above is a true story, but I’m not telling it to you as confessional. I don’t need a witness or arbiter for my eating practices.

I’m here (and, secret: you are too) for the metaphor.

Because sometimes we suck at things at first, even when we care about the larger implications. And you know what? Sometimes your friend or neighbor or colleague does, too.

And a thing that American culture, and Unitarian Universalist theology (interesting overlap there, for sure) are both averse to grasping is that we as people can commit to a thing, and suck at doing what we committed to, and still keep going in the service of our commitment.

We are averse to grasping that it’s possible, and it is frankly alien to us to consider that this kind of try and then try better is in fact what integrity looks like where gravity is applied.

Amid this backdrop, I was recently charged with overuse of the word covenant. I pled guilty; it’s an occupational hazard. And I said that I would try to find another word; but the truth is, I don’t have one. Because where relationship is concerned, covenant is the only word I know that means that we—you and I—are going to try, and mess it up, and then we are going to try again.

Covenant is one of the most powerful tools I know in growing toward the person I want to be, because that so often means building toward—not discovering ready-made, but co-creating, month by month—the relationships I hope to have.

And I need that word, because what’s left otherwise, namely some brittle and therefore broken promises, seems unlikely to allow our best care for one another. Insufficient to facilitate the best of what I have experienced between us. Unworthy of the complexities of human love, including its concerning capacity for hate and the mystifying and magical and sometimes highly uncomfortable realms of discovery of self and other.

Without covenant, a conversational and relational right of return, what we have when we mess up is cutoff. That’s effective, in the most surface-level sense, at removing discomfort, but its ask, or our ask of it, is that we be left where it found us. It’s the opposite, in short, of change through growth.

I have pretty strong muscles for that particular process; I know it better than I wish. But it’s a limited-value tool. Walls are ok for separation, but if it’s connection we seek, we are going to need strategies for when it’s hard. For when people are, well, human. For when we ourselves are in-progress more than we wish.

Trying, and failing, and trying again.

And this is where covenant makes asks different from what our culture is used to. Where we might learn to say, “Oops, that didn’t work” and to follow that with a considered, “Let’s try this instead.”

I might, someday, be an actual vegetarian. What I am, right now, is someone willing to learn out loud, a person with tools better than shame, and a believer in the power of relationship in the pursuit of personal and relational growth.

I am not yet good at this year’s resolution, but I’m not worried. I know through long experience that my grit is made out of my practices.

And guess what: yours is, too.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/04.mp3