I know what I think I want to say, but I’m not sure how to say it.
It’s something politically subversive, psychologically radical, and should be totally obvious, but is usually hidden. Though it’s not hard to find, if you know how to look for it.
Indeed, it’s in the room right now.
So I’m going to try to say it two different ways.
You are worthy of love.
That’s the first way.
This is the second.
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In the brilliant recent Japanese movie Drive My Car, a weeks-long rehearsal process for a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, to be performed in Hiroshima, becomes the location for the main characters to reconsider their entire lives. Rehearsing a play lets the play work on the actors; even more than the way public performance is supposed to stimulate the audience to consider ourselves. Community interactions, political propaganda, and all the rhythms of our days follow a script. Drive My Car prompted me to think of how religious liturgy is a rehearsal for life - “services” in churches, mosques, synagogues and other houses of worship are not the culmination of the week, but the beginning.
I think the power of our liturgies - the stories we rehearse in religion, in commerce, in romance, in media, in ordinary day to day interaction and everywhere else - demand serious attention. These stories can kill, but they can also create. What end they will serve is up to the rehearser.
One way of thinking about this is to consider that we might live between two stories.
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The first - in an older movie, The Exorcist, a vulnerable priest asks an elder, wiser one why the devil would possess an innocent child. The answer may speak to the most important thing to which our attention should be these days devoted: I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as… animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.
If we who know we are flawed can be persuaded that we are, in fact, nothing or worse than nothing - well, we wouldn’t need a devil to wreak havoc thereafter. We’d all hate ourselves sufficient to ruin our lives unaided.
The second story is evoked by the Irish mystic John Moriarty’s description of his older neighbor Mary Hegarty, cycling up the hill in 1950s rural Ireland:
If she had to, Mary would walk, looking neither right nor left, to the centre of hell or to the centre of heaven, and, having done what she had to do she’d come home unharmed. Seeing her, seeing this woman who with the years had fallen into herself, the angels and demons would simply stand aside and let her have her way. Mary’s sanctity made the sanctity of the recognized saints seem somehow suspect. Made it look like an effort of will. Made it look like they wanted to be saints or nothing.
I don’t know the words Mary used to think to herself about who she was and where she was going, but it looks to me like she knew she was worthy of love. Or at least she lived like it.
And that’s the story I want to rehearse for myself too.
*
For love is not a privilege, nor is it best described as a right.
It is, instead, no more and no less, what we're made for.
Love is such an overused word that it needs some exploration.
We can’t exist fully without it, and it isn’t merely a feeling - it’s an experience of connection - with ourselves and each other, with our roots deep in the ecosystem, and our very breathing both receiving from and contributing to the invisible atmosphere that helps sustain life.
There may be both angels and demons by the path, but when we know we are loved our secret torments don’t have to be secret. For we are woven into the fabric of a profoundly deeper shelter than the flimsy security of even our best perceptions of ourselves. Crazy love, for a thousand miles in each direction.
One way to define love, but not contain it, is “the will to extend yourself for the sake of another”. Another is “to treat others as well as you would want to be treated. Another definition of love - some of the deepest love - is the choice to go to the ends of the earth to rescue a friend. I once read someone pondering the idea that if Jesus went to Hell between Good Friday and Easter, what he might have been doing could simply have been to look for his friend Judas.
This is love.
*
We may ache in the knowing that not all our fellow humans feel this love, or even seem to want it. But perhaps an even more important truth is that our own experience of love has hardly even begun.
Love will sustain, no matter what.
God (that word, of course, cannot contain the idea, so feel free to substitute whichever one works for you) will love us, no matter what.
We are lovable, no matter what.
If you doubt this, that’s ok. Look around at, or imagine some of the faces of the people you love. You would love them no matter what, wouldn’t you? And you know they would love you too.
But will we love ourselves?
Can we imagine holding our own image as tenderly as we would hold a baby, or even merely a soft toy Eeyore?
Can we allow ourselves to believe in love for ourselves at least as good as the way we love others? Can we decide to remember that the ancient teaching does not say love your neighbor instead of yourself?
*
We have to be taught not to love ourselves. In the womb we typically know no insecurity; and if we are fortunate to have a parent or parents who have themselves been taught how to love, we will still discover that they are not enough. The night before I moved to the US, my mum showed me the scrapbook she kept of her pregnancy journal and my first year. Notes on her joy at becoming a mother, a lock of my hair, a record of my first Christmas presents.
So much warmth and kindness.
Mum loved me then, and loves me now. And yet still I did not retain the security of the womb (and of course, neither did she). Life happened - or should I say stories about life happened.
From the world, I learned stories that said I was broken - or worse.
That I did not belong.
That I had no place in this world, or that if I had a place, it was a place of disparagement, less-than, unsafe, unlovable.
I’ve come to wonder if we should give our parents a break - they were never supposed to be equipped to raise integrated and whole humans alone, at least not in the nuclear family which lacks the interdependent support of a village, with elders and initiatory rites of passage that apparently most of our forebears knew they could not live without.
But even that last sentence reveals another reason why not only our parents couldn’t be expected to meet all our needs for nurture and security: For even if we were raised in an Ewok village presided over by Mr Rogers and Oprah, we would still need to go on a journey - an ordeal, even - to discover and experience authentic self-love.
I truly believe that our parents and our villages are supposed to be inadequate - that’s not the same thing as saying they are supposed to be abusive, no - just that there is a paradox at the heart of belonging: we must endure a sense of loss in order to experiment and appreciate the gain of what really matters; we must know loneliness before we can truly live into connection; we must walk a path of despair before our hearts are large enough to hold ourselves as worthy of everything good.
We don’t live this way, I think, because of at least four stories:
1: We live in a world with a lot of noise telling us that we are not good enough, not thin enough, not successful enough, not good-looking enough, not smart enough, simply and most frequently, perhaps, just not enough. It is hard to stay afloat in the face of these stories.
2: We live in an economy that tells us we are alone and must fend for ourselves.
3: We live in an activist culture that seeks to promote the common good, but often has an enormous blindspot when it comes to the process of trying to take account of our own privilege - earned or unearned. It tells many of us that our primary place in society is to feel guilt and shame because of our privilege, or to live in denial that we have it, rather than simply to discern the gifts we can share, and the lack we experience. Instead of Maya Angelou’s adage, Do the best you can, until you know better. Then when you know better, do better, we seem to have replaced one form of not-knowing with an important piece of revelation (we are each other’s angels, should share what we have, and take stock of how we got it in the first place), but accompanied it with another form of ignorance (we talk about some of us as if we are little better than demons).
4: And finally, we live in the midst of a social media traffic jam/car crash, in which so much information bombards and collides into us that it can seem unfathomable which part is true, which fall, which propaganda, which anecdote connotes a trend and which an extreme outlier, which is simply God’s business and not ours. Yet we’ve been told that everything must matter to us, everything’s a fight, and we must publish our position on the fight, instantly, all the time. Karl Barth said we should read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. But which newspaper? And how to read the Bible? (Or any text understood to be sacred.). I know Barth meant that Scripture read in the light of faith, tradition, reason and community discernment would illuminate “the news”, but “the news” always comes with an agenda, whoever’s writing it. Scripture does teach to read the signs of the times - but the interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. And if we do not learn to love ourselves, our eyes will not see clearly.
Scripture also says “the poor you will always have with you” - which is not a way of downplaying or ignoring suffering, but naming that knowing about suffering should both push us to serve from our privilege, and also step into lives of abundant love so we can nurture the kind of world in which everyone actually receives enough, and which models for others the possibilities of a better life.
Most of all, the carpenter from Nazareth says that Scripture’s essence can be distilled into one astonishing statement:
You must love God with all your heart, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.
This pair of phrases has been so overused that calling them a cliché doesn’t begin to describe how they have been ignored.
I’ve often heard them framed almost as suggested threats: love God, or God will torture and kill you forever; and love your neighbor, except when your neighbor inconveniences you or holds different opinions. As for loving ourselves - that’s hardly possible when we are told how terrible we are or how much danger surrounds us, so much of the time.
*
So how’s about we not do that anymore?
*
How’s about we return to what the carpenter himself tells us is the Greatest Commandment, not to punish us, but as an invitation: to love God - Reality with an Upper Case “R”, creative loving presence, the embodiment of giveaway, the end and beginning or all our dreaming, our truest home.
And to love our neighbors - willing to extend ourselves for their benefit, but not to love them instead of ourselves.
Instead of that, to see reflected every time we offer love to someone else that we are worthy of that same love.
That you are worthy of that same love.
That you are worthy of love.
You are worthy of love that stretches itself for your good.
You are worthy of love.
You are worthy of love.
You are worthy of infinite love, love that will go to the ends of the earth to find you when you are lost.
You are worthy of love not because of anything you have done, but because you are worthy of love.
You are no less worry because of mistakes you have made, and opening to this love will help you forgive yourself.
You are worthy of love.
You are worthy of love beyond your highest imagination of what love can be.
You are worthy of love.
You - all of you: the wounded child, the angry adult, the stressed out worker, the frightened voter, the exhausted activist - are worthy of love.
You are worth of even greater love than the energetic opposite of the most painful thing that has ever happened to you.
You are worthy of love greater than the most moving moment in the most romantic movie, the bravest in the most courageous epic, the deepest yes in the most exquisite poetry, the greatest awe at the most spectacular mountain vista.
No Pulitzer Prizes or Presidential Medals, civic citations, academic qualifications, career arcs or external success will make this any more true:
That you are worthy of love at least equal to that showered on any hero of peacemaking
Or the most cherished newborn child.
Greater than that, actually - for we can only gently, joyfully stumble towards metaphors that merely touch the edges of this uncontainable, infinite love.
But we can get a taste of it when we look, and truly see , into the eyes of another who is beloved, just like us.
Consider inviting another person to join you in reading thus far, and then look at each other, while hearing these words.
You are worthy of love.
I am with you always.
You are worthy of love.
You matter.
You are worthy of love.
Take the hand of Love, and love your neighbor as yourself.
You are worthy of love.
You are worthy of love.
You are worthy of love.
PS: If you're near Spokane, Portland, Bellingham, Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, or Pittsburgh in the next few weeks, I'd love to see you at one of our How Not to be Afraid events - details at www.hownottobeafraid.com)
(*TWO NOTES FOR ANYONE WHO NEEDS THEM:
1: When I try to write or speak about “God”, I’m already in trouble. Some beloved folks seem to think they own the concept of God, and of course all kinds of terrible things have been done in its name.
But the word cannot contain what it seeks to convey. No word can, but let’s face it, “God” is one of the biggest of words—so big that its very gravity is easily disregarded. It’s too hot to handle. We do so much talking about God without ever touching the wisdom of the concept, never mind experiencing it. So let’s try this: I don’t think God is a cuddly bloke with a nice beard, sitting in the clouds. But I do think that if you find that image life-giving, you are welcome to it, and may it open doors to more love.
When I use the word “God”, I mean something something like what is conveyed by the phrase “Reality with a capital R and more.” Let’s imagine that God is Reality and that Reality is bigger than the universes, known and unknown; it is the Ground of Being, which itself initiates the very possibility that we could imagine anything at all. God induces the rules of logic and reason, is the explanation of everything, permeates every molecule, and is almost completely revealed in every human face. Pure Love.
2: I can’t prove this, but I have evidence for the ideas in this essay. I see this proof every day.)
