Kite m di w yon ti istwa (let me tell you a story):
My first exposure to the stories of Jesus was in the 1950s. I was in my father’s arms at Walteria Methodist Church where the pastor told the story of the two sons and the father.
It’s a familiar story from the Bible, so I won’t reiterate it. You can go look it up in the Gospel of Luke.
But what I will say is, that was a story that resonated with me, even at a young age.
I got the impression that being a “good father” was loving your children. As-is.
Now, that was my early years of believing in Jesus (whatever that means to you), and in my early years, my belief in Jesus was of a man who encouraged us to love one another.
All good, right?
In my teen years I encountered aggressive white Evangelicalism, and I put myself into that system for about 40 years. This belief has a certain set of definitions called Bebbington’s Quadrant, and you can look that up as well, but I think the core of it is that we had the truth and we had to make people obey it.
And as part of the belief system, you are discipled to follow the way of things that fit into white Evangelicalism which is a way of absolute truth and denial of any variation to the point that you end up believing nonsensical things and take terrible positions on the value of people who do not believe as you do.
Me taking up those beliefs and behaviors is 100% on me. I blame no one in the white Evangelical movement. I have all the responsibility to own what I did and said—and I still grow hot with shame at what I let myself become in the pursuit of fitting in (called “obedience” but it’s really compliance).
When the time was fit, I was confronted by people who cared for me enough to speak directly to me. That led to me leaving White Evangelicalism, a process that still continues.
Lots of things about the way I believed and thought have changed in the process of unwinding from white Evangelicalism.
One thing that changed that is perhaps the most significant is the definition of Us and Them. “Us” are us, the people God specially set aside to be loved & cared for. “Them” are those people over there who could be the people of God but due to various circumstances, they simply could never be Us. There was always a boundary. A benevolent God loved us; the same God hated the rest; hated them.
Now, of course I speak of the actualization of the theological constructs. The language is not this direct, and for a very long time you can hold in your head the conflicting beliefs that God is good and that that same God will torture forever those who don’t believe in this God who is good.
In the process of leaving white Evangelicalism and becoming healed into wholeness, I left behind that idea of Us and Them. Where we draw the boundary is where we find the limit of God’s love and therefore our love.
Notionally, God loves those who will not love God back, and notionally as a white Evangelical I loved those who did not love God back.
But the reality of behavior is the actual belief; the spoken beliefs or even just the words in our heads are not belief. They are masks.
So when Us and Them collapse into only Us, then our own notions of what love is possible for others expands to reach All.
We are capable of much more than we understand about ourselves. We are capable of much more love and kindness than we might hold in our belief (where belief is our limitation).
And so, one thing that changed is my own freedom to love those whom my former religious beliefs called “Them.”
Of course, this could just be sleight-of-hand, to replace an uncomfortable dichotomy with a more comfortable dichotomy of “people whom I love because they are lovable” to become “people whom I love because I have to as a logical extension of my beliefs.”
Which, in my opinion, is not love but feigned tolerance.
I don’t see it that way, though. I have been fortunate enough (or blessed enough, in white Evangelical language) to have been able to grow in love as certain people came into my life at the right time, each time expanding the Us/Them into the larger and larger circle of just “All.”
It’s a long way to explain how I see people and how I love people. When I say that I love someone, it is without conditions or boundaries or labels.
And the love I have is what I know how to bring forth from myself to be kind and wise and good and careful with others.
I have been fortunate in love and in friendships to have people who have helped me bloom in love.
Which leads me to easily be available to people who are starving for someone to just see them. Honor them. Believe them. Sit with them. Listen to them. Love them.
So because of a reforming of my understanding of love to recapitulate what I believed in my earliest years, I find it both normal and natural to love widely and accept unreservedly.
When I meet people, I genuinely love them. It might take me a bit of time to figure out how that works for them. People need love expressed to them in different ways, and that just means I need to sit with them and listen to them for a while to understand what love looks like to them.
Which then leads to my statements about loving the “unloveable”—which is a way of describing it that I find offensive. What I mean is that it is just loving the widely unloved. Loving the poor. Loving the sick. Loving the lost. Loving the lonely. Loving the kid kicked out of his home for being gay. Loving the child ostracized for her medical condition. Loving the teenager subjected to racist abuse. Loving the young adult who needs an older adult to listen to them and understand them and just see them.
You’d be surprised if you just stopped and listened to people, or watched them, to see how many people are starving for love and affection, for visibility and dignity. And giving it to them, freely, without expectation, does something to them and to me. To them, it’s often a cup of cold water in their thirst.
To me, it’s another quiet surprise that love is greater than anything else in this world.
So a long way ’round to explain why it is that I will come into a thread to defend someone who is under attack or abuse, or threatened with loss of companionship or home or safety, or seen as a terror for their skin color or their orientation or their national origin or their sexual orientation.
It’s the instinctive part of me to be human to others that was long layered over with a stifling religion that told me that correct behaviors to their standards was more important that mercy to the broken.
Is it religion that has done this? Is it my natural inclinations? Is it maturity and growth and wisdom and age?
Does it matter?
Shrug.
I do what I do because I am who I am.
And I think—no, I believe—that such a way is open to anyone & is not restricted to the few who get some special touch or special gift.
Being a loving person is just being an ordinary, decent human, and is possible to any who would will to be so.
Cheers!
For Clay, whom I told “I never write anymore,” and then wrote this.
