Once a month for nine years, every student in every grade came into school in “full uniform,” a crisp blue button-up, a long, skirted jumper, black tights, black ballet flats, and a freshly pressed blazer. Our nails were to be bare, manicured- our hair tamed and styled, hoop earrings no bigger than a nickel. We’d walk in straight lines, moving through the halls and stairways in a perfect dance, a pristine conveyor belt leading us through the big brown church doors. We’d stand in the pews, gazes fixed forward, listening to the priest, adorned in white and gold, preaching in a Greek dialect so ancient that we could only sometimes understand it. Two, two and a half hours? No talking, no crossing your legs when it’s time to sit (that’s disrespectful!) don’t distract each other, or no recess. If you forgot your blazer that day, you’d wait in the office for someone to bring it to you, missing the hymns and the sermons that happened in English. No breakfast that morning, or else you can’t join the communion line. Wait your turn, do the sign of the cross, bend and touch the ground as a sign of your repentance and respect, drink from the spoon, from the chalice, move over politely and wait for the antithoro, that symbolic piece of bread, satisfying and sweet. Go back to math class. Probably someone talked, probably no recess. Veggie Tales during lunch if we were lucky.
My relationship with spirituality comes up often for me as a birth worker (it also comes up often in therapy). It’s a hard thing to understand- the smell of incense, the warmth that envelopes you when you step into a chapel- it still wakes something up in me, still feels like home. That said, some of my earliest memories of shame, fear, un-belonging, came about in that school. I grew up feeling like religion, organized religion, was a weapon pointed expectantly at me, made to serve as a warning, as an engine of fear and complicity. Questions were discouraged, curiosities dampened. We were assigned our beliefs, because the alternative was to be casted out, excluded from the sure safety of this ecosystem, the one that raised you and fed you, that sees you, naked in your timidness, are you a rebel? A nuisance? Are you not awake and trusting and seeing?
Over the years, I am happy to say, through facing religious OCD, learning to be secure in my identity (a balancing act, still), being open-minded and developing self-worth, I have maintained a positive, personal relationship with faith, with God, with spirituality. I have always been firm in my worthiness of believing, and the one idea I’ve never allowed to take root and grow, is that I am fundamentally unlovable to a Holy Entity who loves unconditionally.
That brings me to my main point (I guess journals are meant for rambles, after all), which is that in my work, which depends greatly on my belief in the power of connection and support through interpersonal relationships, my core philosophy is simple: the thing we all need to be well-adjusted, fulfilled human beings, before anything else, is to feel that we are unconditionally loved. And the root of much suffering is the belief that we are not. Hear me out.
Insecurity: the belief that if we are not “good enough,” accomplished enough, beautiful enough, rich enough, educated enough, if other people’s perception of us is not positive, we are not worthy. If people do not approve of me, I will lose love and acceptance.
Fear: the belief that if something “goes wrong,” we are not worthy of repair- that we won’t come back from it, that we will lose love, safety, a sense of belonging- that we will be left alone to endure it, and we may not be able to. If things go wrong, I will lose love and acceptance.
Shame: the belief that there is something inherently wrong with us. That if we were fully seen, we would be rejected, and that rejection would be deserved. If someone knew who I really was, I would lose love and acceptance.
Perfectionism: the belief that love must be earned through flawlessness, and that any mistake threatens our right to be cared for. If I am not perfect, I will lose love and acceptance.
Jealousy: the belief that love is scarce, and that someone else receiving it means there is less available for us. If I do not hoard love and acceptance, I will lose it.
And,
Resentment: the belief that others have withheld the love or recognition we needed, and that this deprivation defines our sense of worth. If I let go of this hurt, it means I never deserved the love and acceptance I didn’t receive.
And to connect this back to faith and spirituality, for many people, the way we are guaranteed that feeling of unconditional love is through God. Through the soul-deep knowledge that something bigger than you loves you no matter what- that you are expected to be imperfect, understood to be imperfect, and the love is still unmoving, unwavering- every repentance accepted, wiping you clean of insecurity, fear, shame, perfectionism, jealousy, resentment. I think it is beautiful, when we think of God that way. As an all-loving, all-accepting entity that sees you, knows your heart, and is not ashamed of you, does not wish to change you, is not mad at you, is not angry with you, is not waiting to strike you down. I think people are more beautiful this way, asking for these things, believing these things. I believe that God does not think less of you if you had a bacon egg and cheese and didn’t take communion. That God is not disgusted of you for being queer. Has no vendetta against you, is not demanding that you prove yourself, does not abandon you, is happy to sit with you in spirit, is watching delightfully as you experience the Earth, the life you were gifted, feeling the full range of emotions, making missteps, understanding yourself, earning smile lines and wrinkles and fat from eating butter and bread and salty olives. Loving other people sharing in this beautiful experience of existence. Unconditionally loving you.
It is with an unconditional positive regard that I try to view the people I serve. That said, there’s something I haven’t been addressing, and I think it’s what sometimes pushes people away from the ideology I’ve shared. It’s come up for me over the years, too, working in a high-volume care role, with so many different people having so many different stories and backgrounds and personalities, with people who do not have a “clean slate,” no matter which way you slice it, in the eyes of society, of myself, even, sometimes- the hard question is this: what about people who do terrible things? Who hurt others, knowingly, repeatedly, who we might think of as “bad people”?
Here’s what I’ve come up with in my time of pondering: unconditional love does not mean unconditional acceptance of behavior. It does not mean the absence of consequences, or the erasure of accountability. It means that even in the presence of harm, the core belief is not “you are beyond love,” but, “something in you has lost connection to it.” Which is uncomfortable. Because it asks us to hold two truths at once: harm must be taken seriously, and no person is reducible to the worst thing they’ve done. And in some cases, this becomes almost impossible to accept. There are actions that feel so cruel, so senseless, that the idea of extending any form of love toward the person who committed them feels not wrong, offensive.
I don’t have a clean answer for that. I don’t think unconditional love, in this sense, is something we are naturally equipped to feel or practice as humans. And maybe that’s exactly why people turn to God for it, because it asks for a kind of grace that feels beyond us. Maybe unconditional love is not the same as forgiveness, not the same as reconciliation, not the same as excusing harm or removing consequences, but simply the refusal to believe that any human being is entirely beyond redemption, even if we, personally, cannot be the ones to hold that belief in practice. I don’t know! Maybe it all comes back to boundaries, which have never been a shining strength of mine, but are one of the most important things we can practice.
I will try to offer love, acceptance, understanding, try to adjust my perspective, challenge my judgments. I strengthen that skill as I practice spirituality and lean into my faith, because that’s the thing about love. If you feel loved, like you have it, like you deserve it, like you’ll never run out of it, you will naturally want to share it. When there is abundance, we give freely. And so, for me, these things are intertwined.
