Love|Balms is… | Part II | ...Our Genuinely Healing
Read Part I | Love|Balms is…My Living Journey Towards Belovedness
Part II | Love|Balms is…
Our healing—genuinely healing—demands that as part of its journey, we address and eliminate unnecessary harm, hurt, and misdirection in life.
Seeking healing, liberation, wholeness, and thriving for our Selves requires that we encourage, support, and seek this for others as each of us are called and able. I can’t be whole or free for just myself. I cannot consider my Self whole and free, while I am restricting or oppressing others. I cannot consider my Self whole and free, yet stand idly by while others are restricted and oppressed. Restricting and oppressing others, or turning away from it occurring, in fact means I do not understand what wholeness and freedom are.
Genuine wholeness and freedom inherently recognize the humanity and Divine belovedness in others. The Divine within me cannot resist answering the Divine call from within others to mutually honor the fullness of one another—to share together in love, healing, nurturing, and thriving.
In my Self desiring a life in which I want not to be a “good person” who doesn’t harm, but a person committing to #LoveOnPurpose, I recognize that I can’t outright force most people to stop acting abusively or harmfully—and that at some point near if not outright all of us are harmful or abusive. Given the path of human history, in which so much of it has been a focus towards survival from both invading forces and our own oppressive leaders and governmental heads, harm and abuse is our default way of being together.
Keep in mind—until 200 years ago in the US, women and children had no legal status without the men “responsible” for them. Several thousand years regarding other human beings as property or belongings—which is dishonoring of our humanity, and so abuse—did not simply dry up and resolve itself overnight. Today, women are still largely expected to prioritize men, men’s feelings, and men’s lives, professionally and romantically, as if women exist solely to complement manly being. (And this was standard in many societies long before we had anything called “The Book of Genesis.” If anything, historical Christian interpretations of Genesis in which women become subjugated to men demonstrate that every religion pulls its mores and interpretation techniques from the society around it. Another writing. Another time.) Children, who have no capability to ask to be here or not, are still largely expected to simply behave and emotionally perform for adults, rather than to be nurtured and grow into healthy, well-rounded humans of their own. That the frame of family is itself oriented towards dominance and abuse is significant to how we are as individuals and in communities taught abuse dynamics as part of our everyday interactions, and yet is but one example of the pervasiveness of rampant abuse dynamics in our society.
The overarching fact of the matter is that harm and abuse are so pervasive in how we function that it’s an unhealthy and an unrealistic hope to outright stop them—it’s not going to be tomorrow, next week, or next year. Because we’re not trying to stop people, but behaviors being perpetrated and sustained by people that escalate into systemic dynamics. If God created each and all of us beloved, God did not create people who innately cause harm. People are choosing with our free will, even through passivity, to engage in harm. And though some acts and some groups may at time periods generate more harm than others, many times, we are ourselves participating in harm in small ways. On some level, we all need to learn to live love.
Defending others from harm is one thing, and an inherent call of love. Forcing others to behave a way that we haven’t as humans ever truly practiced together is something else entirely, and at a point (as with any type of force) becomes itself a violence. Force is a violence against others’ free will, and that violence manifests in the reality that it must be continually sustained, and is in fact unsustainable. The “force for good” dies, and with them the energy of those following them. MLK, Jr. named rightly that, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.” This is defense. And, when the law demanding good behavior is rescinded, as our voting rights have been for the past several years, that that morality law was the only largescale work engaged to transform our personal, communal, political, and spiritual hearts, renders us vulnerable to the swift resurfacing of the un-love in our hearts that had simply been hidden away. No, we shouldn’t have to teach people to love us or treat us well. And, if we have true hope for seeing an end to harm, abuse, and trauma in the world, and the experience genuine love, some of us must.
I have come to accept that I must begin in transformation with the person I most control and can hold in loving accountability: my Self. This is an accountability that begins within me to live the world I desire to see, rather than simply demand it from others while ignoring my own misbehaviors and appropriated privileges. It turns out that when Gandhi said, “Be the change,” he may have actually meant, “create change beginning out of yourself, and expand from there,” and not quite as much to “force change from others.”
I, Joy E. Bronson, am a black, woman-identified person who grew up poor. These are the identities by which I experience systemic oppression, and the identities from whose internalized oppression I must be mindful to heal and not allow to mis-define me or other human beings. Also. I, Joy E. Bronson, am a cisgender, heterosexual, highly educated (Masters, y’all) Christian (I’m a PK of a PK—triple privilege), who is a citizen of the United States of America. As with most people, I am a complex being who both experiences oppressions, and also has identities which carry extensive privileges (mine are all global) which have been historically used to oppress and even kill others. I am as responsible for those histories and privileges, and to engage them—and dismantle them—as I expect white, male, and rich persons to be responsible for theirs.
I can advocate and fight all day for an end to white supremacism, misogyny, and classism and toxic capitalism from white people, men, and rich folks. But if I do not also address the ways that I perpetuate and support white supremacism, misogynist, and classist mindsets—which I, too, was taught, since it’s through these lenses that we are told and tend to tell the history and values of our society—I am my self holding onto and so living them via internalized oppression.
I can fight all day for an end to the systemic oppressions that seek to upend my own life, but if I don’t address the heterosexism, educational supremacism, Christian supremacism, and imperialism embedded in the history and current reality of my own identities, I am a hypocrite who cares neither about love nor justice, but only how I hurt. My desire for loving fully as I seek to be loved extends to recognizing and addressing how the normal-to-me ways in which my own life is oriented are the result of others being harmed, oppressed, and even murdered so that I can have my “normal.”
And so, Love|Balms is the construction of the visionary, vibrant world of belovedness that reverberates deep within us—“on a quiet day, we can hear her breathing”—that we feel so called and led to deconstruct hurt, harm, and abuse on our journey of unearthing and meeting her. We are not deconstructing for the sake of deconstruction or simply to get away from, but because we have a place far better, beautiful, and healthier to live. And we are going.
I’m done running away. I’m not covering my eyes and ears any longer. Sometimes we have to take a breath, but we inhale to center and ground so we can exhale in love and return with community. And in pursuing love and justice in our belovedness, I’m no longer under the illusion that I can bring the kindom tomorrow and save everyone by forcing peace. First, because “forcing peace” is an oxymoron. Second, because while it may well be someone’s calling, I now know for certain that it’s not mine. And the longer I live outside of my calling, the longer it takes me to get to living what I can do towards our healing and flourishing.
As part of this journey, I seek to connect with others who are committed to living the same, and then to invite others who may also be interested in this journey. And I Acknowledge: This dynamic of living with others to #LoveOnPurpose—as with any dynamic—works only among those who mutually agree in it, and agree to mutual support and accountability of it. As we all seem to need to learn, no one has legitimate right or love to hold others accountable to uphold an ethic to which we subscribe. But we uphold and agree to be held in account to this ethic because we believe in it, and believe that this is who we are created and called to be.
Read Part III | Love|Balms is…For We Living Towards Beloved Togetherness
