Love|Balms is… | Part III | ...For We Living Towards Beloved Togetherness
Read Part I | Love|Balms is…My Living Journey Towards Belovedness
Read Part II | Love|Balms is…Our Genuinely Healing
Part III | Love|Balms is…
For those of us seeking to live our lives of love, how does this call us to love our Selves and others, to call others into love, and to join with those who are committed in finding our way forward in love and justice? Ultimately, I hear the call to:
Continually develop what each of us understands to be our vision of God’s Beloved humans (aka: all of humanity) in life and community with one another. It will not look exactly the same for each of us. And we can only begin to agree with and support one another when we have genuine awareness and clarity of what we each believe. We must keep relearning what we believe healthy love and community look and live like, in order to live towards them our Selves. This means “failing,” learning, and recommitting so that that we are truly growing, and growing together.
Continually learn what mediocrity, harm, and abuse look and live like. By definition, each is anathema to belovedness and thriving. Also, they compromise the majority of oppression and injustice. Unfortunately, they are also many of the typical ways that human beings engage, since our very low bar at this human moment is to “not cause harm” or at best to be considered “good,” rather than to love.
Commit to intentionally engaging in love through each of our own lives, relationships, professional positions, and in our communities. Our “good” feelings, thoughts, and intentions are only those—feelings, thoughts, and intentions. Real relationships are built out of real actions and interactions.
Commit to accept insight, invitation, and encouragement from others when we need redirection for our own walks when it is brought to our attention that we are our selves practicing, perpetuating, and supporting the existence of mediocrity, abuse, and harm. Only through this can we recognize and accept calling back into beloved, flourishing life and community when we have misstepped or meandered from our way. This is in part how we demonstrate that our commitment is towards beloved Selves in community, and not simply to be seen or thought of well.
Refuse to accept as healthy or permissible the ongoing presence of mediocrity, abuse, and harm in all types of our relationships—personal, professional, communal, societal, and global. Assume this is a life process. What we buy, who we befriend, where we work and live, who we partner with—Our intent to love should influence and inform all of these life-level decisions. Learning if we need to definitively need to disentangle ourselves from folks is as much of a journey as committing to disentangle, and then actually doing so. And—we must learn, and we must commit.
Seek to understand, discover, and engage healthy relationship, disruption, and recourse with other individuals and groups within our human community in especial need of safety, healing, wholeness, and love. When we see other folks and groups being hemmed up by unfair behaviors, biases, rules, or laws, we have a responsibility to remember that thriving life matters more than rules or laws. If people are dying or suffering because of a manmade guideline, law, or rule, we are failing at belovedness in preference for our privilege of the pretenses at certainty or control.
Offer invitation and encouragement to each of us when we lose the way that we each profess we desire to walk.
Whatever else the journey presents as integral to traversing it well.
And this is all complex, right? Because at some points we do need to exit relationships. Sometimes I have relationships where a person or community’s life circumstances have made their showing up lovingly a journey that we’re going to have to discover over time whether or not we’ll successfully finish together. Sometimes I am that person! Sometimes one or both of us is so hurtful or simply flippant that we need to separate immediately to mend; to regain focus and alignment; and to discern if there is, can, or might again be life-giving value in our being together.
This is to say that it is entirely possible that relationships will sometimes come to an end. This is a confusing message for most of us in a society dominated by white Western Christianity, in which we are told over and over and yet again that forgiveness is the cure to all that ails us. Forgive the person who punched in you the face, and your broken nose becomes just a spiritual afterthought. Forgive the people who took your baby away and put you both in cages as if you are animals rather than fellow beloved children of God and, even though they’re still doing it, that trauma that you’re experiencing will become overflowing love for your oppressor and nothing else will matter. Or it will help you shove the trauma down inside so that it somatically remanifests as drug and alcohol addiction, depression, anxiety attacks, heart disease, and any and all of the above.
This type of “Christian” forgiveness has always been interesting to me, given that the general reconciliation and healing process unearthed by those who work with communities after genocides strongly insists that, while forgiveness is the healing of the person who has been harmed (we’ll talk another time about why forgiveness is for the person who has experienced harm, not for the person or group that has committed harm), the work of those who have harmed definitively entails apology basically encompassed in what I regard as the three A’s: Acknowledgement and recognition of the harm done to the directly harmed person(s), the self, and the community; Acceptance of responsibility for the damage that the behaviors or actions have caused to the directly harmed person(s), the self, and the community, and; Amends, which is commitment to heal what the person who has harmed reasonably can now, and to transform going forward with the specific intent of not repeating the harm. I mostly find fascinating that apology in reconciliation process is what in Christianity we call repentance, or turning away from engaging in harm and back towards God and love. It seems that right around the time civil rights social justice movements began taking off in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the rhetoric of repentance began falling by the wayside…
Whether or not that is a coincidence, I roll my eyes and sigh while simply pointing out that the white Western Christian church is a perfect depiction of why the offender does not get to set the standards, protocol, or process for healing: given the genocides; theft of land, persons, and lives; denigration and abuse of persons of color, women, children, persons who are poor, folks with disabilities, and LGBTQIA persons that said church has sustained through its very theology for nearly its entire history, it has quite a bit of apology itself to make.
And it is not shocking that, as many of us as human beings and in institutions tend to avoid facing responsibility and potential consequences, the church instead projects onto everyone that the way “forward”—aka, the way for it to continue operating as it has, with no genuine accountability—is to use the rarely questioned influence that it wielded until the 1960’s to focus everyone’s attention on policing the behavior of the abused, rather than asking why we are abusing. This is, after all classic abuser behavior: If those being harmed would just forgive and stop making a fuss—ignore that man behind the curtain!…with the underaged altar boy!—then all would be well. We also see this with white supremacism, with imperialism, with misogyny, with classism, with heterosexism, with domestic abuse, with child abuse, with friends and family when we don’t like being called out on our toxic behavior. Which is unfortunate, because in each of these instances, we are prioritizing how we are viewed over the genuine wellness of others and the community, and our own wholeness.
This is all to say that it actually must be said: No, the purpose of healing and reconciliation is not to get everyone holding hands and singing kumbayah. The purpose of healthy reconciliation is to invite everyone involved to find their healing path forward towards wholeness and belovedness, and how we best do that in healthy relationship to one another—not inherently relationship with one another. Our trifling family members might need to go. It may turn out that we’re the trifling family members, and even though we now recognize it, we can’t reasonably expect given what’s happened that folks want to be in relationship with us right now—if ever again. Healing and reconciliation mutually invite everyone towards spaces of thriving, and they are a process, not an action or a switch to flip, which we engage regardless of whether or not that path indicates that everyone ends up back together.
And “together,” as one of my Divinity professors pointed out, is relative to if we were in certain instances ever together or “conciled” in the first place. We are a world filled with such trauma that, at this historical human moment, there are numerous individuals and groups that need to heal unto themselves before being capable of joining with or rejoining others. And if we genuinely care about healing, love, and lifting up our belovedness and its needs over our wants, our imperative is to respect and support that needed incubation space over instituting a false peace and unhealthy community. We care about, love, and respect our Selves and our neighbors as our Selves to the extent that we desire true relationship and wholeness, and cannot suffer engagement in mere façade.
I truly believe in love and its transformative power. I believe genuine love means that we agree to live our healthiest; to commit to continuing to grow in understanding what “healthy” is; and, if and when necessary, to wish one another well on going our separate ways. When we do this, and only then, we agree to love one another in wholeness. That’s the life and living I feel called into.
This is my journey in being mindful and discovering what it means to live and love well—on purpose.
I invite all who feel so called not to follow along with me, but to walk together (I’m following some of y’all!), for as long as our paths interconnect and overlap.
We all have a journey to healing, wholeness, and living our belovedness--and we can support one another along the way...
Amen, and axé.
