Pride Month Matters
I can't love you until I love me first
I don’t think it’s any small thing that, when asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40, NIV, emphasis mine)
This is something my soul has rested on for the majority of my Christian life. There’s so many things I could say about this, and how meaningful it is to me. But I will focus on a few important points that will come together in a nice bow over the topic of Pride, affirmation, and love.
Love your neighbour as yourself.
When I’ve heard this particular passage preached about, it’s often along the lines of “We are sinful people who are selfish and self-serving. We love ourselves far more than we love our neighbour. We need to be more self-less and give our love away more freely.”
As a quiet, yet somewhat extroverted person, I love observing, listening to, and being around people. Throughout the many different jobs I’ve had and places I’ve lived and groups I’ve been a part of, I’ve been blessed to hear so many beautiful, heart-wrenching, joyous, serious, compassionate stories from many people from many walks of life. I’ll tell you one thing I’ve noticed—we really suck at loving ourselves. Many of us live with an indescribable amount of embarrassment and shame from the things we did and didn’t do, and we believe it’s because we are bad (notice how the language of preaching that I described above contributes to this). If any of you know Brené Brown’s work, she talks about how guilt is “I’ve done something bad,” and can motivate a person to make changes and amends; however, shame is “I AM bad,” and causes a person to shut down. How can I do good if I am inherently sinful? How is that possible?
I know this because I’ve lived it. It’s an impossible spiral to manage and only leads to more shame, more regret, and more despair.
Friends, the only way to get out of this spiral is to focus on what it means to love yourself. I can’t love my neighbour fully, unconditionally, if I don’t first give that to myself. I’m not selfish and self-serving and inherently sinful; I refuse to use that label for me or you. We are all doing our best with the tools and circumstances we were given; and, true, sometimes our best isn’t quite enough. But I wouldn’t expect my baby to start speaking Spanish if I’ve never taught her a single word—why would I expect myself to be able to manage conflict if my family always avoided it, or listen empathetically if they never truly heard me, or love imperfect people if I never lived up to impossible standards?
What I learned about loving myself is that I actually needed to stop giving beyond my capacity for a time so that I could meet my own needs, learn new skills that would help me navigate my relationships, and unpack baggage that was weighing me down in the journey. It felt deeply selfish; I felt like I should be doing more for everyone else—good grief, I was constantly told from many directions that I wasn’t doing enough. And you know what, I’m glad I stood my ground and continued doing the work. I’ve become a version of myself that’s not perfect but that I’m deeply proud of. A person that has less judgement and more grace, less hurt and more understanding, less avoidance of fear and more ability to walk into the unknown.
How can I love you if I don’t even know how to love me?
Everything hangs on these commandments
What I understand this to mean is that we should be able to read the bible through the lens of these two commandments. We should be able to make the next right choice through these two commandments. We should be able to filter truth through these two commandments.
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, when I became a Christian, I tried to make sense of why God would deem queer folx as sinful, which lead to me to make unkind, untrue arguments in my head to try justify this. But when I filter this through Jesus’s statement to love my neighbour as myself, it really made me rethink my perceptions. I love my family and am so grateful to do life with them; am I TRULY loving my neighbour if I say that they shouldn’t have that? I can’t imagine ever kicking my kids out of the house or not attending their weddings; am I TRULY loving my neighbour if I expect them to do that because their children are queer? I don’t know what it’s like to be a person who doesn’t mostly1 fit into the gender roles and binary; am I TRULY loving my neighbour if I tell them who they should and shouldn’t be based on my own assumptions, without ever truly listening to and understanding their story?
Instead of eating the interpretations of scripture I was force-fed, I clung to this passage and used it as the lens through which I perceived everything else, and it really became a lot more simple—harder, but more simple. If a passage and the way it has been interpreted doesn’t line up, I have to look deeper, think critically. Perhaps the truth it’s pointing me to is that the Bible is full of imperfect people who did their best in their circumstances, and maybe they still fell short. Maybe it’s not actually about emulating the ‘heroes’ of these stories, but about seeing a common thread of humanity, that people that can be both wise and brash, generous and unfaithful, brave and greedy. I started to understand that, while the Bible holds truth about God, it’s still written by people, chosen by people, put together by people. And those people had good intentions, as well as their own incomplete, and dare I say faulty, perceptions about who God is.2
Heresy. I know. But, come on. Jesus was a heretic, let’s be real. He was always getting in fights with the religious elite and calling out their BS, turning their rules and ideas about God upside down. He hung out with the marginalized, not to grace them with his incredible presence, but because they were his people. Something I’m finally understanding as I find my people less and less in the church, and more just out in the world amongst the so-called sinners, the beautiful, rowdy prisoners.3
Lately, as I read the stories in the Bible, I’m confronted with the reality that I need to see myself in the Pharisee’s shoes and not the leper. I am the religious elite. I am the one crucifying God. It changes how I read about Jesus’ life and begs me to look at the BS he speaks out against in my own beliefs. It begs me to lay down the law and wear love like a multi-coloured cloak.
If love is the greatest commandment…
…why do children have nightmares of being burned in h*** for some unnameable sin in their life?
…why do so many people feel unwelcome in the church?
…why do we care more about the rules of the powerful than the stories of the marginalized?
…why do we think that we should have control of other’s lives and choices?
…why do so many people suffer from spiritual trauma?
…why does God seem more like a temperamental dictator than a loving creator?
…why are we focussed on enforcing rules that make others feel hated?
Love requires trust. It requires me to listen to “…the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.” (Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart, pg. 125). It requires that I suspend my own assumptions, judgements, and solutions in order to hear what’s at the root of your choices, your emotions, your mistakes, your beauty, your beliefs. When you tell me the truth about your life, love requires that I hope and fight for what’s best for you, whether or not it’s a choice I would make for myself, because I trust that you have truth “written in your heart” (Romans 2:15).
We all have a certain bend toward finding certainty. My friends, it’s time we embrace mystery and trust that, deep in the core of each human heart, we all want what is good and beautiful and fulfilling for each other. Maybe we need to help ourselves, and each other, clear away the overgrown branches of abuse and trauma and hurt to find the path there.
I have no trouble identifying as a woman, but am starting to believe that everyone lives in various places on the spectrum of gender expression
I am willing to admit that I have incomplete and faulty perceptions of who God is. Anyone who says they know all of what God wants and expects of us while preaching that God is bigger than we can fathom is obviously not aware of the contradiction they present
Again, love the poem Dropping Keys by Hafiz
Aleesha, this is an incredibly powerful, compelling, well written and forceful essay of wisdom and strength. Your focus on the Love commandment is excellent. I agree with you, I find so many of us not loving ourselves very well, or at all, That has been my own exeperience and also through my work. A lack of and denial of self love seems epidemic in our culture, reinforced so often by our systems, religious and otherwise. Systems built upon and emphasizing fear, guilt, shame, denial and iour sinful natures are not loving oens at all. Sadly, too many of our religious movements put more emphasis on those than on love. Love is just a word that sounds good but rarely practiced in its full embrace.
Rabbi Hillel the Elder was a Pharisee of the reformed, more adaptible perspective, and a contemporary of Jesus. He said a similar thing when asked to explain the essence of the Torah, expanding one of the central elements of Judiasm as well. I sometimes speak of a trinity of love--God, others, ourselves, and they are practiced best when in balance and not lopsided in any one of the elements of that trinity. In that context, God can be repalced by meaning outside of ourselves for those not from or following a God tradition.
I agree with you, the intentional and marvelous acts of love and kindness are all around us, so abundant in daily life. At least I have been fortunate enough to experence that. We have a ways to go, but writing, words, practices and spirits like yours get us a whole lot closer.