By Katherine Arrington
Art by Maanasi Shyno
When I was four years old, I told my mother that I wished I had not been born. It was not that I found no love in and for my life, or that I wanted it to end. I just felt as though I would rather be a floating orb of pale light, drifting through an opaque sky, conscious but untroubled, surrounded by other such lights all twinkling and drifting in stelliform simplicity.
My mother was appalled. There she was, walking her three young children to kindergarten, and her eldest had already become existential. You would think that her children would have at least a few more years of being innocent babies that pointed at dogs, calling them lions. Yet, tolerant as she was, she accepted my elementary philosophy and gave me some of her own: God chose you before you were ever born because He has a purpose for you. His love for you has no conditions.
Unconditional love. It is a lovely concept: no matter how many mistakes you make, or how much you feel like you have not done enough, you are accepted. Loved, no matter what. With this as a constant assurance, how could I not feel a shell between me and the world, protecting me from its harsh uncertainties and pale hurt?
Time ebbed and flowed in its bewildering manner, and my feet gradually stopped swinging in the air as I sat on wooden pews, finally touching the sanctuary floor as pastors’ voices floated by my ears and into my mind.
I was six, and God loved me unconditionally. I was eight, and God loved me like a mother loves a child. I was ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and God was love. But God was other things too.
These words, spoken from pastors’ pulpits, became imprinted on my consciousness; I carried them with me outside of church and its glass windows and wooden crosses. I took them and made an assemblage of comfort, a reminder that I was loved, exactly as I was. But as much as I wanted those words to be that and only that, I could not neglect the other parts of the Church, the other words that managed to mark my mind.
When I was twelve, my history teacher taught us about manifest destiny. God told us to claim new land as our own, to travel West until we went coast to coast. There was pride in his voice, when he described this call from God. We watched a Schoolhouse Rock video about the creation of the United States. We did not talk about genocide or colonization. My teacher did not share if God had an opinion on those.
When I was fourteen, I asked my pastor why women could not be leaders in the church, and he said that God made men to lead and women to serve the church in other ways. But Phoebe was a deacon, I retorted. Phoebe was a deaconess, he said, with a chuckle, like the whole conversation was an endeavor in jest. There is no Hebrew word for deaconess.
When I was sixteen, my church hosted a few different weddings. In the wedding vows, after the parts about “in sickness and in health” and “‘til death do us part,” there was a bit about obedience. If I ever got married, I did not want to have to vow to obey my husband. In fact, if I ever got married, I did not want a husband at all. I did not share these thoughts with anyone.
I cannot speak for God, but as to the one described to me in church, it seemed to me that His love was conditional. There were ideas about what a Christian looked like and acted like. There were expectations about the type of life you chose to lead.
If love was what I needed backing me — bolstering my belief in myself, my actions, and my decisions — then its conditionality and, worse, my inability to meet its conditions tore down that backing, until I was falling, endlessly, with nowhere from which to orient myself.
For so long, I had made God the meaning for my existence, and when it occurred to me that the love guiding me was not unconditional, I felt untethered. I was eighteen, and I was thinking again about that stelliform simplicity, wondering what it meant to live in this world if love was not the only thing I had been lied to about.
I am twenty now, and the world I know is very different from the one I thought I knew growing up. The system of love I was raised in promised unconditionality, and that was perhaps always a broken promise. I think I just had problems seeing it at first; I thought my eyes were failing me, that I could not see what everyone else marveled at.
When I trusted my own eyes, when I looked at myself from my own perspective instead of the one the church had drilled into me, I realized I did not like the person I had grown into. It was like seeing a wound I was not aware I had; I found that the pain I had assumed was a fact of life was actually something to be healed.
And ironically enough, maybe it was love that did the healing. I have love for the physical and semiotic worlds that surround me, for the ideas that make me feel emotion in ways that cannot be contained within my mind alone, for the people I have encountered who have loved me back in ways I never knew I needed. I do not know if any of that love is unconditional; candidly, I doubt it is.
And yet, maybe I want to measure love not by its conditions but by its impact, its effects. I have known love whose effects were diminishing and painful, and love whose effects were the opposite and more. As I continue to move through this world, I find hope that there is love out there that offers a humble respite from the complications of life.
Comments