Dear Church,
What does it mean to be the Beloved? How does love change us?
Identity formation is a key piece of our discipleship. We come by many identities honestly: smart, successful, broken, single, father, responsible, funny, etc. Identifying with a part of who we are, or what we are good at, or how others see and value us is common. Often identity formation happens early in our childhood based on how we are rewarded or how we learn to protect ourselves.
What’s rewarded becomes something we get good at performing for acceptance and approval. If we are threatened, the means whereby we protect ourselves becomes vital to who we are by way of securing our safety.
These strategies 1) to perform for a acceptance and approval or 2) to protect ourselves from harm for security and safety are often unconscious adaptations, survival mechanisms of young kiddos who need to be accepted and safe to grow and develop and stay alive.
So one way this played out for me: I learned to use humor as a young person to protect myself from angry and scary adults. I couldn’t control adult behavior all the time (though I tried and this is where people pleasing came in as well), but I could ‘change the temperature’ of a relationship or a room by making jokes or playing a fool. This did good work for me as a little one to protect me from danger, but then ended up not being as helpful in school where I often got in trouble for goofing off, being disrespectful and crass, causing disruptions, and so on.
Others of us learn to use these performance or protection strategies in other ways: we are the smart one, the good one, the helpful one, the responsible one, the distant one, the angry one, the silent withdrawn one, the sad one, the needy one, the good looking one, the mysterious one… there are countless identities we adopt as kiddos to get our basic needs met: needs for affection, acceptance, safety, belonging, and value.
These adaptations – personality traits or identities we call them as adults – do good work for us early on but at some point for many of us they stop working. So for me: my humor got me in trouble in school and as an adult many times my humor is inappropriate for the situation or is too sarcastic and hurtful to others.
What are we to do with all this?
Well – God’s love has a voice here.
God’s love accepts us as we are and teaches us to face and befriend these personality traits with that love. So we learn how to not despise ourselves for our jokes – or demand others laugh at us and think we’re funny – but rather to bring compassion and tenderness to why humor became important and necessary in the first place.
Love teaches us to be free from having to be funny, so we can be funny or not, depending on what’s good and beautiful and wise in any given moment.
This is how love works: it redeems those personality traits – those identities we construct – and lets us hold the adaptive strategies as precious pieces of our own sacred story.
God’s love holds us so we can hold ourselves in compassion.
God’s love frees us so we can be free ourselves from compulsions.
Love unwinds and reworks our relationship to what we’re good at, those things unique about our personality, even unwanted habits and behaviors we’ve rehearsed for years.
This is what it means to learn to live as the Beloved: to become what we receive, that is to become the subject of God’s own affection, God’s own esteem, God’s own trust. This is the goal of Christian spiritual formation to become more at home in love, by the power of love, unto the ability to love, for the sake of love.
May it be increasingly so among us as we learn to lay hold of love together.
God’s beloved for your sake,
Fr. Matt
