You Don’t Deserve Love.

You Don’t Deserve Love.

And you never will.

So why not stop trying?

What would it look like to deserve love?

Would it be great acts of courage or kindness?

Selfless service to humankind?

Having “pure” thoughts?

Feeling good?

Feeling humble?

Not feeling depressed or lonely or needy or scared?

Having more will power?

Or taking the right substances or eating the right foods or chanting the right mantras?

Any criteria we come up with will fall short of perfection. By design.

There is no pathological route to wholeness. It doesn’t come by adding one plus one to get to infinity. We will always fall short. Always.

Consider the lilies of the field.

The sun shines on all equally.

Good works can’t earn Grace.

Why are we spending our time holding our breath, in and out of shame spirals, wondering when we will finally be chosen, when we will finally break through, when we will finally make it? It will never happen. And if it does happen, we can bet it will be a false peak, a moment of feeling complete, before the rug drops out again, before the elevator drops us on our butts, and we realize that once again, we were betting on the wrong horse. Once again, we were holding our breath, hoping to arrive someday at a place where we deserve love once and for all.

But is it the wrong horse?

When Lucy pulls the football out from Charlie Brown, over and over again, and he falls on his back, over and over again, is that because Charlie Brown is unlovable? Or is his desire and innocence and trust what makes him such a redeeming character?

There is an ideal that one day we will be able to discern the difference between Self and Story, between illusion and reality, and from that day forward we will have the inner discipline to always choose reality. We will be fully alive and fully trusting and relaxed and happy (and famous and humble) and be a walking blessing to all that we encounter.

What if that day never arrives? What if we are destined to get the rug pulled out from underneath us, over and over? To have Lucy pull the football away, just when we have reaffirmed our trust?

What if our humanness, our longing, our apparent limitations and failures, our illusions, were the food that we seek? What if we made love with our incomplete longing, with our inevitable falling apart and dying? What if there truly is nothing to do, because there is nothing we can do, to achieve love, to deserve love?

What if we consciously give up working to deserve love?

What if we give up, through insight or sheer exhaustion, trying to sandpaper our thoughts and feelings to match a mythical ideal? To get them to fit in with what we think are appropriate, for what we think God or Goddess or Santa Claus has on their chart of our permanent record? What if we give up striving, or even striving to give up? What if we let ourselves be conscious failures in the matrix of deserving?

What if in giving up, we let go, and begin to notice that who we are is already enough. By design. That love is already unconditional. And that all our conditions, including the desire to be better and more loving, are innately lovable. And beautiful. And precious.

You don’t deserve love. And you never will. Amen.

PS. This blog is hopelessly incomplete. There is so much more that I could write, if only I had more skill. If only I was able to go deeper, to truly feel the depths of my and our humanity. Someday, if I work at it, I can write a blog that will really make the big difference. Maybe…