by Susan Hinckley
I don’t know where or when I learned that I would need to do things to earn love.
I can’t pin it down—it seems like knowledge I was born with. In this kind of paradigm, Being Better = More Love, so from a young age I started trying to be the best at everything.
I tried to please teachers, parents, friends. I tried to be popular (not much success there), win awards (more there, but spoiler: awards don’t make you feel loved, they just make you worry about how you’ll top it next time). I got voted “best dressed” one year in school, “best smile” another. Sure I’m still secretly riding high from those Jr. High titles—let’s be honest—but I didn’t really believe either one of them. Still don’t. “Awkward” and “not quite fill-in-the-blank enough” are the designations I assigned myself in school, and those are the ones that stuck.
Religion made sense to me, because it was a scheme to earn God’s love by becoming very very good, and hopefully even perfect. Religion also taught me I was not naturally good, not inherently worthy, not a beloved child in any way I could feel or believe. It was confusing—church told me God loved me out of one side of its mouth while insisting God couldn’t stand me the way I am out of the other.
I honestly thought that the point of Christianity was transcending my humanity, that the ‘good news’ was we don’t have to be what we are—and what we are is fundamentally not okay—because Jesus can fix it! It was based on someone who was better than anyone else who ever lived on this planet: who resisted all temptation, performed miracles, walked on water, then punctuated his example with the heretofore unimaginable trick of resurrection, literally transcending his mortality.
I certainly didn’t absorb the idea that my humanness was one of the essential things about me. That it was key to connection, or the pathway to love.
It would never have occurred to me that humanness was the mirror in which I could glimpse Divinity.1
The day I met God—and let me explain what that means: it means one day I met the understanding that I actually am okay, beloved even, and always have been, as is—was like going around a corner and finding myself in a completely different world. A world I was not only allowed but meant to love, full of humans like me who were also beloved. Once I turned that corner, it disappeared. There could be no going back.
The Rev. Jacqui Lewis writes, “What if the goal of our lives of faith is to have this revelation: The only way to love God is to love yourself so you can love the world?”2 The first 50 years of my life, I wouldn’t have known what to do with that sentence. It would have sounded nice, but love of self simply wasn’t in my wheelhouse.
Loving the world came very naturally, but was mostly something I kept quiet around other Latter-day Saints. The idea that I had sensed God’s presence much more regularly in places other than church would have required some explanation. An ongoing negative narrative about it left me conflicted and confused by my private affection for the world, quietly confirming a deep fear: that for some reason I could neither understand nor control, my faith must be faulty or deficient.
I’d always secretly been on the side of people. I loved the things we did and invented and said and wrote and made. I remember coming home from a movie once, overwhelmed by the beauty of its complex portrayal of relationships between deeply flawed characters—something about their interactions had pulled up a chair for me, assured me it was okay to sit down in my own life, that I deserved to be comfortable. I said something about this to my father-in-law—so often a reassuring light in my church life—and he responded a bit disapprovingly that for him, the movie was too humanistic.
Well, yes … exactly.
“Being spiritual is much easier than being human.”
Carmen Acevedo Butcher teaches that, “Being spiritual is much easier than being human.” This simple framing stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard her say it. Rarely has anything explained myself to me in such a simple and profound way. For me, being a Latter-day Saint made being human feel like a tricky proposition. It set up an adversarial relationship between me and myself, between me and God, and as I think about it now, between me and every other human. It made me jump hurdles for love, placed rules around the love I was allowed to feel myself and express for others. This fueled a deep-rooted loneliness and distrust of all of it, setting me up for a true crisis when the wheels of my religious life suddenly flew off.
If religion could no longer be my conduit for seeking connection with God, would I have to just give up on the whole relationship? Even though church hadn’t really gotten me the feelings or insights I was seeking, I’d dug in hopefully, because I didn’t know there could be any legit god-connection outside it.
Christianity has not rewarded a fully-embodied spirituality. If people can know The Source in their bones, why do they need the church? So the church is invested in keeping us separated from the truth of our own bones and hearts and humanity.
Reimagining Christianity for me would involve beginning with the full acceptance of the human experience. Jesus was, after all, a person—no matter what else he may have been. But it’s not for his humanness that we are taught to emulate him—it is for having been better than we are. No wonder I learned to show up at church with only small portions of myself visible. No wonder I was taught that the natural Susan was an enemy to God. No wonder I internalized shame for my own most human parts, even though it is through that common thread that I am connected to all my siblings. How could I love the thing I had not been taught to reverence? How could I believe God loved me if I had not been taught to love myself?
So one of the biggest things that happened for me the day I suddenly realized I was beloved was that I no longer needed an intervention. Not an atonement, at least not in the way I’d been taught to think about it.3 Not a card to certify my worthiness, nor a priesthood holder who could do essential things that filled requirements I couldn’t fill myself.
For the first time in my life, nothing at all between me and love.
It was a slippery slope, too. One minute after being granted Divine permission to love myself as I am, I realized it put my neighbor in a new light as well. I felt suddenly equipped with compassion, understanding, desire, acceptance, willingness, patience—a whole lot of things I’d never known exactly how or when to use. Love had been obscured by layers of fine print, prerequisites and conditions. As they fell away, I could see the thing underneath was actually easy to pick up and light to carry.
This also meant that rather than a conduit for connection to a god out there somewhere, church might become a conduit for connection with other people. A love lab, where I could grow in self-knowledge and understanding while I learn what it means to live the great commandment, to internalize the one thing we were sent here to really know.
Jesus didn’t come to teach us how to get out of being human, but to show us how to love while we are.
An idea expressed by Rabbi Donniel Hartman4 describes the Jesus I think of when I read his teachings and experiences: “A life of faith isn’t just about walking with God, but how one walks with humanity.” I think that’s about how I walk with my own humanity, in addition to how I walk with everyone else.
“My deepest me is God!” declared St. Catherine of Genoa.5 This means the thing at my center can’t be sin, or shortcoming. In such a view, there can be no deficiency in being human, only divinity. Feeling God’s love is just—feeling love.
I become the pebble in the pond from which all the circles radiate. God’s love originates in me. I never need to be instructed in it, or go someplace holy to experience it, or put myself in the right mindset or soul-set to receive it. The concept of qualifying for it feels as nonsensical as earning my breath.
I talk a lot about a God of relationship, and as I check in with myself about what that phrase means or looks or feels like for me today, the first word that bubbles up is simply connection: humans and all creation, with and within each other, one living whole. I’m trying to learn to stay awake to this world as much as I can: aware of each moment and my place in it, fully inhabiting—committed to and content with—my part.
“Love yourself,” explains Jacqui Lewis. If that sounds simple, the rest of her sentence blows it out to engulf everything else I know now or may ever learn: “—so you can love the other, so you can love the world.” I may have gotten a late start, but I’m willing to work on this for the rest of my life.
Susan Hinckley
“In each human soul there exists a divine element, a kind of inner eye capable of glimpsing something of God, for there exists a deep relationship, an affinity between human and divine nature.”—attributed to 4th century mystic and theologian Gregory of Nyssa
Ursula King, Christian Mystics: Their Lives and Legacies throughout the Ages
Jacqui Lewis, “Apocalypse Now: Love, Believing, and Seeing,” Oneing 10, no. 1, Unveiled (Spring 2022). Available in print and PDF download
The concept of atonement still has value for me, it just functions differently—another essay.
via Jacqui Lewis, above
Made in the Divine Image, Center for Action and Contemplation, 10/27/2021
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If the first six paragraphs aren't a perfect outline of LDS cultural thought that I grew up immersed in, I don't know what is! I have spent my entire life trying to escape the deep, impenetrable belief that I am not only not worthy as I am, but can never be worthy -- that the only way is to "earn" love, and especially Divine Love! Even with evidence to the contrary (such as my mortal parents still loving me, even when they completely disagree with my life choices), I still can't shake the belief that Deity is FAR less forgiving than they are. (My mom wonders why I have such religious PTSD [I panicked when missionaries snuck up on me recently] -- this is why!). Add the fact I felt nothing Divine at church, personally, and experienced faith and belief vicariously, through other people.....? That just proved how evil and unworthy I really was! After baptism and confirmation, when I desperately needed to feel Divine Love and Acceptance, but just felt...nothing......I was convinced I was actually a Son of Perdition who lied my way into mortality (yes, at 8-years-old!), and that Heavenly Father fully knew it! I've spent a lifetime trying to prove Him wrong, but sensing I can only fail.
Oh I’ve felt so many of those feels! Beautiful! For me, accepting and loving my own humanness also led me to find my own “God”-ness so to speak. I found a greater connection to the world in a way that felt so much more God-like than the God I worshipped in the heavens. The God I feel now resides right here in my heart and we worship together, as equal givers and receivers of love.