The Real Work Of Loving Unconditionally

I am new to the conscious work of racial and social justice. I am newly awakened to my socialization as a white person in a society that values and was built on the paradigm of white superiority. It has been a huge and missing piece of the puzzle of my life and my understanding about the world, which I have largely felt at odds with. The Black Lives Matter movement has given me permission, guidance, and encouragement to think radically about the world I actually want to live in.

The world that I want to live in is one of mutual aid and mutual care, unconditionally. When it comes down to it, it is an attempt to embody an age-old holy grail: unconditional love.

The thought that some people deserve love, respect, care, resources, forgiveness, and compassion, quickly becomes nonsensical when you begin to give it any amount of thought because how could one possibly decide who is worthy and who is not? But it’s easy to philosophize about loving everyone unconditionally and quite a different experience to try and implement it.

Obviously, our American justice system and our government in general and our corporations do not love everyone unconditionally. That is quite clear, and what I’ve learned over the past few months is that we can’t wait for individuals to get on board with unconditional love - we need to create systems and institutions that care for people equally and unconditionally while we, as individuals, expand in consciousness to be able to do so as well. Systems and institutions are still somewhat mysterious to me, although I’m learning more about them every day. But what I do know a lot about is human consciousness and I do know that loving unconditionally is not easy.

Unconditional Love requires a lot of forgiveness, of others but ultimately of ourselves. Forgiveness means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the best way I’ve heard it described is like a bendable branch. A branch that has some bend to it is forgiving. It bounces back. A transgression does not permanently alter the integrity of the branch. A branch that has no forgiveness, no bend, will snap. It has no flexibility; its integrity is fragile. Unconditional love requires forgiveness. It requires flexibility and movement. Unconditional love is like a stream running through, over, and around rocks and stones. A stream does not get mad at a stone for being in its way; it simply goes around it, making a beautiful sound the way a stream does and creating beautiful texture in the water. Unconditional Love in its most unobstructed form is simply navigation. But when we’ve held onto grudges, when we’ve blamed and held resentment, whether against ourselves or others, we get stuck. We become less forgiving and more rigid. We become conditional in our loving.

Unconditional Love requires conscious choosing into loving, kindness, and compassion rather than choosing into quick judgment and control. It requires listening. It requires radical acceptance. We must be willing to accept that our lived experience is not the only lived experience. Our opinions are not the right opinions.

When we try to control things, we try to create the world that we want at the expense of the world as it is and at the expense of the world as others want it to be. But accepting the world as it is does not mean that we can’t change it. It is always changing, as we change. When we stay the same, it morphs into more of the same.

Unconditional love requires a sincere and unrelenting deconstruction of thought and paradigm, also known as curiosity. We must consciously and dutifully ease ourselves back into the unknown, question what be know, listen openly to others, and be willing to sacrifice our paradigms, no matter how tightly we hold them.

Unconditional love requires free fall into the unknown. We are creatures of habit and we are creatures of control. We like things to feel familiar. We like things to go as planned. We like things to fit into a box that we can tie with a bow. But the world, no matter how much we try to control it and predict it, is full of unknowns. At any moment, a pandemic. At any moment, a death. At any moment, a message from a loved one. At any moment, something unexpected can happen. We must accept that fact. We must step into it. We must embrace it and invite it into our narrative.

Unconditional love requires an immense amount of patience. We must be patient with others, but we also must be patient with ourselves. We must be able to breathe through imperfection. We must be able to sit in or work through the moment. We will not always be at our destination, whether that is political or relational or the perceived end point where we finally love ourselves without question. These things are unfolding. We must be present to them, or else we will escape into our mind, into our thoughts, into our judgments. Being present requires patience.

If we are to create the world we say we want, we are going to have to extend our love without conditions. We are going to have to grapple with what that means for us individually and collectively. We are going to have to face our individual and collective demons. We are going to have to love the worst of the worst in addition to the best of the best. We are going to have to seek understanding rather than persecution. We are going to have to find the places inside ourselves that we hate and love those too. It is not easy, but it is easier than conditional loving. It is easier than having to decide who to love. It is easier than having to hold polarities inside of us that keep us locked in paradigms of good and evil, in which we constantly have to strive to be good.

I will leave with my favorite poem by Mary Oliver, which I did not realize until just now is, to me, an expression of unconditional loving.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.