Jesus Loved Me. Freyja Taught Me to Love Myself.

That was my joking answer back in 2022 when Meghan Crozier¹ asked her followers what they would title their own deconstruction memoirs. The statement has stuck with me ever since. It’s funny how sometimes what we say when joking turns out to be profound truths, even if only personally true or profound.

My understanding of love was somewhat limited when I was an evangelical Christian. This was due to the fact that in that religion, I was taught that love — or at least pure love — was something that was only given out by the perfect god of the religion, who poured his love out on the undeserving — that is, everyone else. Realizing that I was only receiving love because the Almighty was giving it to me despite myself ruined my sense of self-worth, something I’ve talked about multiple times.

So when I came to Paganism, I was confronted with a new in which I could see myself as inherently worthy of love. That changed so much about the way I saw both myself and love. In time, I’ve come to realize that love — whether for myself or others — is a natural reaction to recognizing the sacred nature — which I define as the inherent value — of the beloved. If I and other are sacred/inherently valuable, how can I do anything other than love them? This allowed me to pour out love² — both for myself and for others — more freely.

(This post is part of the #changingpathschallenge2024. See Yvonne Aburrow’s post for more details on the challenge.)

Footnotes

1. As an aside, Meghan co-hosts a wonderful deconstruction-themed podcast with Cortland Coffey called Thereafter. I highly recommend it. I’m their number one fan. (Pay no attention to the sledgehammer behind my back.) It also occurs to me that I should see if I can help get Yvonne Aburrow on their podcast. I think many people in their audience would appreciate Yvonne’s book(s). ↩︎
2. I will note that as an evangelical Christian, I always found it other to be loving toward others than toward myself. Much of (white) evangelical Christianity is designed this way. After all, we are commanded to love others, but deny ourselves and do things like “put our sinful nature” — which is often conflated with “the flesh” — to death. Plus, I grew up learning that “Jesus, Others, then You” spelled J-O-Y, and that was the order you were supposed to prioritize people in. The reality was, I rarely got around to the Y part, so I had more JO than JOY. ↩︎