Original Blessing

What if our first truth isn't brokenness, but belovedness?

For years, I struggled with my sense of self-worth.

The death of my mum wrenched the safety net away. Childhood and teen years morphed into a bleak landscape, a world ill-equipped to deal with grief.

Early parental loss is sometimes described as an ‘unstitched foundation,’ bonds unravelled before we develop a fuller understanding of life. Too young to hold the truth of it, we absorbed a sense of guilt, of shame, convinced that somehow we were to blame for her leaving.

Built over centuries on foundations of ‘original sin’, shame permeates much of Western culture. And language carries subtle power, shaping how we see ourselves.

If we begin from a place of condemnation, where is hope?

I discovered the work of spiritual theologian Matthew Fox, whose work ‘Original Blessing’ draws on the poetry of the book of Genesis. As he observes, the opening verses describe creation as ‘good’ five times, and on the final and sixth occasion, ‘very good’.

I am not offering a theological argument, but a human one, that we are all, in Fox’s words, ‘people of breathtaking worth and dignity’.

How different might our lives be, might our society be, if we believed that at the core of who we are?

What if the first words spoken over you
Were not ‘fallen’ but ‘beloved?’
Not ‘broken’ but ‘whole?’
Not ‘shame’, but ‘blessing’?

I sit with far too many people who believe they’re fundamentally broken, or that grief is punishment, that loss means God is angry, that suffering is deserved. Beautiful souls worn down by life, by guilt, by shame that was never theirs, childhood trauma, estranged relationships, bodies or voices judged as ‘not enough.’

I learned too soon how trauma and shame become embedded, long after events have fallen away.

We come from love.
Not brokenness, not sin.
Beneath our cloak of shame,
light breathes again.

How do we awaken to the love that is already ours?

Perhaps it means naming what fills us with our sense of unworthiness, the grief we were told to get over, the shame that was placed on us by someone else, which we eventually stopped questioning, the anger we carry so long it becomes part of who we are.

Perhaps it means allowing someone to sit with us in the darkness without trying to fix it.

Perhaps it simply means saying, for the first time, I could do with some help.

For some of us, it may be allowing divine love, or the unconditional love of another, to reach the part of us that believes, quietly and persistently, that we are too far gone, or we’re too damaged, or too much.

We’re not.

Our greatest blessings lie in the people who gaze upon us unflinchingly with eyes of love, while gently loving ourselves too, in a grounded, sacred way, knowing we are enough, ‘perfectly imperfect.’

For me, stumbling from one crisis to the next, my maternal gran offered compassionate, steadfast love, a tender-hearted woman who brought two children up alone in the second world war, later losing her daughter and grandson.

Occasionally I ponder on the tears she must have shed behind closed doors, concealing inconceivable heartbreak.

She never raised her voice. Not once, simply holding a place of sanctuary for her prodigal granddaughter, who finally stopped running and returned home, falling into arms of love that asked nothing in return.

If we have no one to mirror us in non-judgemental love, how do we begin to believe we are cherished? If we’ve known it in human form, a partner, a child, a sibling, a grandparent, a friend, a stranger’s kindness, then maybe we can begin to trust in the truth of divine love that enfolds us in times of blessing and desolation.

Here is a simple practice that helps me to trust in my own inherent worth:

Pause here.

Close your eyes if it helps. Breathe in slowly and count to four. Count to six as you exhale.

Feel the chair beneath you, the ground below your feet.

Breathe again. Let your shoulders drop.

Notice the sounds around you without naming them, allow them to pass through you.

Know you are beloved.

You always have been.

When you are ready, open your eyes and rest in this knowledge.

We come from love and we return to love.

In the expanse between lies beauty and sorrow, unfolding from original blessing.

In the days ahead, I offer you a gentle invitation to stay with these questions, allowing them to open the stillness within:

Who has been a source of unconditional love in your life? As you name them, imagine them held in light, and let gratitude rise.

Who might you look upon today with that same steady love, with a gaze that says, ‘I see you. You are beloved. All is well?’

May you know you are held in infinite love
As you disintegrate to be born anew
In those threadbare moments
May you know you are made of stardust
Transient, yet eternal,
Fragmented, yet restored.