The Beginning of The End...Or Of Something New
HCR™ Tenet 1: Be real, be you.
This is the mid-week edition of The Heart-Centered Rebel™ Letters by Kat Collins. This is a multi-part series about the tenents of being a Heart-Centered Rebel™ and how they came to be. It is honest, raw, and real. Content warning: This post contains religious trauma and abuse.
Tenet 1: Be real, be you.
The most basic, and the most important, of all the tenets of being a heart-centered rebel™ (HCR™) is being your authentic self. When I say authentic and authenticity, I mean that you express your whole self genuinely and realistically. It is who you are at your deepest core.
Everyone deserves to be their authentic selves, not something someone expects you to be. To be authentic is to feel at home in your body and to feel true to your sense of values. It doesn’t come from something outside of ourselves but knowing deeply, internally, that you are enough and that you add to the greater whole of life and you matter.
Being authentic also means we have the opportunity for others to love and accept us for who we are at our core. When we’re being authentic, we are being vulnerable; we are showing our whole selves, the good with the ugly. When we do this, this invites and allows for more intimate and honest relationships and we allow for true acceptance and unconditional love.
Authenticity is also one of the most challenging tenets to live by daily. We tend to live our lives based on obligations, roles, the “shoulds,” and expectations of others. We get bogged down, abused, put into metaphorical boxes, have crushed spirits, and generally feel like we’re not worthy and not enough. For anything. Our true selves become hidden because we’re taught that our true selves aren’t “acceptable.”
We learn to fear that if we show up as we truly are - saying, doing, and feeling the real things that are going on within us without augmenting or censoring ourselves in any way - that others won’t like us, will shun us, be upset with us, judge us, or even leave us. Not everyone in our lives will respond well to our authentic self because of how it impacts them (regardless of what it does for us). We learn to hide behind masks, to hide our pain, our joys, our realness. And that breaks my heart.
When we’re authentic, we stay true to ourselves, and who we genuinely are. We’re present in the here and now. We do what makes us happy and follow our passions regardless of who we disappoint, or how it may be perceived by others. Living a life of authenticity is a constant effort and can mean sacrifice.
The beginning of the end. . . or of something new
There was a popular Nazarene hymn when I was attending church in my younger years. We would often be moved to tears, outright weeping, and altar calls while the song was sung.
“Just as I am, without one plea
But that They blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.Just as I am, and waiting not
To rid my soul of one dark blot,
To Thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.Just as I am, tho’ tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind:
Sight, riches, healing of the mind,
Yea, all I need in Thee to find,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.Just as I am, Thou wilt receive;
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
Because Thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.Just as I am Thy love unknown.”
It was our cry for Jesus to accept us just as we are - full of troubles, weary, conflict, heavy hearts - to unburden ourselves at His feet. I remember how moving the song was when the choir would sing quietly, the pastor began his “we are unworthy” prayer, calling us forward to kneel and pray.
I did it all. I sang. I wept. I felt unworthy of God’s love but I was coming to Him just as I was. I felt a fullness of being seen for myself by a fickle God who may or may not accept me. The song said, “Just as I am” which meant that He would love me, at that moment, in all of my unworthiness, my sinful ways, my not perfect ways. And it was always the goal to pray fervently to have god help me get rid of the “bad,” the unworthiness, so I could be perfect for His love.
All I wanted was to be seen as myself - my whole self - and loved for who I am rather than found lacking and not perfect. Although the Bible has tons of stories of imperfect people who were thoroughly loved by God, I was taught to see it through a lens of “unworthiness” and not good enough for God’s love, until I was “perfect” (as if being perfect has any real concrete meaning).
I always felt that I never measured up quite enough to truly be a Christian. But oh how I tried. I gave myself the role of being the “good girl” thinking somehow that would make me acceptable and loved, not only to God but to others. But I always seemed to mess up. I could never be enough.
I was told, I “talk too much,” I was “too quiet,” I was “fat,” I “didn’t obey,” I wasn’t “submissive enough,” I didn’t “belong,” and on.
When I was a teenager, I overheard some male adult parishioners (churchgoers) talking. I was walking down the stairs about to enter the area where they were when their words stopped me. They were complaining about my parents (my father was their pastor of their Church) - about how awful their kids (my brother and I) were. That we had no respect and didn’t obey what we were told, especially my brother. They said that my parents were doing a bad job of raising their kids and we were going to turn out as “bad.”
These were two elders in our church. I was close friends with their daughters. We all spent a lot of time together as families and friends.
This is just a tiny drop in the bucket of the things I’ve witnessed being a part of the Church over the years. Being a preacher’s kid (PK), meant that you live in what I call a “fishbowl” where everyone can see you and watches you, waiting for any little misstep so that they could call it out - either to our faces or behind our backs.
Because of this fishbowl, image became everything. We were told to never air our dirty laundry or ask for help because others shouldn’t know we’re struggling. We had to put on a pretty face, a mask. We were the master pretenders.
Over the years, “Just as I am” became became “once I’m perfect, then just as I am.” You had to be cleaned up, wear the proper clothes, have the proper respect, proper attitude, and on before coming into Church to be saved and made whole.
Working with inner-city kids in the Church opened a whole new dimension to that attitude. These kids came from broken homes, abusive family, drug situations, the streets. They wore the clothing they had which was torn jeans, ratty sneakers, tight tops and short skirts, low-slung pants, and sometimes the same clothing every day. They cursed. They were rowdy. They played pranks. They were street-tough with a whole world already under their belts that no kid should ever have. They were their genuine, authentic selves.
And I loved every single one of them - just as they were. I was their refuge, church was their ‘safe space.’ All they longed for was someone to love them just as they were - no conditions, no judgment, no shoulds or ought-tos. To share a love that was borne of Jesus as He said in His greatest and first two commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself”(Matthew 22:36-30). They didn’t have to be perfect to be loved.
But they weren’t good enough for the Church. The Church called them out on their “unperfectness” and told them they were unworthy to be part of the Church unless they changed before coming to the Church. They had to clean up their language, dress conservatively, be quieter, always be respectful to the elders, not make a mess, and on. I fought tooth and nail for these kids because they deserved to be their authentic selves in the Church and before God. Isn’t that what Jesus is all about? Loving us humans just as we are, in all our imperfect mess, right now and not having to change before we can be loved?
The teens knew they were seen as unworthy. They had known that feeling their whole lives. One day, after so much condescension and ‘correcting’ by the elders of the Church (and some others), one of the boys, who had a particularly rough life so far, came to me.
He asked, “Why don’t they love me? Why don’t they love us?”
Have you ever felt like your heart, your soul, was literally cracking? That you’ve come apart at the seams? That no answer is right and no sound can come out except a keening of the pain you feel radiating from another soul?
I had no answer. I tried to give him some truth while sparing the pain. But how does one do that when my own heart was splitting from the same pain?
That was the beginning of the end for me. . . or of something new.
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