Two Upbuilding Discourses

You’re Deserving Of Love — Just As You Are

Life can take you to the ugliest of places and most dire of circumstances, torment and humiliate you endlessly, leave you paralyzed and struck with grief and indignancy and confusion. Life can do a most impressive thing, which is to leave you disdainful of life itself, contemptuous of every breath and heartbeat which takes you further along its path. Life can appear as a disease, as a most painful and unfortunate condition, so that even when you direct your gaze towards the world-at-large, you can only see it as a fluke, as an embarrassing mistake in need of correction, and you come to prefer non-being to everything else. Life can make you a nihilist.

But what heals your soul and removes the hardship from your back is faith — not faith in any particular thing, such as that which occurs in expectancy, but that quiet and self-assured faith that’s comprised by self-love: comprised by the conviction that you’re deserving of love.

Deserving of love — not beloved, because any honest appraisal of life will reveal that not everyone is loved. The wicked and destitute, disfigured and unremarkable, erratic and erroneous: they will, more likely than not, be altogether ignored by our culture, which has, in its intrepid push towards progress, valued so highly those utilitarian functions of a person.

And yet this observation isn’t an obstacle to the recognition of deserving love, but rather, constitutes its potentiating factor. For…