Love, Unscrambled

The Surprisingly Holy Work of Just Showing Up (and Maybe Bringing Muffins)

The boy sat still in the front pew, his knuckles clenched white around the edge of the bench, his eyes fixed on the pine box that held his father. The room was humid with grief and cheap cologne. He was barely seven, dressed in his Sunday shirt, the collar too tight, the silence around him crowded with grown men’s sorrow. And then, it happened. The preacher, standing above him like a thundercloud, said something that cracked the air in two: His father had died "without salvation." Just like that, he preached the man straight into hell, using him as a sermon illustration. A warning. A flaming billboard to the sinners in the room: get right or else.

He was an out-of-town preacher who had never met the boy’s father. He hadn’t asked about him. He certainly hadn’t prayed with him or his family. But there he was, tossing the man’s soul into an eternal dumpster fire for dramatic effect and spreading enough fire and brimstone to keep the room lit and the self-righteous warm. Without flinching, he nailed shame to the boy’s chest like a second grief—hot, humiliating, heavy.

That moment, equal parts heartbreak and heresy, did something strange inside this young boy. He didn’t fight back, not outwardly. But something else began: a slow-burning question lodged itself in his chest like a buried ember. What kind of God sides with humiliation? What kind of religion puts nails in a boy’s soul at his own father’s funeral?

Psychologists would call what the boy was experiencing toxic shame, but I have a hard time imagining any other type. Shame isn’t just a feeling, it’s a virus. It infects every emotion and clings to every thought supercharging the negative ones while simultaneously sedating the positive. It spreads throughout your soul draining you of energy, and then it sticks to your body like hot gum on a summer sidewalk, transforming your experiences from “something bad just happened to me” to “I am bad.”

Unfortunately, shame is all too often weaponized by religion. Instead of offering healing, many religious traditions have used shame as a tool to control behavior, to enforce belonging, to keep people in line. The message isn’t “you are loved,” it’s “you are broken, but maybe you can earn your place here.” And, of course, in Christian Evangelical circles, that message is usually punctuated with a finely tuned power ballad about your wretchedness, where you repeat the chorus 37 times while the pastor in skinny jeans fist pumps into the air, randomly and awkwardly shouting “Come on, church!”

The result? Millions of people sitting in pews trying to earn love by any means necessary or avoiding them entirely, feeling unlovable, fragmented, and terminally unworthy not because God said so, but because someone holding a pulpit or a doctrine did.

Shame, when weaponized by religion, doesn’t lead us to transformation. It leads us to unhealthy obsessions, to hiding, to spiritual exhaustion. Honestly, it doesn’t make us want to stand and sing, it makes us want to crawl under the pew with a gluten-free communion wafer and pretend we’re invisible. It makes us small, compliant, and tired enough to accept hopelessness as our only option. You don't feel holy. You don’t feel whole. You just feel like you’re failing at being good, which is the most exhausting full-time job with zero benefits anyone can have.

But that boy in the front pew didn’t surrender to that version of the story. Something in him refused to believe that love had prerequisites and that shame had the final answer. He managed to transform his pain instead of transmitting it.

He was Howard Thurman – a theologian, philosopher, mystic, and prolific author. If the world had had its way, he would have remained a footnote—a poor Black boy from Daytona with no father, no money, and no place in the machinery of power. He grew to be the spiritual architect of the Civil Rights movement and a close mentor to Martin Luther King Jr as well as many other civil rights leaders. His book, Jesus and the Disinherited was so influential for King that it allegedly sat in his front pocket throughout the Montgomery boycott.

Thurman didn’t rise through rage or rivalry. He rose through listening. While others shouted about justice, he sat with silence until it whispered something deeper. Over time, his question about God and humiliation—about shame and salvation—became a vision: that the spiritual wounds of the world could not be healed by revenge, but by a love deep enough to hold both the victim and the violator. He would come to believe something radical: that love, real love, does not shame. It gathers, it holds, it makes sense of the senseless. Not with easy answers or cheap comforts, but like a long, patient untying of a knot that generations have passed down. Not a weak love, but one wild with clarity. A love that sees through hate and shame and finds all the splinters and pieces of shrapnel lodged in your soul and it says, you are more than what has been done to you.

In my last post, I mentioned Dante waking from despair. I think Thurman and Dante would agree – It’s this radical love that awakens us. It’s love that inspires us to keep walking even when it hurts. For Dante this was symbolized in his lady love, Beatrice, who shook him awake. When his doubts dragged him down, she reached from heaven and lifted him up. Love prompted her. Love sent her. To Dante, she wasn’t just beloved—she was the embodiment of a love unspoiled by fear, so radiant it made hell worth walking through. And maybe that’s what we all need to journey through hell: not certainty, but an experience of unitive love burning bright enough to make meaning out of what has been knotted up in us and tangled for generations.

Ok, but I love the Cubs, and, I love Dave Matthews Band, and I love “a nice M.L.T – a mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. They're so perky, I love that." This isn’t the same kind of Love, right? What is this love they are talking about? And where does one get it, package it, and perhaps sell it without a tariff?

Love, for Thurman, wasn’t sentimental. It didn’t come with soft lighting, curated playlists, or Instagram-ready hashtags. It didn’t post “thoughts and prayers” and then log off to binge a crime doc. No. This kind of love just showed up. Sat beside you. Said nothing. Asked for nothing. Like a friend who brings soup and doesn’t need to talk about it.

In the contemplative traditions that shaped him, love isn’t a feeling—it’s a force. It doesn’t arrive with a cape or a clipboard; it crouches low and stays with you when the shame storm hits. In clinical language, we might call that co-regulation or unconditional positive regard. Thurman just called it presence. Sacred, unflinching presence. The kind that doesn’t flinch at your worst moment. The kind that, without fanfare or fireworks, starts quietly unscrambling what shame has tangled.

And modern psychology? It backs him up. We love to believe it’s the therapist’s brilliance—their techniques, their degrees, their carefully lit bookshelf in the Zoom background—that heals us. But the research says otherwise. Over and over again, studies show: it’s not the clever insight, the perfectly timed metaphor, or even that impressive breathwork certification you keep forgetting to use. It’s the relationship. The presence. That awkwardly sacred space where someone else refuses to run away from your ache.

A decade or so ago, during one of the roughest stretches of my life, when everything felt scrambled and shame was the loudest voice in the room, I had a friend named Craig who kept showing up. At the time, I was barely holding together: a tangle of spiritual anxiety, crushed expectations, and the theological residue of a religion built on humiliation. I felt strongly that God was disappointed in me and tolerated me like we all tolerate that one co-worker, but that was almost ok with me, because I was much more disappointed in myself. We’d meet for coffee. Nothing dramatic. No deep, soul-baring therapy sessions. Just coffee. Sometimes a bagel. Sometimes silence.

I don’t remember most of what we talked about, probably books, theology, and the occasional existential panic. Craig was older, a counselor by profession, though never officially my counselor. But he was kind. He was steady. And most days, that was more than enough.

He didn’t fix me. But he baked me scones. Really good scones. And, he brought me the proverbial chicken soup for my sick soul even when I didn’t know I needed it. And somehow, through that quiet consistency, he helped me survive.

He never said it this way, but his presence told the truth that shame had been trying to bury: You are not beyond repair. You are not the worst thing you’ve believed about yourself. You don’t have to do this alone.

Looking back, I realize: Craig didn’t just offer kindness. He interrupted the shame-script. He brought presence to the parts of me I thought weren’t welcome at the table.

Craig didn’t just keep me company. He kept me from becoming the worst version of myself. He reminded me—sometimes with muffins—that love doesn’t have to lecture or quote Rumi. Sometimes it just shows up on a Tuesday and listens badly. No hashtags. No heart-hands selfie. No urgent call to “hold space” with just the right filter and a quote from Brené. He sat with silence. He offered presence. And somehow, that did more than the most eloquent TED Talk about compassion ever could.

The 13th-century Zen teacher Dōgen once described the Bodhisattva of compassion, Kannon, as having a thousand arms and eyes, each perfectly attuned to respond to suffering. He said that Kannon responds to cries of the world the way you reach behind your head for a pillow in the middle of the night—naturally, intuitively, without hesitation or self-conscious performance.

You don’t schedule it. You don’t ask if it’ll get likes. You just... reach. You’re half-asleep, maybe drooling, and still your body knows exactly what to do. That, says Dōgen, is real compassion.

It’s not a strategy. It’s not a brand. It’s not something you perform for an audience of empathetic peers. It's a love so embodied, so deeply integrated into your being, that it moves before you even think to plan it. Like instinct. Like breath.

Compare that to the algorithm-approved love we’re sold today. It’s clean. It’s curated. It makes sure to keep the lighting soft and the captions poetic. But here’s the difference: Performative compassion is still self-centered. It asks, “How will I be seen being good?” rather than simply being there.

Dōgen’s love doesn’t need an audience. It gropes in the dark. It spills the soup. It forgets your birthday but remembers your silence. It doesn’t try to fix your despair with a platitude or a pithy meme. It just reaches for the pillow—awkwardly, maybe even badly—and makes sure your head is held.

And that’s the kind of love Thurman described.

That’s the kind of love that saved me.

Not love as a feeling.

Love as a force.

So maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question.

Not, “Where do I find that kind of love?” but, “Where has that love already been showing up with coffee, with soup, with an awkwardly long hug and not making a big deal about it?”

It’s not always transcendent. Sometimes it’s painfully, beautifully ordinary. It’s someone sitting beside you, asking nothing, offering a baked good, and accidentally helping rewire your nervous system. Howard Thurman believed that kind of presence, a love that doesn’t flinch, is what heals shame, resists cruelty, and rewrites the stories we’ve been handed.

So instead of running toward saving or fixing or conquering, maybe the better question is: Can I let love do its quiet work? No fancy techniques. No rage. No revenge arc. Just the slow, faithful, patient restoration of a heart learning how to beat again. Letting Love—capital L—unscramble what’s been tangled.

Thurman also warned that if we spend our lives dodging vulnerability, avoiding exposure, and guarding ourselves from the “communal agony” of others, we don’t actually stay safe—we just slowly starve like a victim to some kind of an anorexia nervosa of the soul. Our carefully fortified hearts grow quiet. Our lives—so thoroughly defended—begin to wither from the inside out.

So, maybe the last question we should ask isn’t, “How do I protect myself?” but “How can I be more open to love?”

Because you can build a fortress around your soul and still end up cold and alone, microwaving last night’s regret.

And, this unitive Love we are talking about, isn’t waiting for you to be something you are not, or to live up to some hidden expectation that makes you worthy. You are already lovable, and love is already here ready to do its work.

“Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale… it does not seek to balance or to weigh. It does not preoccupy itself with interpretations and conclusions. It is, to the contrary, the annihilation of judgment.”
—Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

The boy on the pew never forgot. But he also never stopped listening. And somewhere between the ache and the quiet, love reached behind its head and made a comforting space for him.

So maybe this week, instead of fixing the world, we show up. Maybe we bake muffins. Maybe we stop trying to be impressive or right or good, and instead choose to be present. We sit beside someone in silence. We reach behind our head for the pillow. We bring the soup, spill it a little, and stay anyway. Because maybe love—the real kind, the wild, unflinching, unscrambling kind—isn’t found in the big gestures or flawless words, but in the quiet decision not to run away from each other’s ache. Maybe that also means not running away from ourselves. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s how Love, unscrambled, begins to heal what shame tangled.