Loyalty is the toxic mimic of devotion.
Photo by Sweet Ice Cream Photography on Unsplash
Dear Lover,
I don't want your loyalty.
I don't want you to diminish the value I have for you to one of obedience or compliance.
Please don't give me that kind of power.
I am not here to receive your repentance or to afford you a place to hang your do-gooder pride.
I am not here to build constructs that encourage you to self-preserve, or worse, to persevere.
I don't want you to just survive with me.
Your loyalty would only sow fertile soil for resentment, martyrdom, and resignation.
It would create separation and competition between us, and after all, we are on the same team.
But I mostly don't want your loyalty because of what it means for you. Because your loyalty is a just symptom of the excruciatingly unbearable reception of your own self-persecution. So unbearable — so ridden with shame and guilt and fear of being wrong — that you make yourself untouchable by choosing to be loyal.
Being loyal to me means that you are harming you, and that just won't do for us.
Dear lover, nothing about you is wrong. You have not sinned and there's no need to repent. All of you is pure perfection. All of you, even the parts that compulsively long to be loyal, are worthy of my love.
Loyalty is the toxic mimic of devotion, and my dear lover, we are being called to worship.
Your devotion is a thing of sheer beauty.
Your devotion is truth, alignment, surrender, and rebellious alchemy.
It is resilient, sovereign, and equanimous.
Your devotion is not obedient, and it does not turn away from the fire.
Your devotion disrupts. It is fierce but it is not squelching.
To be devoted is to be actively and eternally absolved.
It is grace, and it is love. And we both know that's all there really is anyway.
A unique relic of a time we've collectively lost hold of, a time that calls to each of us now from the shadows of our own loins in the darkest moment of the night.
It is an opening with no end in sight.