We’re all obsessed with calculating what we “deserve.”
It’s a sentiment that underlies the fundamental logic of how we think and function. Phrases from "Congratulations, you deserve it!” to “I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve that,” are commonplace. Compliments are followed by reassurance that your blessings are not by chance, but prophesied by your own worth. Conversely, condolences are followed by consolation that you did nothing wrong; these things just happen.
Perhaps it is only human nature to use the results of our lives as a measure of our individual quality. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people all the time, and it’s unfair. Maybe our insistence on keeping track of what we do and don’t deserve comes from our desire to correct this unjustness that we have no power to change.
Some of us look to a higher power — someone or something that can quantify what is good and bad — and assign us to what is fitting. The idea of heaven and hell can be seen as a way to cope with this unfairness, the belief that there is some reward or punishment acting as a means for sanity throughout this life — that one day, everyone will get just what they deserve.
The problem with this fixation, no matter how innate it may be, is that this logic isn’t exclusively targeted at other people and will inevitably point back to ourselves. We can assume heaven or hell for others all we want, but we must inevitably face the question of which one we deserve.
In “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”, Mr. Anderson famously says, “We accept the love we think we deserve.” Truly, many — myself included — have been constrained by their idea of what they deserve, especially as it relates to love. It is easy for people to limit themselves to what they believe the universe has deemed they are worthy of, a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves them powerless to change their place in the world.
In the religion I grew up in, the greatest act of love is laying down one’s life. Love, notoriously hard to accept, becomes intertwined with sacrifice and crawls back to me. I see it in the career my mother gave up to raise me, in the country my father left behind. I romanticize the movies where love means waiting for someone, hurting for someone. I am reminded of it in the body and blood every Sunday, when I consume His sacrifice.
I pray to the Father, remorseful of the sins that make me undeserving of this love. I can try to get cleaner, to not miss any sin at my next confession, but I will never be clean enough. I do not know how much cleaner I am getting; He will not speak to me. My Original Sin has permanently made a mark on my goodness. Love becomes sacrifice, and the question was not, “Am I worth loving?” but “Am I worth hurting for?”. And how could I, eternally imperfect, ever deserve it?
”Am I worthy of this? Do I deserve this?” So irrelevant. Do you want it?
This popular Tumblr quote, in the simplest way, deems all this unimportant. In doing so, it takes away the power that these sorts of questions have on one’s self-worth. It so easily rejects a logic that seems to be programmed in all of humanity, boldly asking the reader to consider that love is not given on the arbitrary human standard of who “deserves” it.
Recently, I’ve been trying to internalize the belief that everyone deserves love. Accepting love had always been hard for me, and in an attempt to finally unpack this issue, I took a long, hard look at how I saw the world around me. I noticed that the times I didn’t feel happy for someone were when I felt that they didn’t deserve love, whether it was something they said or did, something significant or minuscule. I was being judgmental, but that judgment ricocheted right back onto me and made me miserable.
Just like the Tumblr quote, this new mindset instilled a sense of inner peace within me; it radically silenced the cacophony of questions about what I was worthy of. It didn’t matter what other people thought they deserved or even what I, with my subjective judgment, thought they deserved; they all deserved love regardless, and I did, too.
On the cross, Jesus forgives the ones who are crucifying him. He does not condemn whether or not they are worthy of forgiveness, but loves humanity so radically that he is able to forgive those actively hurting him. People, on the other hand, see forgiveness as something conditional, calculating regret or intention behind the action to decide whether or not it is deserved. While forgiveness and love are, of course, different, they seem to parallel human versus divine logic in this manner. The human gives forgiveness and love to who they think deserves it, and the divine gives it regardless.
I don’t know why so much of my younger self’s memories of the Church are riddled with guilt. Maybe it’s that I was an anxious child, or maybe too much of humanity and its obsession with fairness and deserving seeped into the Catholicism that I learned. Either way, my rudimentary ideas of love were interlaced with this guilt. It turns out, all of that was irrelevant anyway: Jesus did not want me to feel guilt, but forgiveness and love.
While everyone has their own journey of acceptance of love, for me, remembering and unearthing the unconditional forgiveness underneath those years of suffocating guilt has helped me to accept love without questioning whether I deserved it. Ironically, the same religion that introduced a love so intertwined with sacrifice it felt impossible to bear now offers a means for acceptance. This realization gives grace to a younger version of me that was so preoccupied with what she does or does not deserve, grace I can now happily embrace.
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