Yeah, we’re going black! The Absence of what I love. Color. I was running this morning and listening to a new song, recently released. The artist is a favorite of some of my children. I kinda like them too, if I’m honest. But the new lyrics went something like this: “…I’ll hold your hand, I’ll hold the door, ‘cause that’s how I was raised…”

Cute, huh? Sweet, and perhaps a little endearing….

And anger began to rise in me. Innocuous enough lyrics, and yet, insidiously present in our experience today. How many times have you heard, and usually in the context of excusing poor behavior, “that’s how I was raised”?

If you’re human and you grew up somewhere on the planet Earth, then there are ideas that you inherited that are archaic, bad, wrong and just plain stupid. You were raised by an imperfect human or a cluster of imperfect humans, which means you absorbed ideas that are not your own. Have you made them your own? Have you rejected them? Do you need to? Do you need to keep them?

Don’t hear me say it’s offensive for someone to hold the door open for you if you’re a female. Is it a kindness? As a female, I hold the door open for people all the time: at work, at the grocery store, in public places because it is driven out of a desire to spread kindness and decency. When the motive is to exert power over someone and to express superior strength and presence of mind, then it is not kind; it is condescending. My point is to examine why you were given the heritage you were given and if it’s worth keeping.

We do things so much by default and deeply held beliefs we may not even be aware of. This year has given me great pause to examine what I believe and why I believe it. I have sloughed off the ignorant faith of my youth for a deeper, more profound experience of God, His universe, and the way He works in it.

Sorting through at this level may require you to go dark for a time, a “dark night of the soul” as John of the Cross calls it. The process that I speak of is one of exchanging the false, shadow black self for the most authentic, raw self that God himself had in mind when he cut your fabric. The invitation to this kind of journey is not easy to say yes to, but if you can press through, fall beneath the surface into a great, mysterious depth…. a beautiful depth, where deep calls to deep…. then a beautiful transformation can take place. A cocoon is black. It is also a safe, nurturing place of deep change.