How old were you when you first started receiving messages about your worthiness?
Did these messages help you build a core identity of loved-ness? Or did they grind you down into a core belief of fundamental flawed-ness?

Did you carry around a sense that your own value is dependent on your belief and right living?

Do you still carry around that sense?

Last year I started writing songs. And through them, I started righting wrongs.

I started looking at the core messages that had been planted in the core of my being, and I started rewriting them.

One of the first ones that flowed from my fingertips through the piano was this one: “You Have Heard It Said.”

Lyrics:

You have heard it said, for you to be free
You have to follow all the decrees
But I say to you, you are already free
Always have been, and always will be

You have heard it said, for you to be loved
You have to please the Father above
But I say to you, you are already loved
Love is like water, it’s what you’re made of

You have heard it said you are totally depraved
And that is the reason you need to be saved
But who told you that you were depraved?
You’re beautifully, fearfully, wonderfully made

You have heard it said, for you to be safe
Better to keep yourself out of the way
But I say to you, you’re already safe
There’s no use in hiding, so come out and play

You have heard it said, for you to be loved
You have to please the Father above
But I say to you, you are already loved
Love is like water, it’s what you’re made of.

I’ll acknowledge it’s a rough home studio demo: just voice and piano, flawed as ever, but it’s doing a tremendously courageous thing:

• It is confronting abusive lies. For generations, religious communities have found it pleasing, satisfactory and necessary to teach people truisms like the ones presented here. But these must be challenged. They are corrosive. To plant inside the very hearts of humans that they are unlovable, broken, fallen, unworthy, is to lock them outside in the cold of winter while you have a warm house available. Love is only shown by humans, by flesh and blood. Do not orient people towards pleasing an invisible, unspeaking deity, and deprive them of fundamental attachment relationships. That is the epitome of conditional love. Human thriving depends on up-close, real-life, out-loud relationships of love — not far-off, hypothetical, constantly-quiet unrequited yearning. To give people that burden is to put concrete shoes on their feet and drop them off a bridge.

• It is repurposing the language of Jesus — “You have heard it said / but I say to you” is a pattern of speaking recorded from Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount.” Take a religiously overbearing insistence, and shift it to new lens. Through this song, I am expressing: There is no monstrous, tyrannical, wrathful “God” out there waiting to destroy you. You, in your fundamental nature, are entirely correct.

• It’s speaking to past Kevan. Stanza four is entirely for me. While a young Kevan might have desired to play, he was often required to sit tight, be quiet, hold still, stay out of the way. But that time has passed. There is no hiding required. Safety is here.

• It’s ambitiously hopeful. Is it true that you are loved exactly as you are? It has to be. I hope especially that this will be expressed to you clearly, verbally, with words, with all the language and time and generosity that helps you receive actual love from an in-person human — but if not: Wait no longer for a sign from heaven of your loved-ness; no further signs are coming. Everything you need to assure yourself of your loved-ness is right in your own mind, your own body, your own hands. Do not externalize what must come from within. Fill yourself with the love you deserve.