The Uniting Power of Innocence

Whenever the world feels divided, I turn to innocence.

A friend recently wrote a beautiful blog about true manhood that reminded me of why I started Honest Heart Journeys. I’d experienced enough harmful femininity - both self-inflicted and observing others - to decide I wanted to help shift our culture.

Our world needs women to live into their fullness and to sister one another as we discover it. 

As we value and find strength in our relationships as women, building them on our shared values and experiences, we naturally rise above the toxic feminine. I know it’s a strong term, but we feel it in the comparisons, criticisms and expectations that so often belittle and divide us. 

Dropping societal expectations, labels, and shallow measurements of worth that have defined many of us takes courage. We can feel naked as we disrobe and don’t yet know the new garment that replaces what we’ve worn  for so long.

But then we discover the heart space of intuition, authenticity and self-compassion that builds natural confidence and trust.

My friend’s reflections on true manhood are no different from mine. He states, as I believe, that we each express both masculine and feminine qualities – both courage and care, persistence and patience, confidence and humility, strength and grace. 

Humanity’s alignment comes when both men and women lean into the infinite range of masculine and feminine qualities that are innate to us. What makes us distinct is how we express them.

The indigenous prophecy of the eagle and the condor comes up often in conversation these days. As the prophecy tells us, we are in a time of balancing. Right when it feels that the world is unhinging, we are actually coming into alignment.

I like to think of it as the male eagle and female condor coming to ride the thermals side by side. The wars of toxic femininity AND masculinity in society are climaxing before they drop away. 

With balance comes peace.

So what about the innocence I mentioned?

In September 2010, my then 20 year old son deployed to Afghanistan with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment of the U.S. Marine Corps, They were the first US battalion into Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.

What held me together as the mother of a marine involved in daily combat with the Taliban – and those were the bloodiest days of the war – was how I saw the world.

I refused to be divided. To hate. To fear.

Right where I could have hated or feared the enemy, I saw them as innocent babes, just like my one month old grandson who I held this past weekend.

I saw them before culture and education had molded them. I saw them as their mothers’ and fathers’ children. As God’s children.

With this clarity, it was easier to see no sides to the war and no enemy to take my son’s life.

On several occasions, my son shared that he knew I’d been praying; he’d missed being killed by just inches. He had been protected, and I had found a mental stronghold.

I would never say there was literally no war going on or diminish the tragic experience of parents whose sons or daughters did not return. I use my experience as my own humble lesson on the power of love. 

I learned what it is to be unwavering, undivided.

Our world needs our unwavering hope and trust in its natural alignment, and in humanity. It needs us to love even those we call enemies.

It needs us to know our ONENESS and to hold to the innocence of ALL. With this mental clarity and calm comes insight and openness to solutions without prejudice around where they come from.

The grace with which we live as we put humanity’s Oneness first is the same that binds us as men and women of strength and substance and nations of people who want the same things in life.

We find a different view of what’s really going on when we ride the thermals, when we’re no longer fighting hand to hand combat on a mental battlefield of hate, fear and inadequacy. When we hold unwaveringly to the infinite nature of our shared innocence and boundless expression, we fly together.