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There are moments when grief arrives quietly—not as devastation, but as clarity.

Yesterday was one of those moments.

I didn’t lose faith.
I didn’t change my values.
I didn’t “wake up” to some shocking new information.

What happened was simpler—and harder.

I realized that a community I once wanted to belong to no longer aligns with the ethic I live by now. And this isn’t the first time I’ve felt it lately. I’m noticing it across multiple online spiritual spaces.

That realization has weight.
And it deserves to be spoken plainly.

The rupture wasn’t disagreement

I can live with disagreement.
I can sit with difference.
I can hold anger, grief, and outrage without needing everyone to agree with me.

What I can no longer align with is something else entirely:

A double movement that sounds like this:

We stand for love.
Therefore, they must be banished.

Once you hear that fracture, you can’t unhear it.

Language of compassion paired with rituals of exclusion.
Declarations of justice yoked to dehumanization.
Spiritual authority invoked not to heal—but to oppose.

That contradiction doesn’t just trouble me intellectually.
My body recognizes it as false.

Anger is a signal, not a mandate

I understand anger deeply.

Anger tells us that something sacred has been violated.
It alerts us to injustice.
It wakes us up when harm is happening.

But anger is not a moral compass by itself.

It is information—not instruction.

When anger becomes the engine rather than the signal…
when it is ritualized, weaponized, sanctified…
it stops serving healing.

There is no restoration in that.
Only repetition.

And I can’t pretend otherwise anymore.

“But what about Jesus and the whip?”

This question always surfaces here.

The image of Jesus driving people out of the Temple is often used to justify righteous aggression—to bless anger with holy approval.

But staying with that story—really staying with it—reveals something crucial:

Jesus did not act to protect himself.
He did not act to secure safety.
He did not act to preserve belonging.

His action made his death inevitable.

He did not target people as enemies.
He exposed a system that had turned devotion into transaction and worship into exploitation.

That was prophetic disruption—not tribal violence.
Revelation—not retaliation.

And it cost him everything.

That distinction matters.

What I’m seeing now feels different

What I’m witnessing in many spiritual and activist spaces today is not prophetic truth-telling that accepts consequence.

It is protective moralization.

It seeks safety.
It seeks legitimacy.
It seeks control.

It uses the language of love while constructing enemies.
It claims righteousness as armor.

And once you see that structure, you can’t participate without betraying something essential in yourself.

The grief is real

This realization has cost me belonging.

I’m grieving the version of myself who hoped these spaces could hold nuance without collapsing into enemy-making.
I’m grieving a shared language that once felt like home.
I’m grieving the idea that justice and compassion would be enough to keep a community whole.

This grief is not superiority.
It is not bitterness.
It is not withdrawal.

It is clarity with a cost.

What I know now

Love that requires banishment is not love.
Justice that depends on dehumanization is not justice.
Prayer that needs an enemy has already lost its way.

Anger tells me when something sacred has been violated.
Love tells me how not to become the violation in response.

I am not becoming isolated.

I am becoming whole.

And wholeness does not shout.
It does not banish.
It does not require an enemy to know what it stands for.

It stands quietly—
unwilling to fracture the world further
in the name of saving it.

🔔 Invitation

If this stirred something in you—grief, relief, recognition, resistance—sit with it gently.

You don’t have to exile your anger to mature.
But you don’t have to weaponize it either.

Sometimes the most loving act is not staying to fight…
but knowing when love has outgrown the room.

With devotion and wonder,
The Inspired Imaginative | The Devoted Mystic

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