An important announcement: I am not changing my Facebook profile pic

So many questions this morning. Some huge, some trivial. I cannot deal with the big questions right now. So I give you my answer to a trivial question that you did not ask: I am not changing my Facebook profile picture. The “Love Anyway” hat stays.

It feels heavier and tighter. I felt a powerful impulse to get rid of it: Get rid of the profile pic. Don’t have a face pic at all. Get rid of the account. Lights out. Shut it down. Shut everything down.

I felt the impulse. The impulse to change the profile pic expressed, in a small way, a comprehensive nausea. I could have vomited verbally all over this space this morning. I have not stopped feeling the nausea. But I somehow isolated one small element of it, the impulse to change the profile pic. But then I saw and remembered the hat in the pic. And I immediately rejected that impulse.

I was able to reject the impulse only because I focused on the most trivial question. I suspended the question about shutting everything down. I suspended the question about keeping the account, but with no picture. Not up to deciding those. And all the larger questions: not anywhere close to being ready to formulate them, much less answer them.

But to the small question, the trivial question—do I swap out the pic with the “Love Anyway” hat?—somehow the answer comes to me quickly: the hat stays. That’s the only clarity I have this morning. But I feel it is not nothing.

I am glad the hat does not say “Love Wins.” Maybe love loses. That seems possible. It seems true. But it’s more than I know this morning. The hat says “Love Anyway.” It stays. That fragment of an identity stays. That core commitment. It both conceals and expresses something deeper, something truly basic: “Loved Anyway.” Note the “-d”: perfect passive participle. The perfect passive participle “Loved” precedes and generates the imperative “Love.” That is the core, the kernel, of my identity. Such a simple thing: it took many years to realize, but I know that now.

They can take everything else away. Maybe they can take my country away and turn it into its antithesis. Maybe they can kill the religious tradition and religious community in which I was raised and steal and desecrate its corpse. Have they? It seems so. But those are larger questions. Not ready for them.

They cannot take away—cannot see, cannot touch, cannot spoil—the “Loved Anyway” kernel of my identity. “God’s truth abideth still.” So the “Love Anyway” hat stays.

Looking at the pic this morning, I do not love the smile. I am not smiling right now. But—looking again at the pic, I realize that the hat is not an accessory added to a smile. The smile flows from and expresses the words behind the words on the hat. The pic stays because of the hat.

That’s my big news flash this morning: I am not changing my Facebook profile pic. That’s my announcement. I will not be taking questions. Thank you. This news conference is over.