Radical Gentleness

“But for the Grace of God.”
— AA Slogan

For a long time, I couldn’t stand this phrase. It carried the weight of a god I was taught to fear. The word grace echoed through the pews of my childhood like a verdict — something reserved for the pure, the obedient, the repentant. It encapsulated the rejection I felt growing up in a Catholic family, going to Catholic church, attending Catholic school. When I was a teenager, I didn’t know yet that I was gay — but I knew I was different. Most of the time, they weren’t overtly homophobic, but my identity was the brunt of jokes and whispers. It was the way they said “those people” with a curled lip and a knowing glance. It was the silence when certain topics came up. The tightening in the room. I learned quickly what was safe to share and what wasn’t.

So when I came into recovery and heard people say “But for the grace of God,” my body recoiled. It brought up shame I thought I had outgrown — the shame of not being good enough for salvation. I didn’t know then that grace could mean something else. Something human. Something tender.

The shift happened in therapy, working through the complex traumas of my childhood. I was not the person they told me I was — not broken, not shameful, not requiring their conditional approval to exist. In one session, when I spoke about feeling unworthy of recovery itself, my therapist asked me to speak to my teenage self the way I wish someone had then. The words that came were gentle. Patient. They sounded nothing like the voices I’d internalized.

Today, I see grace as radical gentleness — and I understand that radical doesn’t mean extreme. It means rooted. To be radically gentle is to return to the root of who I am beneath the layers of others’ expectations. It’s learning to meet the wounded places inside me with the same compassion I’d offer a frightened child — because that’s exactly what those parts are. When shame rises up and whispers that I don’t belong, I’ve learned to speak back with tenderness: “You’re safe now. You don’t have to earn your place here.” Grace, in this sense, is not bestowed from above — it rises from within and between us. It’s what happens when I fall short and still get to stay. When I’m welcomed back into the rooms without having to earn it.

My journey has been from recoil to recognition. Grace doesn’t demand that I be someone else — to believe in something that goes against my values, or to contort myself into a shape that makes other people more comfortable. It simply asks me to be present. It says, “I’m glad you’re here.” And somehow, even when I don’t believe it, I need to hear it again.