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Blaise Pascal wrote, “God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.” Thus, if we feel hateful toward ourselves, we assume that God feels hateful toward us.
God weeps over us when shame and self-hatred immobilize us.
Unwittingly I had projected onto God my feelings about myself. I felt safe with Him only when I saw myself as noble, generous, and loving, without scars, fears, or tears—perfect! Good grief.
For many years, I hid from my true self through my performance in ministry. I constructed an identity through sermons, books, and storytelling. I rationalized that if the majority of Christians thought well of me, there was nothing wrong with me. The more I invested in ministerial success, the more real the impostor became.
“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self,” Thomas Merton observed. He went on to explain.
This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we were born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of
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The whispering of the Spirit has been drowned out by deafening applause.
Have you ever felt baffled by your internal resistance to prayer? By the existential dread of silence, solitude, and being alone with God? By the way you drag yourself out of bed for morning praise, shuffle off to worship with the sacramental slump of the terminally ill, endure nightly prayer with stoic resignation, knowing that “this too shall pass”?
The God who grabs scalawags and ragamuffins by the scruff of the neck and raises them up to seat them with the princes and princesses of His people.
this miracle enough for anybody? Or has the thunder of “God loved the world so much” been so muffled by the roar of religious rhetoric that we are deaf to the word that God could have tender feelings for us?
defended his prose style, saying, “His floridities are merely orotundity. Nevertheless, his unremitting gaseousness has an organic fluidity and turgescence difficult to duplicate and oddly purgative for the reader.”
God speaks to the deepest reaches of our souls, into our self-hatred and shame, our narcissism, and takes us through the night into the daylight of His truth:
Last week I was terrified at the prospect of dying; tonight I am homesick for the house of my Abba.” A central theme in the personal life of Jesus Christ, which lies at the very heart of the revelation that He is, is His growing intimacy with, trust in, and love of His Abba.
“Abba, as a way of addressing God, is ipsissima vox, an authentic original utterance of Jesus. We are confronted with something new and astounding. Herein lies the great novelty of the gospel.”[1] Jesus, the beloved Son, does not hoard this experience for Himself. He invites and calls us to share the same intimate and liberating relationship.
The life of Jesus suggests that to be like Abba is to show compassion. Donald Gray expresses it like this: “Jesus reveals in an exceptionally human life what it is to live a divine life, a compassionate life.”[6]
Author Stephen Covey recalled an incident while riding the New York City subway one Sunday morning. The few passengers aboard were reading the newspaper or dozing. It was a quiet, almost somnolent ride through the bowels of the Big Apple. Covey was engrossed in reading when a man accompanied by several small children boarded at the next stop. In less than a minute, bedlam erupted. The kids ran up and down the aisle shouting, screaming, and wrestling with one another on the floor. Their father made no attempt to intervene. The elderly passengers shifted nervously. Stress became distress. Covey
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Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.
command of Jesus to love one another is never circumscribed by the nationality, status, ethnic background, sexual preference, or inherent lovableness of the “other.” The other, the one who has a claim on my love, is anyone to whom I am able to respond, as the parable of the Good Samaritan clearly illustrates. “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the man who fell in with the robbers?” Jesus asked. The answer came, “The one who treated him with compassion.” He said to them, “Go and do the same.”
This insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dominant perspective of almost all of Jesus’ teaching.
What makes the kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions. Jesus, the human Face of God, invites us to deep reflection on the nature of true discipleship and the radical lifestyle of Abba’s child.
The Sabbath was a day of rigorous honesty and careful contemplation, a day of taking stock, examining the direction of life, and rooting oneself anew in God. The Jew on the Sabbath learned to pray, “Our hearts are restless all week, until today they rest again in Thee.” As a memorial of creation, the Jewish Sabbath foreshadowed the Sunday of the New Testament—the memorial of our re-creation in Christ Jesus.
Paradoxically, what intrudes between God and human beings is our fastidious morality and pseudopiety. It is not the prostitutes and tax collectors who find it most difficult to repent: It is the devout who feel they have no need to repent, secure in not having broken rules on the Sabbath.
Jesus did not die at the hands of muggers, rapists, or thugs. He fell into the well-scrubbed hands of deeply religious people, society’s most respected members.
In the competitive game of one-upmanship, the disciples are driven by the need to be important and significant. They want to be somebody. According to John Shea, “Every time this ambition surfaces, Jesus places a child in their midst or talks about a child.”[13]
Unless we reclaim our child, we will have no inner sense of self, and gradually the impostor becomes who we really think we are. Both psychologists and spiritual writers emphasize the importance of getting to know the inner child as best we can and embracing him or her as a lovable and precious part of ourselves.
Consider Frederick Buechner’s words: We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us—not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children,
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No thought can contain Him; no word can express Him. He is beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine.
People do well to be skeptical of beliefs not anchored in present experience.”[2]
In other words, the Resurrection needs to be experienced as present risenness. If we take seriously the word of the risen Christ
The paltriness of our lives is largely due to our fascination with the trinkets and trophies of the unreal world that is passing away. Sex, drugs, booze . . . the pursuit of money, pleasure, and power . . . even a little religion—all suppress the awareness of present risenness.
Once I related the story of an old man dying of cancer.[9] The old man’s daughter had asked the local priest to come and pray with her father. When the priest arrived, he found the man lying in bed with his head propped up on two pillows and an empty chair beside his bed. The priest assumed that the old fellow had been informed of his visit. “I guess you were expecting me,” he said. “No, who are you?” “I’m the new associate at your parish,” the priest replied. “When I saw the empty chair, I figured you knew I was going to show up.” “Oh yeah, the chair,” said the bedridden man. “Would you mind
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These biblical characters, however clean or tawdry their personal histories may have been, are not paralyzed by the past in their present response to Jesus. Tossing aside self-consciousness, they ran, clung, jumped, and raced to Him. Peter denied Him and deserted Him, but he was not afraid of Him.
own my unique self in a world filled with voices contrary to the gospel requires enormous fortitude.
One of the keys to real religious experience is the shattering realization that no matter how hateful we are to ourselves, we are not hateful to God. This realization helps us to understand the difference between our love and His. Our love is a need, His a gift. — THOMAS MERTON, THE NEW MAN
Our obsession with privacy is rooted in the fear of rejection. If we sense nonacceptance, we cannot lay down the burden of sin; we can only shift the heavy suitcase from one hand to the other. Likewise, we can only lay bare our sinful hearts when we are certain of receiving forgiveness.
In the Abba experience, we prodigals, no matter how bedraggled, beat up, or burnt out, are overcome by a Paternal fondness of such depth and tenderness that it beggars speech.
An old anecdote is told about a farm boy whose one skill was finding lost donkeys. When asked how he did this, he answered, “I just figured out where I would go if I were a jackass, and there it was.” Turning this in a more positive direction, listening to the Rabbi’s heartbeat, the disciple hears where Jesus would be in any given situation, and there He is.
The Rabbi in whom infinity dwells asks if we care about Him. The Jesus who died a bloody, God-forsaken death that we might live, is asking if we love Him!
