Self-image, living, loving and God

I don’t like "Amazing Grace". I like the melody, but I don’t like things that tell me that we’re all wretched and that we’re not worthy of God’s grace. That stuff is old. It doesn’t work anymore. Any time you think you’re a wretched person, you put yourself a serious distance between you and your creator. Any time you say, "I am made out of the same light," your creator can work with you a lot faster, a lot more immediate, and a lot more productive and constructive.
Carlos Santana

I'm writing this to myself, but you can read it anyway. To put it mildly, I grew up in a soup of prescribed self-loathing. It was weird. Charismatic, attention-getting speakers, musicians and writers, and quirkily charming, confident old people all saying "Self is the enemy. Don't love yourself, don't serve yourself. If you saw yourself clearly, you'd realize what a wretched, sinful person you are. Take a good look at yourself and learn this lesson and then fixate upon it for the rest of your days on Earth, or better yet, just take my word for it and then do that. It's how we please God, and what could be better than pleasing God?" (The Gospel, according to them, was that we need to keep our wills and attentions focussed upon how wretched and undeserving of God's grace in not sending us to hell we are.) Thing is, it became us trying to turn our wills selfward in an effort to triumph over self-focussed narcissism. That doesn't work. And being occupied with how "wretched" or potentially sinful you are isn't healthy or spiritually advisable. It may be a cue to give up on certain paths, but in itself, it clearly isn't a path that goes anywhere.

Although one can always cherry-pick verses of scripture, the general message of Paul, of Jesus, of the rest, is not a focus on how wretched we are, and on remembering to always remember that. God doesn't need us to view ourselves as wretched in order for Him to look good and be properly honoured. God is not honoured in His work being judged wretched when compared to Him. He is honoured by His work being seen to be excellent, somehow, even though His work is us and we tend to fuck up, as the manner of children is. The path to wisdom is God-focussed, rather than merely un-self-focussed. We enter into it, of course, inasmuch as we get to touch God, to be touched by Him, to see Him and be seen by Him. He touches us through Life, and through Love.

Prayer and the scriptures aren't the whole story. Life enters into it too (that is an understatement). We often make prayer and the scriptures all about us. We make prayer about confessions and petitions and we make the scriptures about virtues we are going to try to imitate the outer forms of, or at the very least, about vices we will strive not to be seen to appear to be indulging. There are the fleetingly cast shadows of actual human lives in there, y'know? Offhandedly mentioned life-long romances ("and she became his wife; and he loved her"). Stunningly understated deaths ("and he died").

What do you have to do to be transported outside the dreary, empty, onerous world of merely feeding, dressing and amusing yourself? People have tried everything, from fasting, to meditation, to the reading of holy scriptures, to entheogens (substances taken to see the face of God). Here is what I recommend as a prescription for seeing the face of God: He made the world, time, reality, people, matter, nature, and the complex lines of potential conflicts, comings together and interactions between all of it. Take a big dose of all that. You're in the middle of it.

Never go away alone and shut it all out, in the name of achieving greater spirituality, unless it is to be apart for a short time and get yourself together (self-focussed self-exploration) with the intention to return and fully engage with all of it. Think of what a dead person doesn't (isn't able) to do, and then do that stuff. Live. Love. Look for opportunities to do those, and do them fully and deeply and well. Accept no substitute for either. Satan knows there is no shortage of those. Let the written words and acted conversation of the people on the TV and movie screen touch you and always see them for what they actually are: the work and art of other human beings and what they care about, dream and imagine. Reach for the deepest, highest, truest, newest dreams and imaginings. Have your own conversations and interactions too. Have your own dreams and imaginings. You're on earth, in this time and place, in this reality, so BE here.

You can't develop formulas for wisdom and depth, for spiritual exploration and success. It flows from God and it is living stuff. It's not a deal. We don't agree to set aside self-focus, and then it all just floods in. It's grace. Grace is God giving you stuff because it's good stuff and He likes you. It isn't God finally being able (or finally wanting) to bless because you have obeyed. Even when we disobey, there is grace. Disobeying isn't good, obviously, but the scriptures give us very little to obey, and lead us into questions more than answers. Questions which we have to get to know God personally, if we wish to get any kind of answers regarding.

None of us is worthy of God's grace. This is, technically, true of course. It is also true and more relevant to say that grace isn't about deserving or being worthy anyway. Whenever grace, patronage, forgiveness or generosity are seen, they flow from the heart of a person, for that person's own reasons, and have nothing to do with earning, deserving or owing. None of us is "worthy" or "unworthy" of good stuff from any other of us. Sometimes we agree to exchange goods for services, or wages for work, but that's just a contract. It's a separate and lower thing than charity, a more petty thing no matter how much power or time, people or money is involved, than an actual inner drive to give something to someone, just 'cause.

We are here to live and to love, not just to trust and obey. That's very hard for some of us, because we grew up to adulthood and no one ever told us that this was alright, let alone that it was what we're here to do. A few people, by example and by their hearts being active while they lived their days around us, sent out that glorious dissenting message: you are here to be part of the living and the loving. They lived like no one had to remind them to, and it sent a message. It felt like a mythic horn sounding through the mist that lay upon distant verdant hills too far from here for us to ever contemplate visiting. So, many of us just sat very quietly as we'd been told to do, meditated upon the image of our own wretchedness and embraced a subtle, self-inflicted semblance of death, while the dust slowly settled upon us. And we hoped God was happy with it. It was the sort of thing He likes, right? The only way to please Him besides telling others to be like us?

God is transcendently excellent. He doesn't need us to make Him look good. Sharing anything that is of His light, His love, His excellence with others (sharing the actual thing, the experience of it, rather than describing or promising it) is a wonderful, loving act. It isn't a duty. When love is a factor, the word "duty" becomes inappropriate. In fact, it ruins things. In some technical, literal way, someone who loves someone else may "obey" or "honour" or "fulfil duty" to him, but that's not what it's like inside. Someone who loves someone else would not reach for those words when talking about the relationship between the two, the dealings.

When I hold in my hands the life and warmth that is in my newborn nephew, and we sit in the awareness of each other, I am not obeying anyone, serving anyone, nor fulfilling duty. Questions of worthiness and wretchedness, helplessness and strength simply do not enter in. It is primarily an experience and we don't judge those nor dissect them, if we know what we're doing. It is the only way I know what the word "holy" means. Despite what a biologist might say, I am not primarily or merely obeying a biological imperative to "protect the young of the tribe." I'm also not helping my sister out, nor gracing my nephew with my presence. It's about life and love, and they are deeper and higher and beyond that. This is not something to prove. It is something to experience. It is real and it is also true.

Fragments and potential instances of life and love lie in glowing, amorphous pieces scattered throughout the world where God has sown them, calling out warmly to each other, looking to touch and reconnect, to taste and grow, to reunite and catch up on time apart, to be enlarged by one another, to get their collective groove on. Get in on it.