T
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he aged patriarchs of
the church in my area were three Hayhoe brothers, and the kind of teaching, the
focus of the teaching, was very
uniform between them, and was the bedrock we young Brethren plants were expected
to grow in.
The
central preoccupation of much of their teaching was “self” and how bad it was. The Christian life presented by them was a
simple dichotomy: either follow self-will, doing what you thought was a good idea, what you wanted, what seemed to work out for you and make sense, or else to do what God wanted, which we could depended upon to always and only be the opposite of that.
These
guys would go on and on about how self wants to sin, and so we must never, ever
follow self. About how we had no greater
enemy than self. About how, if we wanted
to be happy, we had to put self in the place of death. About how we had a formula in scripture, they
taught, for joy. J-O-Y. Jesus
first. Others next. Yourself last. But they weren’t really teaching that there
was any room in your life for enjoying yourself at all. It wasn’t last so much as “never.” I know people raised under this who can’t
just enjoy a piece of raspberry cheesecake. They have to make it themselves and
give it to someone else, before they can properly feel good about the
experience.
The
scripture assumes that we love ourselves.
Husbands are told to love their wives as they love their own bodies, and
the summation of the law, Jesus taught, was loving your neighbor the way you
loved yourself. Now, for those of us who
were raised to unthinkingly, uncontrollably loathe and doubt ourselves, neither
of these two verses make any sense at all anymore, due purely to the unnatural thing that
had happened to us.
I
have come to believe, years later, that there really was a great capacity for these
mustached little Hayhoe men of Hugenot French descent to have been
arrogant. To have run everything. To have gone around thoughtlessly,
reflexively dismissing anything that didn’t sound like what they thought and felt. I think that’s the kind of thing they were
vainly combating with all of these “sermons against self.”
The
fact is, they did run
everything. Inarguably. The fact is, any and all thoughts that
weren’t theirs got thoughtlessly,
reflexively[1] dismissed. They were pretty nice, but that still
happened, especially toward the end of their lives. For one thing, their personalities, their
willpower, their passion, could not
be denied, and most people[2]
didn’t feel nearly as passionately about much of anything church-related as
they did. So things always seemed to go
their way. They never got told “no” and
had to wear that.
The
point is, many of us grew up hating
our selves. Ourselves. Self-loathing was what we gleaned from these
sermons. Self-doubt. Where these men were at church demanding that
we not follow self-will, and not indulge a self that probably would want to
spend Sunday morning in bed, snoring with its face pressed into a triple-decker
chocolate cake, all shot up with heroin between its toes, this wasn’t the
battle that some of us were really
fighting.
Some
of us were fighting to get out of bed at all, even to eat Cheerios and go to
church to hear them. Some of us not only
didn’t rely on, depend upon or trust in self, we actually knew that we hated ourselves, and would not even be
able to put our two feet on the floor to get out of our bed. Because we knew
deep down that we weren’t worth it, weren’t worthy.
It
would be nice to think I was the only one with this problem, or that this
doesn’t go on today. But this just isn’t
true.
The
scripture doesn’t teach the old “God vs. Self” dichotomy. It draws that line between “Spirit” and “flesh.” We can be the meatbag we are, which needs to
overcome the problems we became aware of in Paradise, and which made it no
longer paradisial to us (more on that shortly), or we can look God-ward to be
enlightened, taught and inspire, and made more mature and spiritual.
We
were taught how bad the fruits of the flesh listed in Galatians 5 were. But we skipped some. We were raised in fear of selfishly demonstrating
fruits of the unedified flesh, such as fornication[1], uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, murders, drunkennesses, revels, and things like these. How worldly!
Partying and having sex and listening to heavy metal albums with devil
imagery on the cover!
But we skipped rather lightly over the fruits of the flesh that
caused every one of our church squabbles.
We never seemed to be able to gather for any five year period without
being asked to support one group of people and condemn another group of people,
all of whom were quite clearly very equally selfishly demonstrating the fruits
of the flesh missing from our list: hatred, strifes, jealousies, angers,
contentions, disputes, schools of opinion and envying.
And have a look at the fruit of the Spirit, by contrast: love, joy,
peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, fidelity, meekness and self-control. In order for this fruit to be seen at all, there
has to first be a “self” to control when it gets out of hand, and a self which is
allowed to love, feel joy and peace, be long-suffering, feel and act in
kindness, be good, be faithful and meek when it is inspired to do so.
We were being taught to simply not be our self, rather than to look
to God to transform us inwardly so that being our self meant being
Christian. “Christian” does not mean simply “not being yourself.” It means being a self that is becoming ever
more like Christ.
[1] We were
taught that this Greek word pornoiea meant simple “sex outside of a legal
marriage,” thought it is doubtful this is the full, or even intended meaning of
it.
The
good news now is that, despite my upbringing, I can no longer think of God as
“me backwards,” wanting merely the opposite of each thing as I want it. I can’t think this way without feeling
silly. I still feel it sometimes, but I
feel silly when I do. I guess I learned
that God is so much higher and deeper and broader and more ancient, complicated
and mysterious than I, that any bringing to the table, so to speak, my own
concerns, interests and desires is a complicated and odd negotiation. But one
He insists upon having.
The idea that God made me to be a specific
kind of tool in His Toolbox, as it were, and that I needed to resist the
attempts of others, and their bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all systems, to make
me uniform and typical, was new.
Once
I laid aside the ambition of sacrificing my self and being some kind of proper,
typical, “fitting the mold” church Christian, once I realized that resolving to
be “normal/typical” was foolish and was doing real damage to me, it was very
freeing. Also very responsible.
I
was free to be the self, the myself,
God intends, but this also meant I had to toss out the old maps and instruction
manuals which referred to entirely the wrong continents and centuries, and had
to work with God more directly. Now,
when people don’t understand me, because I’m different, I can neither claim to
understand exactly who and what I’m becoming and where I’m headed, nor can I
claim to understand why they are pretending to be all the same when they’re
clearly not.
Paradise
In Eden, the man and
his woman were completely naked, and weren’t able to even be aware of this. They were completely unselfconscious. Once they tried to better themselves without
God’s Hand being part of it (no doubt He intended a slower entry into
self-awareness than the short, sharp shock that sinning and following the
advice of the serpent brought them), this all changed. They knew good and evil. It wasn’t just that they “had a conscience
that knew right from wrong.” It was
better and worse than that. They didn’t
just know that they’d done something wrong.
It wasn’t just about their actions, but about who and what they
were. They knew that God was good and
the serpent was evil. They knew that
they weren’t good, and they felt
horrible about that. They wanted to hide and blame others. Their first-born son would go on to murderehis
brother due to those same feelings of not being good enough. Rejection became a
universal human experience.
When
God came to talk to them, instead of just doing that, they realized that He was
good and they weren’t. And they felt as
naked as they were. Exposed. They feared rejection, and it was coming. From themselves first, and their lover next
and finally, God Himself. Every
personality, cognitive, emotional, spiritual and physical lack they possessed
or developed would now be something they’d all know, and keenly feel. And they’d feel the others knowing too. And their standard for “good” was God created,
and was up to His own standard.
It’s
been said “hell is other people.” I
think that these two proto-people, having taken paradise for granted, as it was
“normal” for them, experienced a kind of hell, then. For them, hell was knowing what good and evil
were, and seeing with terrible clarity their own position teetering between the
two, with no ability to attain good on their own, and the very real risk of
falling utterly to evil, just by continuing to live the way they’d been. Hell was knowing themselves. Being self-aware. The thing God hadn’t wanted for them, at
least at that point in time. A thing God
gave no other animal either. A thing
animals do not have to this day.
God
had made a paradise for human beings.
Paradise wasn’t being perfect, spiritual enlightened, deep and masters
of empathy. It was not worrying about the fact that you weren’t.
In
the New Testament, there is occasional reference made to self-judgment, or
self-examination, but there is no encouragement or commandment given to
Christians for self-doubt and self-loathing.
Because those things aren’t good, and we know that.
I
remember being an older teen and young adult and feeling painfully aware of my
own imperfection, my own stupidity, weakness, frailty, folly and generally lack
of deserving acceptance, love or anything nice ever. Where did that come from? Adam in the garden? My family?
My church? Society? The media?
I’m thinking maybe all of the above.
And it wasn’t good.
And
I wasn’t a pretty young woman, so I didn’t get the compliments that people from
that special subsection of humanity often get, and miss keenly when they are
older. Even so, sometimes people got
sick of how much self-loathing and doubt they saw in me, and they tried giving
me measured, strongly worded doses of compliments/reality. They would list my
strengths or accomplishments for me. And
it would roll right off me like water off a duck’s back. It didn’t work. Not even a bit.
For
one thing, my father was never going to convince me that I wasn’t a big
disappointment, and just plain weird and beyond his ability to predict or
understand the motives of. Ditto my
mother. Same thing my church. Same thing what peers I had.
Most
importantly, though, there was me. I was never going to let myself off the
hook. If every single one of these other
core entities in my life had told me in no uncertain terms that they accepted
me unreservedly, deeply appreciated a number of my abilities and interests, and
that they predicted great things for me, and wouldn’t change a thing about me, it
is possible that I might have been moved to contemplate believing them.
But
probably, I would have, in this very imaginary scenario, have done the far easier
thing. The thing that wouldn’t have required any personal growth: I would have
decided that they didn’t know, and
were all wrong, and would certainly cast me out into the streets if they knew
me the way I did. I’d decide I was the
only one who was right about my wrongness.
So
what “cured” me of self-loathing and crippling, hellish
self-consciousness? What made me
self-confident? That didn’t exactly ever
happen, I suppose. But here’s what did:
I
got skinny and my sister continued to call me fat. I got friends and my father and sister
continued to tell me the reason I had no friends was because I had such a
problematic personality and no social skills.
I got a university degree and my sister still called me stupid. I started drinking alcohol in moderation, never
indulging in excess, and my church started to treat me like the town
drunk. I was kind to teenage boys who
wanted to talk about playing guitar, or who had problems at home, and people
from my church told others that I was gay/a pedophile. I was a sounding-board/confidante to any
number of troubled young women and wives, and people spread false rumours about
me taking advantage of them and breaking up their marriages. I decided to follow God instead of just being
religious, and my church forbid young folk talking to me, called me a wicked
person, affixed bible verses to me lumping me in with adulterers, rapists,
thieves and drunkards, and banned me from all church activities, refusing even
to eat in any room I was eating in, no matter if the event was a wedding, a
funeral or job-related.
And
it wasn’t just me. They did that kind of stuff to literally hundreds of people,
many of whom have gone on to be valued members of their (new) churches
elsewhere.
So I
didn’t learn that I was okay, exactly. I
learned that other people didn’t know a thing
about me or who God wanted and had designed me to be. I learned that they’d say pretty much anything.
I’d
like to say that now, when someone says something judgmental, unfair or untrue
about me, I don’t feel it much. I can’t really say that, but I think it’s safe
to say that I’ve learned the difference between being paralyzed and tortured by
self-doubt and self-loathing, and doing
stuff.
And
I noticed something weird, too. I
noticed that, listing off the huge number of accusations I’d collected, to
clutch warmly to my bosom on cold winter nights for the rest of my days, almost
every time anyone ever accused me of
anything at all (ever), it was either something they were afraid they
themselves were guilty of, or it was something of which they were apparently
the only person left on earth still unaware that they actually were guilty.
I
think that’s why people even have an interest in these judgments to begin
with. There is a personal connection to
them. I only get told I talk too much by
people who want to talk too much. It
works for all my other vices as well.
So I
don’t feel like nowadays I’m wonderfully, deeply aware of my own virtues and
strengths. Nope. But I’ve gotten used to doing stuff without endless stomach-churning doubt beforehand and
afterward.
And
there are any number of things that I’ve done before, so I can just say “I’ll
do that again.” Can I sing for a street
full of people at a festival? I’ve done
that a bunch of times, so I can just say “I guess I’ll go do that again.” Can I do it?
I’ve done it. It’s not a
theoretical discussion anymore.
This
gives something one could almost call confidence, though the act is seldom
without a crippling rush of unhelpful, potentially bladder-loosening
adrenaline. Whatever panic, shame, doubt
or self-loathing I may bring to acts of this kind, I have decades of practice just doing it anyway, continuing “through”
them, without them disrupting anything much.
And
when I really start doing well? It’s not
so much that I can feel the “well” so much as I lose all track of myself and
being someone who can panic, doubt or any of that. I forget where I am, who I am or what I’d
doing entirely. And swimming in that
moment when self-awareness gets ripped away by that powerful tide? Feels like maybe I got ripped away from it
all rather than it being ripped from me.
No self-consciousness. No
awareness of lacks. And it feels like
paradise.
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