If God's singleminded desire for us is that we experience the fullness of life, our spiritual journey becomes one of purification. God, in his mercy and love, working at removing those obstacles in our lives that are getting in the way of us experiencing the fullness of life. The primary obstacle is our ego, that persona that has developed to counter the emotional pain of our journey through the imperfect world of our growing up years. 

The ego doesn't surrender willingly. it has to undergo a process of humiliation as its stranglehold on our beings is released. By its very nature, this purification process is uncomfortable and painful at times, a process that is willed by God in his great love for us.

Understanding how God works in our lives is not always easy to discern. What we think is God's action in our lives can sometimes be more the desires of our ego, with its agenda that makes it constantly on the lookout for circumstances and experiences that are fulfilling for us, self-serving in some way.

The ego is averse to discomfort. The ego came to be in our lives as the persona that was going to rescue us from emotional pain as a child. Now as adults, it continues to want to convince us that emotional discomfort and pain are bad, to be avoided at all costs even to the extent of asking God to collude with our ego and shape our lives and circumstances so that there is an absence of inner turmoil.

Of course, God does not want us to suffer unnecessarily. But given our human condition, and its fallen nature, there is an aspect of our suffering that is inevitable, particularly when it comes to emotional pain.   

Monday, 27 June 2016

If Jesus manifested his love and goodness by healing people during his earthly life, I can't not believe that he would not continue healing work for us today. We can open ourselves to His healing in terms of our emotionality. However, us surrendering and being open to that healing process is our necessary co-operation with his healing hand. We surrender to the healing process, different from trying to control it. Emotional healing is very much a letting go process. The initial letting go is consenting to God's healing action in our lives, even though the healing is not always a pretty picture. Invariably, it constitutes growing pains and surrendering particular ways of seeing ourselves, others and God.    

Can we weave this statement into our inner being:

"God regards me. God values me. God finds me acceptable even in my growing awareness of my brokenness, weakness, my inability to overcome my flaws and even my lack of faith. I can take off all my masks, let others know my truth, and even if they struggle to accept me in my truth, I can go towards the ultimate truth and that is that God loves me unconditionally." 

We want to have a renewed attitude to our emotionality. While we want to be free from the inhibiting dictates of our emotions, we first have to go towards them. It requires us working with them, not disowning or fearing them. We want our afflictive emotions to be healed by God, rather than us just "eliminating" them through repressive means

Getting in touch with our feelings can be difficult at first. We may feel overwhelmed at times. We may also feel confused about the array of feelings and conflicting emotions that we begin to experience. Sometimes we may even feel worse before we feel better. The important thing is to feel. 

Our attitude towards our emotions is pivotal in the context of preparing the way for God's deeper healing of us. A healthy attitude towards our emotions is marked by a truthfulness, and an acknowledgement of them. Can we accept their existence? Can we begin to name them? Can we make friends with our emotions rather than view them as this nuisance value in our lives?

It is simply not true that we need to feel shameful about any part of our wounded, broken selves, whether it be our vulnerability, our needs or particular emotions that we have, over time, learned to experience as shameful. God asks us to let go of any distorted, non-loving attitude toward ourselves. Paul (Romans 5:20) encourages us to contextualise our weakness in our faith, and regard our growing awareness of them as an opportunity to experience God's grace and power in our lives.    

Whenever we buy into our shame, and respond in daily life in ways that give the impression that we indeed believe ourselves to be shameful, the shame that we carry is reinforced and exacerbated. Identifying the shame, acknowledging and accepting its presence in our life at this juncture in our growth is necessary. However, being controlled by it as though it were the truth about us hampers our healing process.  

It is possible that as we remind ourselves of the truth (that we are not shameful beings), and experience the release of the stranglehold that shame has had on us, it will be accompanied by tears of sadness. This experience of an outpouring of sadness can be triggered by someone, or an experience, reminding us of our goodness. It is worthwhile staying with that emotion. It is a moment of truth: "It is truly sad that I have been carrying shame for so many years."

The ultimate truth is that regardless of what we have done or not done, intentionally or unintentionally, we are unconditionally loved by God. The presence of shame distorts this fundamental truth.

We can't wait until we are perfect before we give ourselves permission to let go of the last drops of shame that infect us. We need to work with God towards its healing. If one of the healthy attitudes towards all our other emotions is that we feel our feelings, stay with them at times, or be in our emotions, shame is an exception to this. It is of no help to allow the experience of shame to linger for any length of time. A healthy amount of self-talk is necessary at these times reminding us of the truth.  

An obstacle that stands in the way of God's grace reaching our shame is pride: "I pride myself on presenting as altogether, without weakness or vulnerability. I am overly invested in my presenting self, my ego. I am ashamed of my brokenness and imperfection, and experience a deep sense of shame when others become aware of its manifestations." 

Can we take our shame to God, knowing and believing that his healing extends to our shame, rather than us revert back to keeping it at bay by continuing with our co-dependent ways of being, seldom being true to ourselves, but opting for keeping others happy? 

Shame is an emotion that has infiltrated our inner being and is now unwelcome in its falsehood. It is not true that we are shameful. I can't imagine the God that I have got to know uttering the words, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." Yes, sadly, people say these words to one another. We can be quite adept at shaming one another, but let's not project that onto God. God does not want us to carry shame. It is His desire to heal our shame. He wants us to let it go. 

As we move towards a loving self-acceptance, and endeavour to be more authentically "me" (the person that God created me to be, not the adaptive, accommodating me), the presence of shame will resist this process. Shame can become so entwined in the very fabric of who we are that being free of it can feel like an impossible task. Much of our adaptive patterns of behaviour have come to be as a way of keeping our shame at bay and preventing others from knowing the shame that we experience about ourselves. Being different, changing our ways of relating, and experiencing the accompany feeling of shame at times, is a difficult part of the initial movements towards self.  

Shame

One of the primary obstacles to a healthy loving attitude to self and a growth in self-love is the presence of shame within us. Shame is that emotion that comes to be when, in our formative years, our true self, with all its natural emotions and needs, met with disapproval, criticism and rejection. Shame is the inner response of the child to the experience of emotional abandonment (that is, significant others withdrawing or detaching from us when they don't like aspects of our true selves).The child internalises the experience of disapproval and abandonment as a comment on himself. He experiences himself as not good enough to be regarded unconditionally. His potential experience of his basic goodness is replaced by the experience of shame toward self.

Loving ourselves in our brokenness

Our personal healing is characterised by a diminishing of the dominance of the the false self (the ego), and an increased consciousness of the true self. We become more aware of our blind spots and dare to allow others to know us more. 

As growth and healing occurs over time, the love emanating from the true self flows into our whole being. We love and regard ourselves and all that we have been in our efforts to live a good Christian life, as well as our past patterns of relating that were governed by a mistrust as to whether others (and God) would accept us in our brokenness. We also love and accept ourselves as our blind spots are revealed to us. We love and regard the increased consciousness of the emerging self in its woundedness and concomitant emotions, as well as its beauty. 

Radical Self-acceptance

The growth and healing process is characterised by our becoming more acquainted with ourselves, growing in self-knowledge and awareness of our inner world: "Can I lovingly accept that person that I begin to know more intimately; the 'me' that has been trying his best to lead a good life, but whose woundedness has brought about behavioural habits that, try as I will, I have not been able to eradicate by my efforts alone? Not only is there a need for an acceptance of whom I have been up until this point in my life, but also for an acceptance of what now emerges from within - aspects of myself that now become conscious to me."

The journey takes us into the unfamiliar and the unknown, the experience of dispositions and emotional states that we might have never known before. For example, we will experience a vulnerability that can bring about intense feelings for fear at times. In all this, can we begin each day renewing both our "yes" to God and to ourselves. 

This dynamic growth of faith and love cannot be plotted or set out step by step. It is a life journey fuelled by grace, with us, in an effort-filled way, co-operating and consenting to God's presence in our lives by consciously letting go of those aspects of ourselves that obstruct and resist the free flow of grace. This recursively linked spiral of growth is facilitated and enhanced by a loving attitude towards ourselves. It is indeed an indispensable aspect of the spiritual journey. 

Over time, given our perseverance on our faith journey, we will begin to notice that our attitude towards, and perception of, ourselves begins to change. We begin to relate to ourselves in a way that Paul (1Cor 13: 4-7) describes as love. Why would this not be so? Our loving attitude towards ourselves grows. In experiencing an increasing sense of our own worthiness, there is less of a tendency to be jealous, conceited or proud. Ironically, we are less irritable with ourselves and our shortcomings even though, in our increasing self-awareness, our imperfections seem to be more and more apparent to us! We no longer keep a record of our wrongs, but are accepting of the growing awareness of the truth of who we are - a child of God, born in his image and likeness. We no longer give up on ourselves. We keep on hoping in God's ongoing healing in our lives. There is an ongoing growth in our confidence in God's loving mercy.    

The interplay between faith and actions is well described in the Letter from James (James 2:14 - 24) as well as in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13:1 - 13). Both writers emphasize that the proclamation of faith is meaningless unless it is accompanied by loving action. Our loving action is the ongoing manifestation of a living-out of our conversion or "Yes" to God. Indeed, the growth in our faith is recursively linked to the quality of our love - the more our faith grows, the greater the quality of our love; the ever-increasing quality of our love, the ever-deepening growth in our faith.

The changing quality of our love, though most readily understood as extending towards others, needs to be experienced towards ourselves too.

Growing as "lovers"

As I work with Christian folk in my practice, I pick up an overriding theme - "I want my behaviour to be more in keeping the values that I profess. I know how I want to be, how I want to relate to others, but I keep on falling back to old habits which seem to undermine my efforts." 

Isn't this the story for all of us? We sincerely go forward, desiring to be that good person that we believe we can be, but the reality of our daily life is that we keep on failing; keep on falling short of the "standard" that we set for ourselves. 

Acknowledging  this pattern, possibly in much the same way as Paul recognised it in his own life when he said, "I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate......Instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want." (Romans 7:15, 19)

Shedding light on this human condition of ours can be a helpful movement toward self-understanding rather than exacerbating our normal inner tension by relating to ourselves in negative, harsh ways.