hearts set on pilgrimage
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
 
"You Might As Well Face It You're Addicted To... guilt?"

I was channel-surfing last night and stumbled upon Joyce Meyer. She's a christian teacher that Helen has gotten a lot of good from, so I'm willing to listen.... Did you ever have a time when someone says something, and it just goes right in, like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. And suddenly you can see the whole picture for the first time.

I got a glimpse of that last night.

She talked about being "addicted to guilt". She oriented in life around her shortcomings and flaws. If there was a problem, it was because she did something wrong or didn't do something right. It was her "comfort zone", and had some payoffs for her. But it also caused her great suffering, and made her unable to find deep, lasting peace in God.

As she was talking, I suddenly had one of those glimpses into a different way of being, a peaceful existence free from blaming myself for problems, free from striving to always do better, free from constant self-improvement. It was like a brief vision of a promised land.

That vision was so blissful, so attractive, that I thought perhaps I'm addicted to guilt, too. If I take a drink of water and find it is an extraordinarily blissful experience, perhaps I was very thirsty.

I have never thought of myself as a guilt-stricken person. But I am very oriented around personal responsibility, I often find myself striving to "be better", and I often interpret problems in my life and the lives of others as character issues, sin issues. I'm relentlessly self-improving. I get burnt out with normal life. I relish approval from others. I suffer when criticized.

Now that I'm thinking about it, that sounds like a case of performance orientation.

Eugene Petersen in an interview with Christianity Today recently said that Jesus taught that the most important question in the Christian life is not "What?" or "Why?", but "How?". Jesus is very interested in "how" we live our lives.

Even if I do all the "right" things: go to church, read the Bible, pray, give to charity, help others, raise my children, be faithful to my wife, provide for my family, vote regularly, obey the Ten Commandments, etc. Jesus asks me how I do it: peacefully, faithfully, depending on God, receiving His grace, moved by His Spirit, compassionately? Remember the widow's mite? It wasn't how much she gave, but that she gave wholeheartedly, faithfully. It's the adverbs that matter in Jesus's language.

And this is not just another dimension of performance. I've heard it preached that Jesus raised the bar of performance in His sermon on the mount. He took the Ten Commandments and internalized them, made them impossible to measure, and impossible to meet to anyone who was not God. I don't think Jesus was trying to break us, I think He was trying to break the Way of The Law, the path of performance. By making it impossible for me, I'm reduced to relying on mercy and grace.

Even before the Sermon on the Mount, I wasn't keeping the commandments, but I was fooling myself. And I fool myself still, when I look at my performance as the relevant assessment. Jesus is still asking me, "How? With love? compassion? Trusting Me? With peace?"

And Jesus is not challenging me to better performance with this question of "How?". He is calling me to give up the striving, give up the thinking and doing that blinded the rich young ruler to his addiction to his high position and the trappings that went with it: his performance. He is calling me to repentence, redemption, restoration, trust in Him, and blissfully: peace. I am thirsty for peace.

Now I've got some difficulties in my life, and I'm getting burnt out on trying to solve them myself, even to solve them through prayer (because its based on my prayer performance, not God's goodness). I don't think I should stop taking effective action to handle my concerns (the "What?"). I'll keep working, I'll keep praying, but not because "its the right thing to do, and I have to do the right thing or else it won't work and it'll be my fault and I've got to do it right..." But because God has peace for me, He wants to bless me, and it is peaceful to be yoked together with Him: working His garden, being a blessing to others.

Because that is the Kingdom life to which He has called me: being right with God, being at peace, and full of joy.
 
Psalm 65 in The Message is so beautiful to me. It works its way from intimate praise, to redemption of His people, around to a Creator of a glorious world and back again to praise--not intimate this time but all-creation praise. He speaks of Creation's fertility, its life-giving abundance: rain-sodden, tilled earth; golden wheat fields; sheep "dress[ing] the canyon walls". Ah, it’s like a beautiful landscape painting. I wonder how many landscape paintings were inspired by Psalm 65.

I guess if I can look at the beauty in the world and wonder at the glory of God, people can look at the evil and wonder if there is a God. In a sense they cancel each other out, in terms of "proving God exists". It seems to me that in each case, the assumption is already made, at least speculatively, whether God exists or not.

Take it a step further: beauty moves me to think there's something Good, something great and glorious enough to create everything and make me able to appreciate it. But physical ugliness doesn't make me feel like there is something Evil, with great power to cause suffering. It's the suffering I look at and discern Evil. There is definitely an asymmetry to the whole Good/Evil thing.

I don't pretend this is rational evidence of God. But that's not the only evidence we humans use.

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