BEING HUMAN

by Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B.

We love ourselves very much, don't we? None of us wants to be unhappy, so we do everything in our power to ensure our happiness. Since we can't be happy without thinking well of ourselves we resist facing our faults. If we love other people too, we love ourselves for being so generous to them. If we worship God it is because we think we should, and doing that makes us love ourselves even more.

So why do we hate ourselves so much? Why do we subvert our desire for happiness at every turn? Why do we think every compliment is mistaken and every detraction deserved, while at the same time craving compliments and nursing a grudge at every slight? Why do we expect other people to reject us and then act in such a way that they will? And why is our love for God so lukewarm that we have to flunk ourselves in spirituality?

Most moralists think that the trouble with human beings is that they are self-centered. I agree. But the strange thing about self-centeredness is that it doesn't make us think well of ourselves. Children should have high opinions of themselves if they are as naturally selfish as we think they are. But they don't. Most, perhaps all, adults carry scars from childhood because they grew up with the conviction that they were bad.

Let us not dismiss these thoughts as applying only to a few who suffered severe traumatic experiences as children. I have observed that even well- loved people are plagued by at least some doubt about their own adequacy and lovability as human beings. The mystery deepens when we reflect that even a child who is consistently supported and loved still grows up with some scars of self-hatred. There seems to be a weird mathematics of the human psyche where one bad experience outweighs ninety-nine good ones. The praise of parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends and teachers can be undone by one or two teachers or classmates who say a child is no good. So imagine the geometric progression of self-hatred in the child growing up with little or no love. Strangely enough, the more brutally a child is treated, the easier it is to make the child accept the blame.

As adults we still find it easier to listen to the one voice that says we are no good than to the ninety-nine voices that say we have value. Likewise, we find it easier to hear one voice that speaks badly of someone else than the many voices that speak well of that person. Is it not satisfying to learn that someone held in high esteem was not so good as we thought? But at the same time that we are disillusioned with the fallen great ones, we are disillusioned with ourselves for relishing the detraction.

Is it any wonder that we find it easier to hear God condemning us than to hear Him forgiving and loving us? We may accept the theological doctrine that God's creation is good but believe in our hearts we were created evil. We don't choose to feel this way about ourselves, but we do. This is the trap of original sin. We are caught in it against our will, and we willfully throw away the key every time it is offered us. The word "Satan" in the Bible means "Accuser," and it is this accusing voice that we hear inside us. But even when we know where the negative voice comes from, we believe it.

Here we need to pause and pick up the Christian notions of guilt and penance, which are often swept away in the name of healing our self-image. Believing that we are irrevocably bad can only cripple us psychologically and spiritually. But this is a very different thing from accepting responsibility for doing something wrong; one should feel guilty and repent for acting wrongly.

But before we can repent, we need a reasonably good self-image. That's the catch. As long as we suffer guilt for just existing, we cannot bear the pain of dealing with the specific things we have done wrong. Our consciences become warped. We blame ourselves for what we are and for what others have done to us and we lose the ability to accept responsibility for what we do. The result is that people can't bear to be told that they sing off-key or haven't done the dishes right, because such mild reproaches hook into this sense of essential wrongness. Worse, such a person expects to be exempt from being criticized for treating people badly because he has been hurt so much in life already and shouldn't be hurt any more by being forced to account for his behavior.

Even if we have not been pushed to such an extreme, I suspect we all experience the pain of self-doubt and inferiority which, paradoxically, keeps us from seeing clearly in what ways we really are inferior, to say nothing of the ways in which we are competent. Fyodor Dostoevsky could write a masterpiece like Crime and Punishment and yet be convinced he had spoiled a good idea for a book. This fundamental pain in our human experience tempts us to use spirituality as a means to get relief from our humanity rather than a transformation of it. In practice, if not in theory, we think that the only way to approach God is to tie up our humanity in a sack, throw the sack in the lake, and then come to God all pure and ready for Heaven. The trouble is, if we tried to get into the pearly gates without our humanity, there would be nobody standing at the gate for St. Peter to let in. We would have to go back and retrieve the sack we threw away. Not only that, the human experiences we try to throw away won't die. They stick to us as sticktights do when we try to flick them off our clothes. Either we learn to live with our experiences or they kill us.

We don't like pain. So it makes sense that if we can't fix the pain, we push it away from us, no matter how much that hurts us. Then we hate ourselves for letting the pain we pushed away continue to bother us. We all try to console each other by saying "Don't let that bother you." But when, in the history of all possible galaxies, has a person stopped being bothered by something by being convinced that it is not worth being bothered about? "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Try telling your feelings that!

Loving ourselves so much, we will do anything to keep from seeing the package of humanity that each one of us is. Afraid to look into the package, we hate ourselves for being so fearful. We assume that this package is a terrible monster ready to devour us. After all, we have paid most attention to the negative voices and packed the positive ones underneath them where we can't hear them. With our feelings safely locked away, we reach the point where we think we aren't letting our painful experiences bother us.

I have come to see the results of denying the pain of an experience in my life. I had a grade-school music teacher who had a compulsion to put her pupils down. One day she capitalized on my tendency to daydream by showing the class a magazine clipping of an Arab riding a magic carpet. Then she said it was a picture of me flying off to Dreamland -- a premeditated insult if there ever was one! For years I prided myself on not letting that insult bother me. But then I recalled that, in spite of developing a great interest in music later, I never learned the do-re-mi syllables, and I never learned as much as a note on a toy musical instrument that this teacher asked us to learn to play! This is how things that don't bother us haunt us anyway.

So let us try something else. Let us try to make friends with ourselves. Don't we find it easier to think well of somebody who thinks well of us? And yet, we cannot turn our self-judgments around at the snap of our fingers. Our problem all along has been assuming that we can fix ourselves. Aren't we expected to put our selves together as handily as we assemble the pieces of a table from an easy-to-assemble kit? We have already tried putting our pieces together, and they didn't fit. We have tried fixing our pain by building a doghouse to stuff it into. The "dog" doesn't like it; it breaks out, and we have to nail the pieces back together for a larger doghouse that gives us even less space to be ourselves. Speaking of nails, doesn't this get to be a case of nailing our Lord to His Cross all over again?

Making friends with these hurts is a different proposition. Trying to fix a friend is the best way to lose one; the point of being a friend is simply to be with another person, and be ready to listen. Trying to be a friend to some of our hurts is being like the princess who is asked to kiss a frog in the fairy tale. The ending of the tale does not let us forget how awful it is to kiss such a slimy thing. Well, maybe we can get by with coming close, and just putting an arm around the hurt. If the frog is too fearsome to approach, then we need first to make friends with that fear--treat it as a little slimy thing that needs attention. We aren't trying to break down our defense mechanisms; we are trying to persuade them to open their doors for us. When we are with our hurt, wait and see if this hurt has anything to say. We might be surprised with what we hear. We might be surprised when we end up seeing a prince who had been turned into a frog by some evil spell of our own making.

As with any attempt to make a friend, we are taking a plunge. We can't take such a plunge through faith in ourselves, because we don't have this faith and we can't be the object of such faith anyway. So in this plunge, we have to carry our humanity towards the voice that says: "Neither do I condemn you." We have to step into a new story about ourselves written by our Creator. In this new story, we will find the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine supporting voices and goes after the stray voice that drowns the others out. Our Lord Himself carries the pain and brings it back to us. But the pain is not the same as it was before. The Lord has been gently bearing this pain for us so that this very pain can, in turn, teach us to be gentle with it. It is as if a frightening monster has turned into a scared child in need of our help.

Now we can brighten the outlook by bringing in the good things that happen to us. We gain a new freedom to go back over those experiences that made us feel really good. These are the experiences that the hurts had drowned out. A simple example out of my own life can illustrate this point. I came out of a term at summer camp as a small child carrying the rejection of my fellowcampers and my counsellor. It is only after prayerfully making friends with the hurt that I can now remember and deeply appreciate a fellow camper who spent a whole afternoon picking raspberries with me, and just being nice to me.

Here we come to the heart of the Incarnation and its offense to us human beings. All along, we have tried to get rid of our humanity in the hope of getting on to something better. And God has played the joke of taking on the very humanity we didn't want. Not only that, He suffered the pain of every rejection there is. So how can we expect to find God except through our humanity and the pain of our rejections? It turns out that it is through accepting our humanity and the pain that it has brought us that we, in fact, do get on to something better--not something inhuman, where our earlier fantasy would have led us, but to a renewed human life in God.