Last semester, for my Pastoral Care and Counseling class, I read excerpts from “The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction” by Eugene Peterson ( author of The Message). His thoughts on inadequacy and false humility have stuck with me, becoming a weekly and sometimes daily critique on my flights from God.
As someone with an ideological commitment to orthodoxy and “conservatism” as well as an acute and weighty (but sometimes numbing) sense of condemnation because of my moral failings, I juggle imperatives, asking myself questions with conflicting answers.
What I can say is that some of the following thoughts shifted my thinking in a lasting way: at times, making me face God when “humility” and biased guilt would have me do otherwise.
From “The Contemplative Pastor”:
“People don't feel they are very good at the Christian life. They are apologetic and defensive about their faith. A feeling of inadequacy is characteristic of adolescent life. When a person is growing rapidly on all fronts - physical, emotional, mental - he or she is left without competence in anything. Life doesn't slow long enough for him to gain a sense of mastery. The teenager has a variety of devices to disguise this feeling: he can mask it with braggadocio, submerge it in a crowd of peers, or develop a subcult of language and dress in which he maintain superiority by excluding the larger world from his special competence. The variations are endless; the situation the same: the adolescent is immature, and therefore inadequate. And he is acutely self-conscious about this inadequacy.”
“That is exactly what the pastor meets in people of all ages in the church. They feel they aren't making it as Christians. This is a bit of a surprise because in the past the Christian church has more often had to deal with the Pharisee - the person who feels he achieved adequacy long ago. People today are more apt to be uneasy and fearful about their Christian identity.”
“That process seems natural an innocent - as natural and innocent as the feelings of inadequacy in the adolescent and his consequent admiration of competence. It is more likely, though, a new disguise for an old sin - the ancient business of making idols. God calls people to himself, but they turn away to something less than God, fashioning a religious experience but avoiding God. The excuse is that they are "inadequate" for facing the real thing. They proceed with the awareness that, far from sinning, they have acquired the virtue of humility. But the theological nose smells idolatry.”
At this point, Google Book’s anti-copyright infringement protections thwarted the rest of my quote harvesting. Until I can check out the book, here are my notes from the rest of the chapter:
-The pastor can’t treat this inadequacy as an unfortunate feeling to be removed by psychological or moral means. The pastor should see it as a sign of sin—an avoidance of personal responsibility in the awesome task of facing God
-Second Characteristic (the first being Inadequacy) : Historical Amnesia
-People are not in tune with 20 centuries of tradition
-People are not of the persevering type—they easily led by fashions
-It is a manifestation of our nature, just like Inadequacy because it acts like a clever ruse for masking sin. It is a sin of denial that denies dependence on God and interdependence on neighbors and a counter-insistence that the ego be treated as something God-like.
-The quest for “identity” and integrity, while appearing innocent, actually harbor sin.
I needed to read all of these things. Inadequacy—reaching but not grasping—and dejection typify so much of my life and, now I realize, so much of my irresponsibility. I’ve been the Pharisee and I’ve played the woe-to-me Christian, but it wasn’t until I read this that I saw them as symptoms of the same disease. I don’t mark this realization as a cure; I am still an adolescent (may I hope an older one?) but I am guarded against seeing virtue in sin.
No comments:
Post a Comment