Love Thyself

Week of Monday, May 12, 2003

Several years ago a former professor in our faculty fellowship at Stanford asked me a question that I have never forgotten. One day Don remarked to me, “My mother always told me to 'be yourself.' Do you think that is good Christian advice?” Because Don's question entailed some home spun wisdom that most people take for granted as true, I found it hard to think Christianly about his question. Later I joked with a friend that this advice is about the worst thing you could tell a person—be yourself?! More positively and piously, I eventually told Don that I thought the Bible taught us to “be your new self” (Colossians 3:9–10).

I now believe that my jest about Don's question contains the seeds of ideas that are fundamentally unchristian, that is, my insinuation that it is not okay to be my own, unvarnished self before God. Rather, my joke implies that we deserve to feel dread when we stand before God as what Henri Nouwen once called my “unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable.”¹ We find it difficult if not impossible to believe that God really accepts us, as the revivalist hymn puts it, “just as I am.”

At least this is the verdict of Brennan Manning after decades of ministry around the world. In his most recent book he describes the “dominant malaise” or “pandemic” infecting so many Christians he encounters:

The melancholy spirit of Chekov's plays—“You are living badly, my friend”—haunts the American conscience. The disparity between our ideal and our real self; the grim specter of past infidelities; the awareness that I am not living what I believe, that I am not all I ought to be, that I am not measuring up to others' expectations regarding demeanor and lifestyle; the relentless pressure of conformity; the midlife oppression of what I had hoped to become and what I have actually become; the obsession with personal dishonesty and self-centeredness; and the mournful nostalgia for The Blue Lagoon combine to transform an expectant pilgrim people into a dispirited traveling troupe of brooding Hamlets.²

Or again, in commenting upon the three parables in Luke 15—the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the prodigal son, Manning argues that these powerful stories about joy for abundant and undeserved mercy barely make a dent in the American psyche.

How do I know this? Throughout almost forty years of pastoral experience, I've observed disciples of Jesus badger, bully, and bludgeon themselves into earning God's mercy. The haunting memories of failed relationships, callous disregard of children, sexual peccadilloes, financial indiscretions, words of love not spoken, support not offered, compassion not extended, and abysmal indifference to human need suddenly resurface, sometimes from decades past. These unwanted recollections paralyze faith [and] overwhelm the message of Jesus.³

Instead of accepting God's acceptance, we lapse into a spiritual version of the Horatio Alger ideal of reward for self-effort.

As a consequence, writes Manning, many believers succumb to any number of legalisms by which we try to appease God. We wrongly think that God expects us to be perfect, always on our game, with never a compromising thought, feeling, word or action. But of course we will fail this unattainable standard, and when we do fail we expect wrath and punishment. Thus, “we struggle to maintain a hollow image of a perfect self. The struggle itself is exhausting. The legalists can never live up to the expectations that they project on God.”⁴ Since we have little or no experience of unmerited mercy in most all of life and culture, perhaps the impulse to earn our way is natural. But it is a game we can never win.

Manning has built an entire ministry proclaiming the unconditional and unfailing love of God. He reminds us that we need not fear our fears about ourselves; that we can live free from the opinions of others about us and even our own opinions about ourselves; that it is okay to accept that you are bent, broken and bruised and instead to embrace your fallen humanity; that we no longer have to deceive ourselves about our frailty but instead can accept our poverty and powerlessness; that we can admit that even in our best times we are a “bundle of paradoxes” and even a mystery to ourselves; that we no longer need confuse our opinion of ourself with God's opinion of us (which is the only opinion that ultimately matters); that we can increasingly become more aware of but less threatened by the conflicts within and without us; and that God's love never waivers no matter how destructive our choices and how horrible their consequences.

Christian maturity entails accepting your failures but learning to live with them, and moving on to rejoice in the “fierce tenderness of God” which always—always—results in an “impeccable sense of feeling safe.” In turn, we learn to treat our own selves with gentleness and kindness. The entire thesis of his most recent book, writes Manning, is not rocket science or “gratuitous guesswork.” It can be neatly summarized by something Carl Jung wrote long ago:

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ—all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness—that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?

This, says Manning, is the epitome of grace, accepting divine acceptance.⁵

Yes, the apostle Paul calls us to put off our old self and to put on our new self; we should be making progress in that direction. But for many believers their progress is more of a ziz-zag course than a straight line from glory to glory. The Good News is that the Father's tender compassion is not contingent upon perfect performance. He is never surprised by our many frailties, but like an affectionate father or mother, He loves us all the more, not less. So, yes, be yourself.

---

1. Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus (NY: Crossroad, 1998), p. 16. For what it's worth, this is probably the most influential Christian book I have ever read.
2. Brennan Manning, A Glimpse of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 2003), p. 85.
3. Brennan Manning, The Wisdom of Tenderness (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 2002), p. 137.
4. Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2000), p. 41.
5. The Jung quote comes from Manning, A Glimpse of Jesus, p. 135. The previous two paragraphs come entirely from the three Manning books already cited.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2003 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.