My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality. It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves. (1 John 3: 18-20 The Message)
These verse popped up on Tablet's my Bible App today, and they could not have been better timed, they offer a challenge to live within the love of God and not to count ourselves outside of it. As I pondered them today I realise that I have a tendency to develop the defense mechanism of living outside of the love of God. I don't deny that God loves me because I know that that would be a lie, but I effectively shut myself away from that love because it would be overwhelming, so overwhelming that it would sweep me off my feet and carry me out to the depths where I could do nothing but surrender to it, and while I know it is what I need, and it is certainly what I preach, there are times when it feels safer to stand upon the rock of my own construction even if that means listening to the voices of self-criticism.
To move beyond self-criticism means dropping my defenses, admitting that I have messed up and accepting that God loves me anyway, that God knows the true me and longs to be able to help me to reach my full potential. Richard Rhor's daily meditation also spoke into this today:
"Jesus did say very clearly that we had to “lose our self to find our self” in several different settings. For much of Christian history this was interpreted as the body self that had to die, and for some miraculous reason this was supposed to make the spiritual self arise! It did not work, and it allowed us to avoid the real problem. What really has to die is our false self created by our own mind, ego, and culture. It is a pretense, a bogus identity, a passing fad, a psychological construct that gets in the way of who we are and always were—in God. This is our objective and metaphysically True Self.
There is a true me, a God created, God dreamed, God envisioned me trying to be heard and longing for release, bits of that me are evident at different times, but the false me, the ego centered self demands attention and delights in putting me down and denies the chance for my inner voice to be heard. I think this struggle to become real is highlighted well by Paul in Ch 7 of Romans where he speaks of his struggle to become his true self. If we are honest we all struggle with this in some way or another, and while I would not like to say that the depressives among us struggle more than others, I wonder if somehow we have a heightened sensitivity to the voices of self-criticism, and also to the desire for release.
If we can recognise this we might begin to see it as a gift, to hear the groaning of our inner being in tune with the whole of creation that longs for things to be put right, recognising that gift can be deeply challenging though, and like many others I have tried at times to mask that inner groaning with many unhelpful things like alcohol and excessive spending, things that dulled the pain for a while but never lasted, things that destroyed more than they helped. Sadly for some that destruction becomes the thing that overwhelms, and many of us have been on the edge of it. Yet even there on the edge the love of God is present, the love that hears the groaning of our deepest self and longs to set us free. None of us are beyond the reach of that love.
So how do I silence the voice of my inner critic? The truth is that I cannot do it, I can only give myself to the one who can, to allow myself to be hidden with Christ in God, to accept his words of acceptance and to lift my feet from the rock of doubt and fear and allow myself to be carried and overwhelmed by love itself, and that might mean plunging to the depths for a while where the treasures of darkness are found, where his light is the only light, and where with a true openness of heart I can allow the healing work of love to minister to my soul.
The problem is the moment the words " I am depressed" pass our lips others often become uncomfortable with our honesty, and so there is a tendency to hide it, to struggle on bearing the burden of a sense of deep failure and shame, and the voices of self criticism win. Today I choose to say with confidence, I am depressed, I am struggling, but I choose to hear and identify with the call ofmy inner voice's longings, and all will be well...
To love others we need to love ourselves, and we can only do this when we embrace what and who love is...
