Over the last few weeks I have been pondering what it means to reach the end of myself, to know without a doubt that I have no strength or goodness of my own, and that any strength and goodness I try to project is false and in all likely-hood a mask. This it turns out is not so much an exercise in navel gazing followed by a trip to a pit of wallowing despair as it is a letting go in which I am beginning to find a huge amount of freedom and relief. When I speak of letting go I am speaking of letting go of my need to seem right, my need to be strong, letting go of my defenses and excuses and accepting that my flawed and broken self is loved completely by the God who created me. and who works within his flawed and broken world to bring about healing, wholeness and ultimate transformation as we work with him, stepping into the light of his/her presence...
My journey has been a journey of repentance, but not in the grovelling sense of proclaiming myself sinful and expecting God's punishment, but rather the wonder that as I turn towards divine love I find that love is for me and always has been! In many ways The Message captures it well;
“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule." (Matthew 5:3)
With less of you there is more of God, and what I have found as I have admitted my need is that with more of God there is more of me, the true me, the me without masks and pretences, the me who is beginning to love and accept myself, and even and probably most importantly to forgive myself. All of this is becoming possible because I am daring to believe that God loved me first. Brennan Manning speaks of this as he tells of hearing Jesus speak to him in the stillness of the night...
"Little brother, perhaps the most difficult thing for you to accept at this moment is your failure to have done with your life what you long to accomplish. This is the cross you wanted least of all, the cross you never expected, the cross you find hardest to bear. Somewhere you got the idea that I expected your life to be an untarnished success story, and unbroken upward spiral toward holiness. Don't you see I am too realistic for that?
I witnessed a Peter who three times claimed he did not know me, a James who wanted power in return for service, a Philip who after three years did not know he was supposed to see the Father in me, and a score of disciples who were sure I was finished on Calvary. The New Testament is full of men (sic) who started out well and faltered. Yet I appeared to Peter, and James is not remembered for his ambition but for his sacrifice of self for the kingdom. Philip did see the Father in Christ when I showed the way. And the disciples who despaired had enough courage to recognise me in the stranger at their side who broke bread with them in the gathering darkness at the end of the road to Emmaus. The point is that I expect more failure from you than you expect from yourself.
Te most urgent thing for you now, little brother, is to desire to possess the Holy Spirit.... The Spirit alone can drive you onward and upward. The Spirit alone can make you good and keep your eyes fixed on me."
The Spirit alone can release me, and you, the Spirit alone is the one in whom I find freedom, goodness and healing. I cannot do it, I have never been expected to do it, I don't have to find the will or the strength to do it, what a relief it is to be able to let go, to drop my masks and pretenses and to allow God to flood me with a wonderful, powerful accepting love.
As I am flooded by the wonder and reality of this I ask myself why I have not come to this realisation before, and the honest truth is that somehow I knew it but could not accept it. I was caught in a trap of trying and striving and working to get it right, to be right, to be acceptable, to be good. I couldn't do it of course and that hurt, so I hid behind a mask of self sufficiency and tried again, redoubling my efforts but it always ended in a fall. My struggle to become good and "right" only revealed to me more clearly how far from being either I was. My lack of trust in the God I proclaimed tripped me again and again, I often preached grace but just as often refused to receive grace until I ran out of me. In Falling Upward, Richard Rhor writes:
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By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights. First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or “thou shalt nots” to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of “purity” and self-discipline is “behovely,” at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents. (I was a Star Scout and a Catholic altar boy myself, and did them both quite well, but it made me love me, not God.)
Because none of us desire a downward path to growth through imperfection, seek it, or even suspect it, we have to get the message with the authority of a “divine revelation.” So Jesus makes it into a central axiom: the “last” really do have a head start in moving toward “first,” and those who spend too much time trying to be “first” will never get there. Jesus says this clearly in several places and in numerous parables, although those of us still on the first journey just cannot hear it. It is far too counterintuitive and paradoxical.
Our resistance to the message is so great that it could be called outright denial, even among sincere Christians. The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working.
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What I am describing is in many ways a reconversion, one that has taken me closer to the wonder of the cross and so made ressurection life possible for me in a deeper way. I think that we go through these stages at various times in life, that we are called bit by bit to shed our masks and pretenses and to dare to step into the light as we are, or in as much as we are able. The stripping of pretenses and laying down of masks makes us vulnerable, but it makes a deeper and more abiding strength possible for God is the strength in our weakness, and all that we need for life and godliness, it is in dying to our false selves that we find out true selves, it is embracing our weakness that we find strength, it is in letting go that we gain everything!
I will finish what is becoming a long post with a prayer that I need to pray day by day:
Loving God, Holy Saviour, Help me to die with you that I might rise with you,
I am always looking to cheat death, to prove my worth, to show my capabilities,
and my strengths and to deny my weaknesses,
I have hidden behing masks of coping
when I have needed to fall upon your grace,
I have looked for support and approval
when what I have needed is the fullness of your love,
I need to be set free from myself,
because I can't get "it right" and I can't "do it"
Loving God I need you, I need your Spirit, I need your peace,
Help me to understand the depths of your love
in a fuller way,
to dare to come to your cross with boldness,
to receive your grace with confidence,
strengthen me and set me free, for I can do nothing
without you, but with you anything is possible.
I am yours and you are mine,
Help me to die with you
that I might rise with you.
AMEN
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