Here's a point of tremendously sharp conflict. What do we do about this word "deserve"?
"You deserve to be happy / fulfilled / have meaning in your life / wake up every day excited..."
- every contemporary self-help / New Age guru
"As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace [that] you have been saved."
- this Paul of Tarsus guy (Eph 2:1-5), and not the only time he said something like this
I realize I have bitten off a lot right there. All I want to do at the moment is try to sum up decades of thrashing around in inner turmoil.
I tried to live with the idea that I was unworthy, that that was my fundamental relationship to God, for a very long time. It was not mostly intentional. I can read, and the New Testament says an awful lot of things about God's love and tender care for human beings and therefore for me specifically.
The problem is that I came to the Bible with even earlier experiences and filters. I use the word filter because it is widely used and recognized, but I actually don't like the image of a filter; I don't think it accurately describes the situation. A filter blocks some things and lets others pass. I don't think I had a filter; I had a very warped lens that shrank some things down to very tiny importance and expanded others enormously.
Given my existing lens or filter, then, passages like this got very distorted. I have purposely given you a nice long pull to show you how it worked. The lens shrank down to unnoticeable dimensions the past tense in the first few sentences. I read this and thought, "I do deserve wrath, pain, punishment." After all, I was very used to thinking that; in a horrible way, comfortable with it.
Then I went on to read the next sentence, and I could not really accept it. It seemed to contradict the thing I had just read, or really the conclusion I had just reinforced for myself. My place of rest for that sentence was more or less: "God is sort of offering mercy and forgiveness and happiness in heaven and whatnot, but He knows I don't deserve it, and He's making some sort of mistake, and He'll take it back... probably already has." The really insidious thing is that this was going on at the level of inarticulate emotion and gut reaction, and I could not see what I was doing to myself. I was always uncomfortable reading this passage and others like it; that was all I think I could have told you back then.
CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.
Ep 147 - Daniel Shields on Nature and Nature’s God
Ep 146 - TSSM Takes a Break
Ep 145 - Faith Journeys That Make a World of Difference: Paul Seungoh Chung
Ep 144 - Matthew & Chantal of 5th Place on Emotional Fitness
Ep 143 - Scott Gazzoli and Spirit over Show
Ep 142 - Matt Swaim: Symbols and Substance, in Faith and Online
Ep 141 - Louis Albarran and the Faith of Real People
Bonus - Society of Catholic Scientists 2022
Ep 140 - Chris Bell – Views from a Pro-Life Lifetime
Ep 139 - Pondering Big Issues Powered by Uranium
Ep 138 - Darcia Narvaez, Insights About Humanity for a Suffering World
Ep 137 - Francis Bacon and the New Organon
Ep 136 - Deacon Harold: Life Rich in Reality, Reality Rich in Life
Ep 135 - A Visit to the Universe of Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ
Ep 134 - Bill on Journalism and Truth with Franciscan Dave
Cybersecurity Bonus Episode with Matthew Cloud
Episode 133 - Cybersecurity Education as a Vocation with Matthew Cloud
Ep 132 – The Long Road to Mathematical Physics
Ep 131 - Jordan Wales and the Moral Theology of AI
Episode 130 - Natasha Toghramadjian’s Research into Earth-Shaking Impacts
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