Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (4 page)

Moe sits down at the table in his room and closes his eyes. The love of the crucified Christ surges within him. His eyes fill with tears. “Thank You, Jesus,” he whispers, as he peels the plastic top off his microwaved lasagna. He flips to Psalm 23 in his Bible.

I was in the dream, too. Where did I choose to spend that evening? My impostor rented a tux and we went to the Ritz. The next morning I awoke in the cabin at four a.m., showered and shaved, fixed a cup of coffee, and thumbed through the Scriptures. My eyes fell on a passage in 2 Corinthians: “From now onwards, therefore, we do not judge anyone by the standards of the flesh” (5:16). Ouch! I lug the false self around even in my dreams.

I relate to Charles Ashworth, the character in the Howatch novel, when his spiritual director comments, “Charles, would I be reading too much into your remarks if I deduced that liking and approval are very important to you?”

“Well, of course they’re important!” Ashworth exclaims. “Aren’t they important to everyone? Isn’t that what life’s all about? Success is people liking and approving of you. Failure is being rejected. Everyone knows that.”
[6]

The sad irony is that the impostor cannot experience intimacy in any relationship. His narcissism excludes others. Incapable of intimacy with self and out of touch with his feelings, intuitions, and insight, the
impostor is insensitive to the moods, needs, and dreams of others. Reciprocal sharing is impossible. The impostor has built life around achievements, success, busyness, and self-centered activities that bring gratification and praise from others. James Masterson, M.D., stated, “It is the nature of the false self to save us from knowing the truth about our real selves, from penetrating the deeper causes of our unhappiness, from seeing ourselves as we really are
 
—vulnerable, afraid, terrified, and unable to let our real selves emerge.”
[7]

Why does the impostor settle for life in such a diminished form? First, because repressed memories from childhood that laid the pattern for self-deception are too painful to recall and thus remain carefully concealed. Faint voices from the past stir vague feelings of angry correction and implied abandonment. Masterson’s summary is appropriate: “The false self has a highly skilled defensive radar whose purpose is to avoid feelings of rejection although sacrificing the need for intimacy. This system is constructed during the first years of life, when it is important to detect what would elicit the mother’s disapproval.”
[8]

The second reason the impostor settles for less life is plain old cowardice. As a little one, I could justifiably cop a plea and claim that I was powerless and defenseless. But in the autumn of my life, strengthened by so much love and affection and seasoned by endless affirmation, I must painfully acknowledge that I still operate out of a fear-based center. I have been speechless in situations of flagrant injustice. While the impostor has performed superbly, I have assumed a passive role in relationships, stifled creative thinking, denied my real feelings, allowed myself to be intimidated by others, and then rationalized my behavior by persuading myself that the Lord wants me to be an instrument of peace . . . at what price?

Merton said that a life devoted to the shadow is a life of sin. I have sinned in my cowardly refusal
 
—out of fear of rejection
 
—to think, feel, act, respond, and live from my authentic self. Of course, the impostor “argues relentlessly that the root of the problem is minor and should
be ignored, that ‘mature’ men and women would not get so upset over something so trivial, that one’s equilibrium should be maintained even if it means placing unreasonable limits on personal hopes and dreams and accepting life in a diminished form.”
[9]

…

We even refuse to be our true selves with God
 
—and then wonder why we lack intimacy with Him. The deepest desire of our hearts is for union with God. From the first moment of our existence, our most powerful yearning is to fulfill the original purpose of our lives
 
—to see Him more clearly, love Him more dearly, follow Him more nearly, as the old prayer says. We are made for God, and nothing less will really satisfy us.

C. S. Lewis could say that he was “surprised by joy,” gripped by a desire that made “everything else that had ever happened . . . insignificant in comparison.” Our hearts will ever be restless until they rest in Him. Jeffrey D. Imbach, in
The Recovery of Love
, wrote, “Prayer is essentially the expression of our heart longing for love. It is not so much the listing of our requests but the breathing of our one deepest request, to be united with God as fully as possible.”
[10]

Have you ever felt baffled by your internal resistance to prayer? By the existential dread of silence, solitude, and being alone with God? By the way you drag yourself out of bed for morning praise, shuffle off to worship with the sacramental slump of the terminally ill, endure nightly prayer with stoic resignation, knowing that “this too shall pass”?

Beware the impostor!

The false self specializes in treacherous disguise. He is the lazy part of self, resisting the effort, asceticism, and discipline that intimacy with God requires. He inspires rationalizations such as “My work is my prayer; I’m too busy; prayer should be spontaneous, so I just pray when I am moved by the Spirit.” The false self’s lame excuses allow us to maintain the status quo.

The false self dreads being alone, knowing “that if it would become silent within and without, it would discover itself to be nothing. It would be left with nothing but its own nothingness, and to the false self which claims to be everything, such a discovery would be its undoing.”
[11]

Obviously, the impostor is antsy in prayer. He hungers for excitement, craves some mood-altering experience. He is depressed when deprived of the spotlight. The false self is frustrated because he never hears God’s voice. He cannot, since God sees no one there. Prayer is death to every identity that does not come from God. The false self flees silence and solitude because they remind him of death. Author Parker Palmer has stated, “Becoming totally quiet and unreachably alone are two of the signs that life has gone, while activity and lively communication not only signify life but help us evade the prospect that our life will someday cease.”
[12]

The impostor’s frenetic lifestyle cannot bear the inspection of death because it confronts him with this unbearable truth: “There is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.”
[13]

The vivisection of the impostor’s anatomy appears to be a masochistic exercise in self-flagellation. Isn’t such morbid introspection self-defeating? Is this really necessary?

I maintain that it is not only necessary but also indispensable for spiritual growth. The impostor must be called out of hiding, accepted, and embraced. He is an integral part of my total self. Whatever is denied cannot be healed. To acknowledge humbly that I often inhabit an unreal world, that I have trivialized my relationship with God, and that I am driven by vain ambition is the first blow in dismantling my glittering image. The honesty and willingness to stare down the false self dynamites the steel trapdoor of self-deception.

Peace lies in acceptance of truth. Any facet of the shadow self that we refuse to embrace becomes the enemy and forces us into defensive postures. As Simon Tugwell wrote, “The discarded pieces of ourselves will rapidly find incarnation in those around us. Not all hostility is due to this, but it is one major factor in our inability to cope with other people, that they represent to us precisely those elements in ourselves which we have refused to acknowledge.”
[14]

As we come to grips with our own selfishness and stupidity, we make friends with the impostor and accept that we are impoverished and broken and realize that, if we were not, we would be God. The art of gentleness toward ourselves leads to being gentle with others
 
—and is a natural prerequisite for our presence with God in prayer.

Hatred of the impostor is actually self-hatred. The impostor and I constitute one person. Contempt for the false self gives vent to hostility, which manifests itself as general irritability
 
—an irritation at the same faults in others that we hate in ourselves. Self-hatred always results in some form of self-destructive behavior.

Accepting the reality of our sinfulness means accepting our authentic self. Judas could not face his shadow; Peter could. The latter befriended the impostor within; the former raged against him. “Suicide does not happen on a sudden impulse. It is an act that has been rehearsed during years of unconscious punitive behavior patterns.”
[15]

Years ago, Carl Jung wrote the following:

When we accept the truth of what we really are and surrender it to Jesus Christ, we are enveloped in peace, whether or not we feel ourselves to be at peace. By that I mean the peace that passes understanding is not a subjective sensation of peace; if we are in Christ, we are in peace even when we feel no peace.

With a graciousness and an understanding of human weakness that only God can exhibit, Jesus liberates us from alienation and self-condemnation and offers each of us a new possibility. He is the Savior who saves us from ourselves. His Word is freedom. The Master says to us,

Jesus discloses God’s true feelings toward us. As we turn the pages of the Gospels, we discover that the people Jesus encounters there are
you and me. The understanding and compassion He offers them, He also offers you and me.

On the twentieth and last day of my stay in the Colorado Rockies, I wrote this letter:

I come to you today not with rod in hand but with an olive branch. When I was a little boy and first knew that no one was there for me, you intervened and showed me where to hide. (In those Depression days of the thirties, you recall, my parents were doing the best they could with what they had just to provide food and shelter.)

At that moment in time, you were invaluable. Without your intervention, I would have been overwhelmed by dread and paralyzed by fear. You were there for me and played a crucial, protective role in my development. Thank you.

When I was four years old, you taught me how to build a cottage. Remember the game? I would crawl under the covers from the head of the bed to the footrest and pull the sheets, blanket, and pillow over me
 
—actually believing that no one could find me. I felt safe. I’m still amazed at how effectively it worked. My mind would think happy thoughts, and I would spontaneously smile and start to laugh under the covers. We built that cottage together because the world we inhabited was not a friendly place.

But in the construction process you taught me how to hide my real self from everyone and initiated a lifelong process of concealment, containment, and withdrawal. Your resourcefulness enabled me to survive. But then your malevolent side appeared and you started lying to me.
Brennan
, you whispered,
if you persist in this folly of being yourself, your few long-suffering friends will hit the bricks, leaving you all alone. Stuff your feelings, shut down your memories, withhold your opinions, and develop social graces so you’ll fit in wherever you are.