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Authors: Brennan Manning

Tags: #Christian Life, #Spiritual Growth, #Christianity, #God, #Grace, #Love

Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (9 page)

BOOK: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
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The pharisee within is the religious face of the impostor. The idealistic, perfectionist, and neurotic self is oppressed by what Alan Jones calls “a terrorist spirituality.”
[8]
A vague uneasiness about ever being in right relationship with God haunts the pharisee’s conscience. The compulsion to feel safe with God fuels this neurotic desire for perfection. This compulsive, endless, moralistic self-evaluation makes it impossible to feel accepted before God. His perception of personal failure leads to a precipitous loss of self-esteem and triggers anxiety, fear, and depression.

The pharisee within usurps my true self whenever I prefer appearances to reality, whenever I am afraid of God, whenever I surrender the control of my soul to rules rather than risk living in union with Jesus, when I choose to look good and not be good, when I prefer appearances to reality. I am reminded of the words of Merton: “If I had a message to my contemporaries . . . it was surely this: be anything you like, be madmen, drunks . . . but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”
[9]
Of course Merton is referring to the cult of success, the pharisaic fascination with honor and power, the relentless drive to enhance the image of the impostor in the eyes of admirers. Conversely, when my false humility spurns the pleasure of achievement and scorns compliments and praise, I become proud of my humility, alienated and isolated from real people, and the impostor rides again!

My resident pharisee is never more prominent than when I assume a stance of moral superiority over racists, bigots, and homophobics. I nod approvingly as the preacher lambastes unbelievers, liberals, New Agers,
and others outside the fold. No word would be vitriolic enough for his vigorous condemnation of Hollywood, Super Bowl commercials, provocative clothing, and rock ’n’ roll.

Yet my library is filled with biblical commentaries and theology books. I attend church regularly and pray daily. I have a crucifix in my home and a cross in my pocket. My life is completely formed and permeated by religion. I abstain from meat on Friday. I give financial support to Christian organizations. I am an evangelist devoted to God and church.

Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who pay your tithe of mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the Law
 
—justice, mercy, good faith . . . You blind guides! Straining out gnats and swallowing camels! . . . Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of corruption. In the same way you appear to people from the outside like good honest men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
(MATTHEW 23:23-24,27-28)

In the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, the Pharisee stands in the temple and prays, “I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get” (Luke 18:11-12).

His prayer indicates the two telltale flaws of the Pharisee. First, he is very conscious of his religiosity and holiness. When he prays, it is only thanks for what he has, not a request for what he has not and is not. His fault is his belief in his faultlessness. He admires himself. The second defect is related to the first: He despises others. He judges and condemns others, because he is convinced that he stands above them. He is a self-righteous man who unrighteously condemns others.

The pharisee who pardons himself is condemned. The tax collector who condemns himself is acquitted. To deny the pharisee within is lethal. It is imperative that we befriend him, dialogue with him, inquire why he must look to sources outside the kingdom for peace and happiness.

At a prayer meeting I attended, a man in his midsixties was the first to speak: “I just want to thank God that I have nothing to repent of today.” His wife groaned. What he meant was he had not embezzled, blasphemed, fornicated, or fractured any of the Ten Commandments. He had distanced himself from idolatry, drunkenness, sexual irresponsibility, and similar things; yet he had never broken through into what Paul calls the inner freedom of the children of God.

If we continue to focus solely on the sinner/saint duality in our person and conduct, while ignoring the raging opposition between the pharisee and the child, spiritual growth will come to an abrupt standstill.


In sharp contrast to the pharisaic perception of God and religion, the biblical perception of the gospel of grace is that of a child who has never experienced anything but love and who tries to do her best because she is loved. When she makes mistakes, she knows they do not jeopardize the love of her parents. The possibility that her parents might stop loving her if she doesn’t clean her room never enters her mind. They may disapprove of her behavior, but their love is not contingent on her performance.

For the pharisee the emphasis is always on personal effort and achievement. The gospel of grace emphasizes the primacy of God’s love. The pharisee savors impeccable conduct; the child delights in the relentless tenderness of God.

In response to her sister’s question of what she meant “by remaining a little child before the good God,” Thérèse of Lisieux said,

It is recognizing one’s nothingness, expecting everything from the good God, just as a little child expects everything from its father; it is not getting anxious about anything, not trying to make one’s fortune. . . . Being little is also not attributing to oneself the virtues that one practices, as if one believed oneself capable of achieving something, but recognizing that the good God puts this treasure into the hands of his little child for it to make use of it whenever it needs to; but it is always the good God’s treasure. Finally it is never being disheartened by one’s faults, because children often fall, but they are too little to do themselves much harm.
[10]

Parents love a little one before that child makes his or her mark in the world. A mother never holds up her infant to a visiting neighbor with the words, “This is my daughter. She’s going to be a lawyer.” Therefore, the secure child’s accomplishments later in life are not the effort to gain acceptance and approval but the abundant overflow of her sense of being loved. If the pharisee is the religious face of the impostor, the inner child is the religious face of the true self. The child represents my authentic self and the pharisee the unauthentic. Here we find a winsome wedding of depth psychology and spirituality. Psychoanalysis aims to expose clients’ neuroses, to move them away from their falseness, lack of authenticity, and pseudosophistication toward a childlike openness to reality, toward what Jesus enjoins us to be: “unless you become like little children.”

The inner child is aware of his feelings and uninhibited in their expression; the pharisee edits feelings and makes a stereotyped response to life situations. On Jacqueline Kennedy’s first visit to the Vatican, Pope John XXIII asked his secretary of state, Giuseppe Cardinal Montini, what was the proper way to greet the visiting dignitary, wife of the U.S. president. Montini replied, “It would be proper to say ‘madame’ or ‘Mrs. Kennedy.’” The secretary left, and a few minutes later, the first lady stood in the doorway. The pope’s eyes lit up. He trundled over, threw his arms around her, and cried, “Jacqueline!”

The child spontaneously expresses emotions; the pharisee carefully represses them. The question is not whether I am an introvert or an extrovert, a sanguine or a subdued personality. The issue is whether I express or repress my genuine feelings. John Powell once said with sadness that as an epitaph for his parents’ tombstone he would have been compelled to write, “Here lie two people who never knew one another.” His father could never share his feelings, so his mother never got to know him. To open yourself to another person, to stop lying about your loneliness and your fears, to be honest about your affections, and to tell others how much they mean to you
 
—this openness is the triumph of the child over the pharisee and a sign of the dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17).

To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life.
[11]
Jesus listened. In John’s gospel, we are told that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions (11:33). In the book of Matthew we see that His anger erupted: “Hypocrites! It was you Isaiah meant when he so rightly prophesied: This people honours me only with lip-service, while their hearts are far from me. The worship they offer me is worthless” (15:7-9). He called the crowd to intercessory prayer because “he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd” (9:36). When He saw the widow of Nain, “he felt sorry for her. ‘Do not cry,’ he said” (Luke 7:13). Would her son have been resuscitated to life if Jesus had repressed His feelings?

Grief and frustration spontaneously broke through when “as he drew near and came in sight of the city he shed tears over it and said, ‘If you in your turn had only understood on this day the message of peace’” (Luke 19:41). Jesus abandoned all emotional restraint when He roared, “The devil is your father, and you prefer to do what your father wants” (John 8:44). We hear more than a hint of irritation when, dining at Simon’s house in Bethany, Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why are you upsetting her?” (Mark 14:6). We hear utter frustration in the words,
“How much longer must I be with you?” (Matthew 17:17), unmitigated rage in “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path” (16:23), extraordinary sensitivity in “Somebody touched me. I felt that power had gone out from me” (Luke 8:46), and blazing wrath in “Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market” (John 2:16).

We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore. He is a man in a way that we have forgotten men can be: truthful, blunt, emotional, nonmanipulative, sensitive, compassionate
 
—His inner child so liberated that He did not feel it unmanly to cry. He met people head on and refused to cut any deal at the price of His integrity. The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn or reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive emotional antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action.


Before going out to dinner, my wife, Roslyn, will often say, “I just need a few minutes to put on my face.” A pharisee must wear his or her religious face at all times. The pharisee’s voracious appetite for attention and admiration compels him to present an edifying image and to avoid mistakes and failure studiously. Uncensored emotions can spell big trouble.

Yet emotions are our most direct reaction to our perception of ourselves and the world around us. Whether positive or negative, feelings put us in touch with our true selves. They are neither good nor bad: They are simply the truth of what is going on within us. What we do with our feelings will determine whether we live lives of honesty or of deceit. When submitted to the discretion of a faith-formed intellect, our emotions serve as trustworthy beacons for appropriate action or inaction. The denial, displacement, and repression of feelings thwarts self-intimacy.

My indwelling pharisee has devised a way to disembowel my true self, deny my humanity, and camouflage my emotions through a fraudulent mental maneuver called “spiritualizing.” My mind’s clever tap dance into religiosity shields me from my feelings, usually the kind I am afraid of
 
—anger, fear, and guilt. I distance myself from negative emotions, intuitions, and insights with one foot and hopscotch into rococo rationalizations with the other.

I once wanted to say to a bigot, “If you don’t cool it, I’m going to choke you and hang you as an ornament on my Christmas tree”; instead, I reasoned to myself,
God has led this unenlightened brother into my life, and his obnoxious manner is no doubt due to childhood trauma. I must love him in spite of everything
. (Who could argue with that? If bigots hate African-Americans, and I hate bigots, what’s the difference?) But the plain truth is that I fled my feelings, lacquered them with pious claptrap, responded like a disembodied spirit, and alienated my true self. When a friend says, “I really don’t like you anymore. You never listen to me and always make me feel inferior,” I do not grieve. Quickly turning away from the heartache, sadness, and rejection I feel, I conclude,
This is God’s way of testing me
. When money is scarce and anxiety sets in, I remind myself,
Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow,” so this little setback is just His way of finding out what I am made of
.

When we choose our masked self and deny our real feelings, we fail to recognize our human limitations. Our feelings congeal to the point of callousness. Our interactions with people and life situations are inhibited, conventionalized, and artificial. This spiritualizing wears a thousand faces, none justifiable or healthy
 
—disguises that smother the inner child.


When Roslyn was a little girl growing up in the tiny hamlet of Columbia, Louisiana (population nine hundred), her playmate on Saturdays was another little girl named Bertha Bee, the daughter of the African-American housekeeper, Ollie. Together they played dolls in the breezeway, made
mud pies by the edge of the lake, ate cookies, shared their lives, and built castles in Spain. One Saturday, Bertha Bee failed to show up. She never returned again. Roslyn knew she wasn’t sick, injured, or dead because Ollie would have told her. So Roslyn, nine years old, asked her father why Bertha Bee didn’t come to play anymore. She has never forgotten his reply: “It is no longer appropriate.” The face that a child wears is her own face, and her eyes that look out on the world do not squint to see labels: black/white, Catholic/Protestant, Asian/Latino, gay/straight, capitalist/socialist. Labels create impressions. This person is wealthy, that one is on welfare. This man is brilliant, another is dim-witted. One woman is beautiful, another dowdy.

BOOK: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
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