I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life. . , the great temptation [is] self-rejection. —Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved Yesterday evening, I felt particularly grumpy preparing dinner for my kids. I was hungry. They weren’t helping. My husband and I had a date, and I didn’t want to be home fussing over pasta—a real biblical Martha. I suspect Martha didn’t want to feel resentful. I didn’t want to feel resentful, either. I hate myself for resenting my children! Hating my experience and resenting the people involved? A real lose-lose situation even if the children do get fed. Another mealtime devolved, which isn’t unusual. Eventually, it was my turn to eat. My husband and I went out to our favorite haunt and, for once, I decided to order dessert. “I’ll feel better if I eat something sweet,” I thought. Instead, I felt guilty, stupid, a failure for indulging myself—a line of reasoning which, sadly, isn’t unusual either, at least not in my corner of America. Worrying about eating is its own kind of indulgence, a gnawing compulsion. The shame and mental distraction deprive me of enjoying the gift of food, “fruit of the vine and work of human hands.” I suppose we are intent upon torturing ourselves. Or at least some of us are. I suppose that’s why I seek God, make the choice to focus intentionally on the Power Which Heals, the Power Which Brings Peace. Evidently, I could use some healing. I could stand some peace—release from the seemingly ceaseless barrage of negative thoughts that so often make me feel terrible. For example, there are my unnecessary and often unrealistic ambitions, signs of grandiosity. Chronic shame, which convinces me I am less than other people, is just as bad. Both are untrue, the result of inflated estimations of myself. What is true? I AM. I exist. I am here, now. What do I do with that? When Jesus went about healing folks, he addressed demons by name and touched people’s eyes, took their hands in his and lifted them onto their feet, back into life. He met them in their homes and on the roads where they normally walked, or where they sat stuck in the delusion of helplessness. This strategy on Jesus’ part was neither flashy nor casual. It was attentive, focused, and personal. It suggests intimate relationships have the power to heal. They have the power to heal me if I will settle into my one-on-one encounters as deeply as I can. My conscious participation in relationships with people—not tasks, self-concepts, or things—dispels false understanding and alienation. It can happen with my children. But I have to want healing. I have to want to be lifted back into life. “Your faith has made you well,” Jesus says over and over to the people who seek him. Maybe it’s true. Maybe my choice to draw close to God brings its own corrective to self-negating thoughts and behaviors, to obsessions, addictions—any interior plague. My decision to seek the truth about myself in relationship to love reveals my true size and restores peace in me a little bit at a time. I am neither too big, nor too small. As Goldilocks declares, I seem to be just right. One on one, I can try to carry a message of dignity to whomever I meet, the people I know already and those I seek out, those who suffer—human beings, all of them—like I do. Who doesn’t want to be truer, realer, awakened to life and authentically themselves? I suppose there are some people who don’t. But, among those who do, their desire for peace turns out to be a hammock into which I can fall when I lose my grip—when frustration and disappointment leave me weak with hopelessness or drunk with raw emotion. I often wonder if I can withstand life, survive the occasional sense of accomplishment alongside being a disappointment to myself, and all those other feelings each of us can name for ourselves. Truth tells me I can: by the faith which heals, relationships born of communion, and the Spirit which is God, which is infinite—neither big nor small, high nor low, but all things right. “Let us not fall into temptation,” reads the new English translation of the Lord’s prayer. I can meaningfully ask for that—even on my best days. Karen Jessee
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