People often throw around phrases like: ‘you deserve it!’ to encourage other people. It’s always hit me as very hollow; it doesn’t have truth backing it up. I know I do not deserve anything, or, at least, in my deeply cynical state I certainly cannot believe it.
I have for years let myself act as if maybe I’m wrong that I don’t deserve anything, but I can never shake that looking at the world that way always seems to be the right way, the way that rings true with everything.
No: I don’t deserve anything. Nobody, especially not God, is obliged to give me anything, to do me any good. I can feel very deeply that I have done wrong, and that every thought in my mind is bent in the wrong way: every single thing that gets inside my skull becomes perverted by my way of thinking about it.
Perhaps this is shame-speak, and it is not wholly true, depending on how you reason it out, but it is also definitely the idea.
It especially scares me when Christians who acknowledge human sinfulness talk as if anyone deserves something. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t yet fully internalised that Christ died for our sins, thus making us deserving… and that is how I am sure I will come to see it when I get out of the Dark Woods of Doubt.
But the stage of feeling one’s complete unworthiness is actually one of the stages of coming to God, to repentance. No person can possibly admit their sin and thus allow God and Christ to make them New again if they do not… actually have sin that makes them totally unworthy of God’s giving them good things.
The penitent sinner feels so frustrated, so lost in the extent of their complete depravity that they are forced to go to God, even against their own wills… even against what they want to do, because of the shame of being naked before God, of being seen as ugly, repulsive, and so-to-speak belching-out-uncleanness.
I am lost as long as I have any part of myself that still imagines it can make me good. Any part of myself that imagines it’s in my own power to follow The Law (as Paul talks about in Romans) causes my own undoing because I can never actually do everything right. I will always slip up, forget things, mess up here or there. If I am my own god, then I will always fail (at least considering the kind of person I am and how I think I ought to behave).
Until I get so to the end of myself that I am sick of being In Control of every aspect of my life, so exhausted by trying to keep up appearances and to do everything The Best Way One Can, I will never be able to be free from the overpowering sense of undeserving… I will only continue trudgingly attempting to deserve by doing things as well as I can.
Everything I do, then, is done with this aura of having to do it right because it is my way of earning what I want in life, earning God’s grace to me, because unless I do the right things I couldn’t possibly deserve help.
The point of this is just that I don’t have any part of me that can possibly believe I could deserve things; I can’t reason with myself to show myself that’s an actual possibility. I hope to talk about this more in the future; I’ve been wrestling with this idea since I was a child, so I have a lot of different angles I’ve wondered about, and different logickings I’ve thought through.
Essentially the years of thinking about it brought me to think: alright then. I don’t deserve anything. It’s pointless to worry about deserving things… and the only thing that seems to have any point is to feel how undeserving I am so I stop essentially living like a Pharisee, trying to earn my salvation; so that, essentially, I am completely morally undone and have no other choice but to give every bit of control up to God.
Beautiful humility.
ReplyDeleteI so wish to, and hope to, uncover this thing. Again, though, am I controlling? ;)
DeleteI think this is common, though, especially in these times. And something I've tried, and continue, to work on as well. I'd recommend checking out Julius Evola's book "Revolt Against The Modern World" as a great source of self-reflection on how temporal we've all become in this time. Living in our heads- always thinking, thinking, dissecting, being "rational" and so on. He makes an interesting distinction between this modern temporal-focused way of being and the religious/spiritual nature of antiquity that he supposes was once the state of humans.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7NB1r7fndQ
Hmm, I'll have to think more about that first video and related ideas. I see, I think, the general point that's being made, and have often wondered how I could live in a more living-and-breathing way while in a world that certainly doesn't operate that way as of yet.
Delete