Read Online Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister
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of the world and call it perfection.
We batter people with what they are not to do and call it God’s word and God’s will and completely forget to teach what must be done instead. The Beatitudes—Jesus’s sermon about the other side of the Ten Commandments—we forget to teach and hesitate to risk. After all, mercy, meekness, justice, and, most of all, poverty of spirit don’t mix well with persecution, anger, condemnation, perfectionismand religious hubris. In the name of conscience, we lose the very foundation of conscience—the awareness of our own struggles, the sense of our own frailty, the pain of our own woundedness and the limits of our own perfection.
With this kind of religion, there is no room for the love of God. The “love that casts out fear” is long gone. We are harsh on others because, in the center of us where the light shines and cannot be hidden, we do not trust the God we say we serve. It is our own sins for which we fear. It is we ourselves whom we doubt can possibly survive in the presence of a just God. Then, knowing how really weak we are, have been, will be again at the very first opportunity, we do our best for the world by condemning all the rest of those who have not condemned us as we deserve.
That is the fear, the pain, the anguish that comes in the dark of the night to torment us. It is that fear of God that drives us to despair. It is the substitution of the God of Wrath for the God of Love in us. It is the punishment we think we deserve and so project onto others. It is one of the greatest burdens of the human soul, this sense of self-loathing.
And it all comes out of succumbing to the sin of perfectionism, the failure to admit that we are not perfect, the norm of the world, the icon of sinlessness. Our only answer is Augustine: “This is our perfection: to find out our imperfections” so that we never need fear our capacity to sin against God by sinning against others.
14
T HE S TRUGGLE B ETWEEN G UILT AND G ROWTH
Everybody is ashamed of something. I remember, at the age of nine, being left alone in the house of a family friend with one direction: “At three o’clock, Joan,” they showed me, “turn this knob on the stove straight up so that the black mark is pointing up to the ceiling.” Easy, I thought. “Do you promise to remember?” Of course I would.
It was after 5:00 when I remembered. It was about 5:30 when they returned. The roast was shrunken and black and ugly. Still hot, in fact. I swore I’d turned the oven off at 3:00, that I couldn’t imagine how it could have gone on again, that the roast looked exactly like that when I turned it off.
It was only a child’s fault, of course. But it heralded the impact on me of all the other choice points that wouldsurely follow in life: the promises, the failures, the lies. It has stayed with me all my life: the failure to keep the promise, the lie that followed the failure. It stung with a poisoned stinger that burned on in me long after the roast was forgotten and the disappointment in the eyes of those who had trusted me had faded.
Most of all, I remember the shame. Not only had I failed, I had lied. I was not the person they had all thought I was. I had put a barrier between me and people I loved. The whole scene became a template for the future. And, surprisingly, a good one.
The lifelong question now became what was worse—having to face the long-term sting of shame or bear the short-term pain of truth. And so began my journey from guilt to growth. It became what the church calls, in its explanation of sin as the reason for the coming of Jesus, “the happy fault.” The understanding of sin that comes from careless sinning itself, the necessary fault that turns our lives around, that becomes a wisdom to live by.
As I have sat and listened to people over the years, I have become more and more convinced that everyone deals, sometime in life, with a necessary fault. What’s more, I am convinced that most
We batter people with what they are not to do and call it God’s word and God’s will and completely forget to teach what must be done instead. The Beatitudes—Jesus’s sermon about the other side of the Ten Commandments—we forget to teach and hesitate to risk. After all, mercy, meekness, justice, and, most of all, poverty of spirit don’t mix well with persecution, anger, condemnation, perfectionismand religious hubris. In the name of conscience, we lose the very foundation of conscience—the awareness of our own struggles, the sense of our own frailty, the pain of our own woundedness and the limits of our own perfection.
With this kind of religion, there is no room for the love of God. The “love that casts out fear” is long gone. We are harsh on others because, in the center of us where the light shines and cannot be hidden, we do not trust the God we say we serve. It is our own sins for which we fear. It is we ourselves whom we doubt can possibly survive in the presence of a just God. Then, knowing how really weak we are, have been, will be again at the very first opportunity, we do our best for the world by condemning all the rest of those who have not condemned us as we deserve.
That is the fear, the pain, the anguish that comes in the dark of the night to torment us. It is that fear of God that drives us to despair. It is the substitution of the God of Wrath for the God of Love in us. It is the punishment we think we deserve and so project onto others. It is one of the greatest burdens of the human soul, this sense of self-loathing.
And it all comes out of succumbing to the sin of perfectionism, the failure to admit that we are not perfect, the norm of the world, the icon of sinlessness. Our only answer is Augustine: “This is our perfection: to find out our imperfections” so that we never need fear our capacity to sin against God by sinning against others.
14
T HE S TRUGGLE B ETWEEN G UILT AND G ROWTH
Everybody is ashamed of something. I remember, at the age of nine, being left alone in the house of a family friend with one direction: “At three o’clock, Joan,” they showed me, “turn this knob on the stove straight up so that the black mark is pointing up to the ceiling.” Easy, I thought. “Do you promise to remember?” Of course I would.
It was after 5:00 when I remembered. It was about 5:30 when they returned. The roast was shrunken and black and ugly. Still hot, in fact. I swore I’d turned the oven off at 3:00, that I couldn’t imagine how it could have gone on again, that the roast looked exactly like that when I turned it off.
It was only a child’s fault, of course. But it heralded the impact on me of all the other choice points that wouldsurely follow in life: the promises, the failures, the lies. It has stayed with me all my life: the failure to keep the promise, the lie that followed the failure. It stung with a poisoned stinger that burned on in me long after the roast was forgotten and the disappointment in the eyes of those who had trusted me had faded.
Most of all, I remember the shame. Not only had I failed, I had lied. I was not the person they had all thought I was. I had put a barrier between me and people I loved. The whole scene became a template for the future. And, surprisingly, a good one.
The lifelong question now became what was worse—having to face the long-term sting of shame or bear the short-term pain of truth. And so began my journey from guilt to growth. It became what the church calls, in its explanation of sin as the reason for the coming of Jesus, “the happy fault.” The understanding of sin that comes from careless sinning itself, the necessary fault that turns our lives around, that becomes a wisdom to live by.
As I have sat and listened to people over the years, I have become more and more convinced that everyone deals, sometime in life, with a necessary fault. What’s more, I am convinced that most
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