(This is a three-part post. Here is the Introduction.)
I begin this post by briefly characterizing the two thoughts. The first one is:
“God will love me when I have proved that I am lovable.”
And the second one is:
“God’s deepest love is meant for other people. I’m certainly hoping to get into heaven and avoid hell, but heaven will the continuation of life in the Church now, which is to say, it will be ecstasy for the right sort of people and pleasant enough for me.”
We can speak of these thoughts as having a demonic origin, but the demons also pay attention to our strengths and weaknesses, and because of certain patterns in our early lives, we can be more susceptible to certain types of thoughts.
These are both varieties of vainglory and pride, oddly enough. I realize that will be difficult to hear from someone struggling with these thoughts. I mention this because I believe that we will be able to use the tools given by Evagrius and Cassian to fight them off, if we understand their origins correctly. Their origins are in the shortcomings of our parents and others charged with our upbringing. Our job is to redeem our parents’ shortcomings through a clear-eyed assessment of the truth of our situation, through God’s love and forgiveness, and through a resolution not to blame them for our own struggles, and rather to trust God’s powerful help in untying these knots.
So again, the first thought is that God will love me when I have proved that I am lovable.
This takes a variety of forms, often hidden deeply behind more acceptable thoughts.
So for instance, I can see myself as a hard worker, or I can be invested in a self-image that is strong, or unusually intelligent or thoughtful. These seem to be plausible aspects of ourselves, and these traits are often rewarded by the appreciation of others. But they are precarious because they are driven by a root fear that we are not lovable.
If I can prove that I am special in some way, then I will be lovable, and then God will be alright with me. In the end, we don’t quite believe it. There’s an absurdity in there. We can’t ever arrive at a place where we will have earned God’s infinite love.
Behind this is a parental figure who himself or herself struggled with self-acceptance and therefore projected expectations onto us. A devout parent might be very anxious to make sure that we were properly raised and put extra pressure on us to live up to unrealistic expectations. Perhaps it’s a parent who had a dream to be an athlete or musician or academic and who saw in us a chance to achieve the goals that were denied in his or her life.
The fact that this usually comes from a situation in which the parental figure is struggling with self-acceptance gives us an insight into the intractability of the problem, since to understand the dynamic fully (which is not necessarily for healing, by the way), we would need to see the circumstances under our parent was not able to arrive at self-acceptance, and this produces the infinite regress that we call original sin, ultimately arriving at Adam and Eve’s estrangement from God and its effects on Cain and Abel. And so on and so on.
Sadly, we often discover the truth of our predicament precisely when we fail, and we begin reproaching ourselves. Our own lack of self-acceptance re-emerges with a vengeance. “There you go again! You’ve blown it! When will you finally get it right and stop being such a klutz!” But this is not God’s voice and, in point of fact, it is not your voice. It is a false thought, and one that causes intense pain and shame. What would it take to let go of it?
The truth is that God is not waiting for us to clear any bar at all to approach Him and be loved by Him. The worst sinner is loved by God and welcomed by God when he turns to Him for mercy. Think of the father of the prodigal son, watching for his son, running out to meet him without any reproach at all!
But admitting our neediness can be very risky, when we’ve spent many years crafting a persona of competence. It requires real faith to let go of that self-image. But it is worth it in order to shed that false thought that we must live up to some arbitrary standard before God will show us His acceptance.