“I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. … This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.” – Oscar Wilde
There are few of us for whom it cannot be said that the worst of what we have suffered in our lives came as a direct or indirect result of our own actions, our own choices, our own habits of thought and emotion (it seems a cruel and imperious truth from which we reflexively, and understandably, shrink). Resultant guilt or shame can be a far more crushing weight than even our self-inflicted suffering, becoming an additional source of self-inflicted suffering. The roiling, turbid, inward, downward spiral of condemnation and pain must come to an end; we can suffer for only so long, the ultimate end of such a person is dark depression and death. If we don’t die or kill ourselves the life instinct in us fights back, claws at the walls of the well into which we have fallen, scrabbling for the surface world, for some light again. We’d be happy to fight back to a gray world, at least; we can live there, dying more slowly but still alive.
“I am Light that has come into the world so that all who believe in me won’t have to stay any longer in the dark.” –Jesus
Trite, religious, bullshit. Meaningless.
“Throw your pretty, worthless little trinkets at someone else! Don’t offend me with your simplistic aphorisms you Moron!! This is REAL life, okay? Not some fucking episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or ‘Seventh Heaven’!”
Translation: “You are not acknowledging and honoring my pain as real, as worthy of your consideration. You do not see me as a person or you would not insult me with false hope from your false prophet of B.S.. You would offer me more tangible help than that if you really cared about me at all and you don’t.”
I hate that I have ever done that to anyone in my life but I have. I hate that I did it even more when I was not being religious at all. That kind of insufferable myopia is in no way confined to religious people. Not seeing beyond the outward manifestations of another’s inward pain to the person themselves, to acknowledge that you see them, feel them, can cry with them and say, “Hey, it IS real, what you are feeling and it matters to me too!”, is endemic to the human condition.
Time after time we see that Jesus did just that; he acknowledged people and did not trivialize them. The woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well, the little children that his disciples thought should not bother the Master, he stood up for them and spoke to their hearts. He was light to them. He saw them.
Imperfectly, haltingly, but truly, people who love Jesus want to become more like him.
God, thank you for your grace and love that let me stop ruining myself. Please help me to always SEE people, to look past their acting out and their dysfunctional behaviors to the soul of them, the part that you love unconditionally and help me to love them like you do. Grant me a heart of forgiveness like yours. Through me, may they be inspired to come out of their darkness and to know you as The Light of The World. Thank you, amen.
