God, Self and Concepts: Which Transcendence Fits?

Ultimately, I want to explain why I remain a Christian.  In order to do that, I need to call out a particular brand of denial: namely the tendency to find blame God when the error is in my heart.  While I’ll end up talking about my own God-concept, I do believe the “divine blame” to be a universal and human liability.  While I’ll end by examining it as a personal flaw, I need to examine it as a corporate one first.  

The history of religious thought is a dance between dualism and unity.  Every major religion has had a unitive experience of God, only to hash it out doctrines dualistically.  Consequently throughout religious history, wars have been fought over whose God concept is more “correct.”  Christians formulated the Trinity, a concept that owes its life to the Jewish monotheism.  We then turned around and told the Jews they were wrong.  We persecuted them, they pushed back with violence, we both condemned each other.  The Quran says that much of the Torah and the Gospel is correct.  However, ultimately when Muslims heard the call to submit to Allah, they told Jews and Christians they were wrong.  Christians used this as justification for the crusades.  We killed them, they killed us back.

It would be tempting to say “Religion causes wars” and back away from it. But blaming religion, positing a bunch of different God-concepts as correctives to one another, will always be fruitless.  The serenity prayer says “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”  We can’t change God, and we ought to stop trying.

Ultimately, the solution hinges on the connectedness between my God-concept and my self-concept.  Again, the serenity prayer asks for “the courage to change the things I can.”  If God-concepts appear opposed to each other, it is only because the people who came up with them are opposed to themselves.  If there’s anything we can change, it’s ourselves. 

St. Paul is a case in point.  He disagreed with the Christians and it drove him to violence.  Ultimately, his encounter with the Living Jesus led him to repent that violence, saying “what I do not want, that is what I do.”  He’d located the source of his angst squarely with his own incomprehensible self.  “Our lives are hidden with Christ in God,” he said, then he went on to wrestle with that mystery for the rest of his life.

At my dualistic worst, I am oppositional and judgmental.  I wax verbose about God, sacrificing his peace to my nervous preoccupation with his attributes.  I am full of all or nothing thinking.  In adolescence, newly shocked at how powerful—and drastically misused—sex can be, I embarked on what I thought would be Lifelong celibacy.

In my adolescence, through family therapy, I learned about transactional analysis.  In short, this examines the subtle power dynamics inherent in the relational games we play.  I learned how shallow quid pro quo interactions are: I increasingly backed away from people who used this “something for something” way of relating, preferring instead the “unconditional” relationships that characterize adult giving.  All of that is fine, I suppose, but, to date, I don’t surround myself with people who play games.  This is all good and well—at a certain age, it’s natural to start choosing whom I relate with. The rub is that, when I’m honest, I play a few relational games myself.  I can accurately self-apply that bit in the Gospel about removing the speck in my brother’s eye.  I have ignored the log in my own.  I don’t have the life-skills to deal healthily with people who fall short of the better angels of their nature, and I’m fairly sure that’s some kind of character flaw. 

I’ve been convinced I need to work on myself for longer than I’ve known what that looks like.  I’ve spoken elsewhere of the need to rebuild a healthy ego, just as the Jews needed to rebuild the temple.  I suppose that I’m writing this post because I’m getting a sense of how to do that, and it leads me to one conclusion.  The kind of “Self-work” I need to do is best supported by Christianity.  I will try to say why.

But first, for me, a healthy self would be characterized by 2 things:

Transcending and including, instead of opposing and Judging.  If I had the current resources of character when I was a younger man, I might have  healthier boundaries.  A healthy ego can deal with what isn’t ideal, because it knows how to keep itself safe. They may well make it easier to deal with people who can’t, by dint of psychological programming, love unconditionally.  A healthy ego includes my own and others’ character flaws, because it sees them from a higher and wider perspective, and doesn’t over-identify with them.

Open ended questioning:  I need to remember how easy it is to impose my willful little half-baked solutions as a way to work through projects and conflicts.  Both the Gospel and the Quran say “don’t say ‘tomorrow I will do this’ or ‘tomorrow’ I will do that.  Instead, say ‘if Allah wills it, tomorrow I will do this.’  I need to remember that my own ideas are only God’s will if they work best for everyone, and respect everyone involved.

My character flaws would become my gifts:  Among Adult Children, it's said that the principles of recovery are the opposite of our character flaws.  I'm stealing this from Bill P. Todd W. and Sarah S., specifically their book Drop the Rock.  When my higher power acts, I hope he'll do what they say: namely, turn my fear into faith, my egoism into humility, my worry into serenity, etc.  This process has begun, but I'd love nothing more than for it to be on surer footing.

The need for Redemption and assistance: A healthy ego can ask for help, but in my case there’s a bit of a rub.  As an “adult child”—an adult who developed and still operates out of inadequate childhood defense mechanisms—I am predisposed to unhealthy dependency.  I would pass the buck, ask for a redeemer to do my inner homework for me.  I am conscious of the AA saying “God will not do for you what you refuse to do for yourself.”  A healthy self would have to lead to healthy dependence.

The Jewish God concept—in which God is securely identified immanent and personal, is not quite enough for me.  Before I knew how slippery the slope of egotism is, I fashioned a God of my own beliefs and worshipped the dead letters of self-imposed law instead of Spirit.  Again, I empathize with St. Paul, who did much the same.  We both made a God of our worse selves.

I would be a terrible Muslim.  Islam posits a transcendent and impersonal God, as a corrective of the Jewish one.  I have difficulty, when I read the Quran, knowing how Allah’s commands would make me anything less than an immature disciple.  I would follow him, at the expense of myself, thereby bypassing personal work I need to do.

The Buddhist model, with its cries of “Non-self” would do the same end run around developing healthy boundaries.  Buddhism’s teaching of “interbeing” gives me the conceptual resources to see that work much more fluidly, but I would use non-self as a tool of avoidance, I know it.

In the end, I remain Christian. The Buddha was right, selves are mostly illusory, but I am not enlightened enough to avoid acting egotistically.  Whether the hereafter is more like nirvana or heaven—whether my end is a glorified self or an extinguished one-- I need to deconstruct, and reconstruct before I get there.  God concepts and self-concepts are linked.  And if, in the end, I take St. John’s advice—if I remain in Jesus--It’s because the redeemer I need is my own truest, most empowered self.  Perhaps, when I see him face to face, I will recognize that he’s been with me the whole time.