Going Back in Order to God Forward
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, prt. 3
Wildwind Community Church
October 24, 2010
In order to not cause confusion, I am naming each of the sermons in this series after whatever we’re covering in the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality book that week. So last week’s sermon was called Know Yourself, That You May Know God, but I really wanted to call it False Self/True Self. Today’s message is called Going Back in Order to God Forward, but what I’d really like to call it is, “People Who Never Leave.” People Who Never Leave. Do you know anybody like that? I’m talking about people who come over to your house, and they’re usually people you really love and care about, but the problem is that they never leave. It’s super hard getting them to call it a night and head home. I think we all know people like that. Some people are just that way.
But there’s a certain sense in which we’re all that way – or at least most of us. Unfortunately, most of us are people who never leave.
Genesis 2:24 (NIV)
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
The scripture says a man needs to leave his father and his mother in order to be united to his wife. And it’s not written in the text, but we can safely assume it’s not just the man who has leaving to do. After all, the man is to be united to his wife, not his wife and her mamma and her daddy. A man’s failure to really leave his family of origin results in inability to be joined to his wife, and a woman’s failure to really leave her family of origin will just as surely result in her inability to be joined to her husband. Count on it.
Man, do I see a lot of this in my work with couples. There are a lot of men out there who seem to be full-grown men, who have wives and kids and work hard and do man-things, but who really have never left home – have never really grown up, have never moved into a grown-up identity. I’m beating around the bush. A lot of men are mamma’s boys. I work with couples where the wife is dying a little bit everyday as she slowly wilts from the insults or rejection of her husband’s mother, while he refuses to confront his mother and defend his wife. Guys, I don’t pretend to fully understand the way into a woman’s heart, but I can tell you the way out of it. Just make a habit of letting your mamma come between you and your wife. If you are one of those men in the unfortunate position of having a mom who does not respect your wife, does not allow her to be all that she deserves to be in your life, the surest way to damage your marriage is to run to your mom’s defense before your run to your wife’s. If when the chips are down, you are more afraid of hurting mommy’s feelings than hurting your wife’s, you have made your choice, and this fact is never lost on a woman. She knows how she rates in your life.
Ladies, your turn. I see this in women too. Only with women, it is not normally a failure to separate from mamma, it is a failure to separate from – okay – honestly, it’s mamma again. A lot of the time (not always) when someone is feeling like they lacked a connection to a parent, it was the father they lacked a connection to, that’s where dads come into play here. But most of the time when an adult of either sex was smothered by a parent, it is the mother they were smothered by. The way women usually fail to separate from mommy is in prioritizing time with her mother above time with her husband. Women defend this by saying “You don’t understand, my mom is my best friend.” And of course it’s important and beautiful for a mom and her daughter to remain close all of the daughter’s life, but not when mommy comes between husband and wife. At some point (clearly marriage is one such point!), we have to change our priorities. Guys, if mom is disrespecting your wife, then the task falls to you to make your wife the priority she deserves to be. Ladies, if your mom is demanding a lot of your time and you’re fortunate enough to have a husband who loves being around you and would like to be with you more often, the task falls to you to make your husband the priority he deserves to be.
These are just two examples of ways in which we fail to leave. They show how our past continues to exert influence on us today. They are easy to see, easy to talk about. But what about other ways in which our past continues to exert influence on us? On page 99 of the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero offers examples of false messages we may receive in our families of origin. These messages become assumptions and can guide our attitudes and behaviors unless they are uncovered, exposed as falsehoods, and intentionally changed. I’m going to whip down this list very quickly. Remember, these are falsehoods, but they are sometimes taught as truth to us as children, and we accept them as truth:
•Money is the best source of security
•The more money you have, the more important you are
•Making lots of money proves you “made it”
•Avoid conflict at all costs
•Don’t get people mad at you
•Loud, angry, constant fighting is normal
•Sex is not to be spoken about openly
•Men can be promiscuous, but women must be chaste
•Sexuality in marriage will come easily and will never create problems. If it creates problems, you are abnormal or are with the wrong person
•Sadness is a sign of weakness
•You may not be depressed
•You need to get over losses quickly and move on
•Anger is dangerous and bad
•You can make your point better if you explode in anger
•Sarcasm is an acceptable way of managing anger
•You owe your parents for all they’ve done for you
•Don’t speak of your family’s “dirty laundry” in public
•Duty to family and culture comes before everything
•Don’t trust people – they will let you down
•If I just do [x or y], nobody will ever hurt me again
•Do not show vulnerability
•Only be close friends with people who are like you
•Do not marry a person of another race or culture
•Certain cultures/races are not as good as mine
•Success is getting into the best schools
•Success is making a lot of money
•Success is getting married and having children
•You are not allowed to have certain feelings
•Your feelings are not important
•Reacting emotionally without thinking is acceptable
I would add some things to this list.
•Parenting well is more about luck than about skill
•Parents and children will be at odds with each other and have continual conflict
•Parents should just be buddies to their children and not really set limits
•Children exist to serve and please their parents
•There is a such thing as affirming kids too much. If I do this, they will become arrogant.
•Parents exist only to serve their children
•Parents should prioritize the kids above the marriage
•Having a good marriage is just about finding the right person
•Eventually, all husbands and wives end up disappointed in each other
•If your marriage is good, it is because you got lucky
•Ultimately, no one finds happiness or lives joyfully
•It is not possible to really live in truth
•You should not express emotion by hugging or touching your spouse or children
•Parents should never argue in front of the kids
•Your ideas, your feelings, and your view of the world are stupid and you are not free to share them
•You must achieve to be loved
•I cannot be a man unless I stuff my emotions
•I cannot be a woman unless I wear my emotions on my sleeve
•God will not love you unless you do what I say
•All churches are filled with hypocrites
•Everyone in the world is just trying to get what they can get for themselves. Don’t ever be foolish enough to think that anybody just wants to do what is right
You could add many more, based on your own family of origin. The thing that is dangerous about these false messages we receive in childhood is not simply that they are false. In fact the real danger about them is how many of them are not given to us as blatant messages. Very few parents will ever sit down with their children and say, “Son/daughter – if you want my love and approval, you have to bring home all A’s.” Or “Sweetheart, I will love you as long as you are chaste, but if in a moment of weakness you end up getting pregnant, don’t count on me for compassion or love.” Of course some of these things parents will come right out and tell us, but many of them were just accepted as truth by our own parents (because their parents before them accepted them!), and taught to us as assumptions – things we pick up very clearly from the way our own parents and grandparents behaved. Because many of these messages were not clearly articulated, but just embodied and practiced and passed on to us that way, we therefore often fail as adults to articulate them so that we can see them for the falsehoods that they are. Instead, we assume they are true on some level, and we keep trying to live according to them. But of course, they are false, and falsehood is not reality, and when we live most of our lives out of sync with reality, we are certain to suffer the painful consequences. So some say, “Do I have to do this, Dave? This Emotionally Healthy Spirituality thing sounds painful – I’m going to have to see a lot of things I’d rather not see, and deal with a lot of stuff I’d rather not deal with. Do I have to go back into my painful past in order to go forward?” The answer is of course not. You don’t HAVE to do anything. And there IS some pain involved in going back, in getting healthy, in shedding the false self, in facing reality. But some of you are in pain right now. It is left to every person to decide when has the pain of staying in my false self become so bad that I am willing to move into the pain of shedding it and letting it go in order to move into the peace and love that I will find in the true self. And some people will ask, “But will I go to hell if I don’t do this?” I’ll give you the answer the saints seemed to arrive at. The road to hell is hell all the way to hell. In other words, it’s not about whether you’ll GO to hell. It is that if you are living falsely, you are in hell right now, and the call from God is to be “saved” – to come out of darkness and move into the light of truth.
1 Peter 2:9 (NRSV)
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
To some people, it seems like it’s an even trade. Some people say, well, I’m in pain right now as I experience the painful consequences of living in the false self (the fear, the insecurity, the guilt, the regrets, the sadness, the shame, etc.). I could move through the false self towards the true self, but this too causes pain. If there’s pain either way, why not just stay in the false self? Either way there’s suffering involved, and I really, really don’t want to go back to look at these painful things from my past. It is true that both paths involve pain. But the difference between the suffering of the false self and the suffering we encounter as we shed the false self and move into the true self is that the suffering of the false self is non-redemptive suffering. It is non-redemptive. How? Because all suffering that happens that does not ultimately teach us a lesson about reality, and move us toward living more fully in the light of truth and reality, is non-redemptive suffering. It does not accomplish anything. It is pain for pain’s sake. If you suffer because of your fears, your insecurities, your efforts to defend the false self, then you are suffering to prop up a lie. Even if you succeed in doing this, what have you gained? The privilege of living in a lie for a little while longer.
Instead of pointless and ridiculous and wasted suffering in the false self, we could instead willingly confront our falseness, our emptiness, our hollowness, the shallowness of the lies we have accepted and built our lives on. And yes, of course this brings pain, but it is redemptive pain. It is pain that leads us out of darkness, out of shame! It is pain that leads us into marvelous light. It is pain that leads us from glory to glory, as scripture says – a journey of ever-increasing truth and joy and beauty and freedom and love.
2 Corinthians 3:18 (HCSB)
18 We all, with unveiled faces, are reflecting the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory...
But we gotta be willing to LEAVE!! Allow me to illustrate. There is a kind of comfort that comes from sitting on the couch. We avoid exertion. We watch TV. We stare off into space. We just go with the mindless flow. But eventually, our comfort turns to discomfort, as we develop a headache from all that TV, or we get thirsty or hungry, or our back starts to hurt. At that moment we have a choice to make. We can ask someone to go get us some water, or some food, or some aspirin, so that we can remain where we are. We can refuse to leave. This is non-redemptive pain. Or we can make a choice to leave the couch and go for a walk. Now if we do this, we will also experience pain – perhaps in a knee, or our back, or even that piercing pain in our side. But this is redemptive pain. Why? Because the more we do it, the better shape we find ourselves in, and the better shape we get into, the less pain we live with. So the process of getting out of pain is painful. But staying in pain is also painful, and the pain that is caused by a choice to remain in pain can never go away. Because we have actually chosen to remain in pain.
Now I want to speak briefly to those of you who are thinking, “But I’m not in pain. In fact the only pain I’m experiencing at all is the pain of having to listen to you constantly talk about pain.” I have no doubt that some of you are in that place. And I just want to say this. Living in the false self is always painful. If you are in your false self and do not feel your pain, you have simply gotten used to it. I was talking to a person earlier this week who was reflecting on having lost a lot of weight recently, and that person said, “It’s strange. When I was big I wasn’t really aware of being in pain. But after I dropped the weight, I started thinking back on where I was, and realizing how tired I always was, how I could never do anything, how everything exhausted me, how I was afraid of what others were thinking about me. I just didn’t see it then because I wasn’t ready to do anything about it.”
That may describe some of you here today. You have to go back in order to go forward. You have to confront the myths and the lies that your false self is built on in order to move past them and find freedom. You have to be willing to leave! To leave those false ideas and break the destructive patterns that have come down to you from your family of origin. But maybe you aren’t feeling any pain so you don’t feel motivated to do it. To you I simply want to say: don’t worry about it. Truly. Don’t worry about it. As I said earlier, you can’t leave the false self anyway, until it becomes so painful living in it that you will do absolutely anything to get rid of it. So do your thing. If during this series you are able to reflect on some experiences and some truths that cause you to feel some real pain that could eventually be redemptive, and you could maybe begin to follow out that pain out of falsehood and into truth, so much the better. If not, your time will come! The time comes for all of us where we are confronted with that choice and that possibility, and the choice is always completely up to us.
By the time we are adults, the false self – that fake thing we built to protect us from pain – has become a prison and is itself causing us pain. The false self has its time when we need it, and it is effective. But the time comes when we have to leave it behind and let it begin to fall off. It’s not useful anymore. The party is over. So the question is whether you will end up like one of those people who never leave, who never catch the cue that the party is over and it’s time to move on. Whether you will be like the husband who chooses mamma over his wife, or the wife who chooses mamma over her husband. Or whether you will actually be willing to leave. If you are beginning to suspect you’d like to leave, like to be on the journey toward the true self, like to experience redemptive pain instead of non-redemptive pain, all you need to do is hang with us. Keep reading the book. Keep doing your daily offices and sitting in silence. Keep working in your workbook and being honest with yourself when you answer the questions. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The student of course is you, and the teacher, of course, is the Holy Spirit. I just want to encourage you this morning. Don’t be one of those people who never leave. Put away childish things. Choose pain that leads you out of pain, not pain that keeps you wrapped in it.
1 Peter 2:9 (NRSV)
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
