Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, June 20, 2021, at 8:00 and 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
The Three Causes of Suffering
III: Low Self-Esteem
“Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively! (II Corinthians 6:11-13)
“I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The astonishing Light
Of your own Being!” (Hafiz)
[Our hearts are heavy and our minds are distracted by the news of the death of our dear friend, Fr. Bob Shearer, our priest in charge, who served us so admirably, with such verve, creativity (I’d say panache, look at all the beautification in our church) and faithfulness. His long, uphill battle with this dread COVID has come to an end, and we pray that having opened to him the gates of larger life, God will (we know) receive him into his everlasting arms.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away
Change and decay in all around I see
O Thou who changest not, abide with me]
Suffering, unhappiness, and grief, we should know by now, especially as we age, come to all of us. To be human is to know the ups and downs of daily, monthly, indeed, lifelong existence. There are the external circumstances of our lives, things over which we largely have no control. And then there are the internal reckonings, our attitudes, emotional responses and spiritual condition—in other words, how we deal with these circumstances. We hear it put like this. We may not have much to do with the cards we are dealt. It’s all about how we play those cards.
We have been looking at three of the root causes of our internal distresses. The first root cause is our reluctance, sometimes refusal, to accept life as it presents itself. This nonacceptance is in part a fool’s game: because we can rail and scream about events and circumstances, but they will play themselves out whether we want them to or not. So, acceptance in one sense is not much of an option. The burden is on us. What are we going to do? Moan and complain and hang our heads or see everything that happens to us as happening for us? In other words, hold our heads up and move from rejection to full acceptance.
A second cause of suffering is envy, a niggling form of unacceptance that can twart our happiness, erode our sense of joy, diminish our love. But envy can also be a burden we can shed by simply turning our heads toward gratitude and even deeper acceptance.
This morning I’d like us to consider a third and perhaps even more pernicious form of non-acceptance, the cause of unfathomably tragic suffering. I refer to the low self-esteem that so many millions of us feel about ourselves. Isn’t it amazing that we are all we have (right?) and yet we can develop such a low opinion of ourselves that we may wind up fruitlessly wishing to pull ourselves out of our dark place, feel like a stranger in our own skin, perhaps wish to become someone else entirely—or worse case scenario, just remove ourselves from this beautiful, if seemingly empty, life?
Perhaps we find the good humor of some of our friends a bit annoying. After all, it seems unrealistic to be happy all the time. “Come off it,” we may argue. “Life is not always a bowl of cherries.”
And how about the person who, when we ask them to help us do something, replies, “I’d be ‘more than happy’ to help you!” More than happy? That sounds like a dangerous mental condition. “We had to put Dave in a mental home. He was ‘more than happy’!”
Whatever the many and complex causes of our low self-esteem, such profound, sometimes lifelong, suffering comes out of, basically, messages we give ourselves. Talk about being our own worst enemy. It’s astounding:
- “I’ve just never been much of a success at anything.”
- “If I could just feel more comfortable being around other people.”
- “The things I’ve done with my life are too shameful even to face.”
- “If people really got to know me, I know they would despise me.”
Where do such messages come from? Isn’t it strange that when we realize that they come almost without effort from our brains, like ducks that come out on the water in a shooting gallery—that we tend to actually believe these messages! We are more apt to believe our own nonsense than even cruel criticisms from other people.
And I will say two things. I submit that 1) every single one of us tends to be harder on ourselves than we deserve and 2) that our self-criticism causes us more unhappiness than we realize.
This beating up on ourselves can be an onrush of unhappiness or a slow drip that grinds us down and keeps us in misery and out of the sunshine to which we are so richly entitled. And this detraction from our love of ourselves is bound to be projected out onto others. Love of others has to be in concert with the love of self. How could it be otherwise?
But do we want to live out the sunshine of life and of God? You tell me! Does whatever brought us here (I choose to call it a divine Father) ever want anything less than joy from us? Enjoyment, joy of life, happiness—call it what you will. The universe has better intentions for us that living a life as if it were a vale of tears. And it sure as shootin’ wants us to love others, and this is forever thwarted if we remain stuck in the bog of our self-criticism.
Did any of you ever watch a Billy Graham revival on television? Perhaps you actually saw him in person. I remember seeing his appearances as a child and watching as people from the large auditoriums filed down to his altar calls as they sang, “Just as I am.”
This hymn still sounds in my ears. Just as I am without one plea.
Just as I am. Thou wilt receive
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve
Because Thy promise I believe
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
There is no way the God we worship wants us shamed, wants us to wallow in the bog of what we think is so wrong about us. God loves us, loves us absolutely and without condition. Take the greatest human love we know that has ever been directed to us, from a parent, a lover, a friend. That love is a pale comparison to the shimmering, eternal beneficence, care and tenderness shown by the one who brought us here.
Therefore, to continue beating ourselves with the club of our self-criticism is a sadness, a thumbing our nose at God. Instead of beating ourselves with a cudgel, I heard someone suggest just using a wet noodle. And we might follow up this gentler lashing with a hearty laugh.
Turning around the bad habits of self-criticism may not come quickly or easily. It may require therapy. Learning to embrace ourselves (sometimes called “inner-child work”) can take time. All this certainly requires grace. And this grace is available all the time, in fact, at every moment.
As a wise man once said, “The whole journey of our lives is to break the boundaries we have drawn for ourselves and experience the immensity that we are.” This immensity is as broad as the sky and as deep as the ocean. In fact, if we didn’t know better, we would take it as extreme pride to liken ourselves to the divine, but this is the message of our baptism, that we have been united to Christ in his death and resurrection and are in sync, I dare say union, with God.
“Everywhere narrow shafts of divine light pierce the veil that separates heaven from earth.” (Pelagius)
I close with this poem by John O’Donohue:
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come, to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Amen