Marilu Thomas, “Returning the Compliment”
Sometimes a song can take you right back to a very precise moment in your life with just a note. Last week, David Bowie’s Young Americans came on my Spotify feed. An old picture came to mind. I am sitting on a couch in an expensive bar at the ski resort where I was working, wearing a black, white, and rust striped turtleneck. My very long chestnut hair is in a loose bun, and I am smoking. Everyone smoked then, so I did too. I smoked because I thought it made me look cool. I could blow a smoke ring through a smoke ring in the air. I am laughing in the picture, looking at my best friend and roommate, Patty. If you took this at face value, you would surmise I was very happy. I was young, thin, healthy, a college-graduate, with a great job, living at a ski resort, surrounded by friends. My memory, however, was that I felt very scared and hollow inside. I was sure I was unlovable and always searching your eyes for any hint of rejection. I dressed myself to fit in and be cool. I said what you wanted me to say. I was never myself. I was who you wanted me to be. I was an actor, living as a likeable chameleon. I was a Christian but believed I needed to be perfect for God to love me, and deep down I knew I was flawed but I didn’t want you to find out. My youth leader in high school told me to replace the word love in 1 Corinthians 13 with my name and that’s how I should be; patient, kind, not irritable, rude, envious, or resentful. I knew I didn’t measure up to that. I can look back with compassion on that young woman; consumed by self-loathing, self-justification, and self-sabotage, living in a hostile world and in deep need of God’s grace.
The other song that popped into my head, unbidden, was Paul Simon’s, You Can Call Me Al. “Why am I soft in the middle now? The rest of my life is so hard. Got a short little span of attention now. I need a photo opportunity; I need a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” The girl on the couch lives inside me but is aging now. The voices of imperfection are still there but now the judgement of gravity and time pull my body toward the ground, making me older, like everyone else on the planet. Who can love old? Old is not cool. I am still in need of God’s grace every day of my life.
The question at the center of this ruminating is, “Can we love ourselves despite the evidence of our imperfection?” The great commandment is, “Love your neighbor as yourself, “so we do love our neighbor as ourselves. Since we rarely love ourselves, we rarely love our neighbor. We judge ourselves harshly, so we judge our neighbor harshly. This is one of the great conundrums of Christianity. How do we love ourselves? It sounds ludicrous to our ears. Love ourselves? Isn’t that selfish? Who does that? Aren’t we supposed to be self-forgetting and self-giving?
In pastoral care and my own therapy, this is the most glaring and painful of Christian enigmas. We are nothing without God, it is true. But we are not nothing to God. Self-hate is not humility. Self-hate, or self-loathing, is a form of perfectionism gone awry, ego on parade. We hate ourselves because we feel we should be better, not have these imperfections. We fear that we were made wrong, born unwanted, not in God’s plan of perfection (which, BTW means whole). We compare ourselves to others and want what we imagine they have—assurance, confidence, love. But we are all only human. We don’t get above human, no matter what our achievements, knowledge, possessions, strength, excellent good works, or abilities. This is the message of 1 Corinthians for us today. Welcome to the human race.
Brennan Manning, in his beautiful book Abba’s Child, writes that “[W]e unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings towards ourselves. As Blaise Pascal wrote, ‘God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.’ Thus, if we feel hateful toward ourselves, we assume that God feels hateful toward us…But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves—unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely. In human form Jesus revealed to us what God is like. He exposed our projections for the idolatry that they are and gave us the way to become free of them. It takes a profound conversion to accept that God is relentless, tender, and compassionate toward us just as we are—not despite our sins and faults, but with them. Though God does not condone or sanction evil, he does not withhold His love because there is evil in us.”
Hating ourselves is hating the gift of the particular life that God has given us. It is a form of sibling rivalry with our fellow humans, vying for more of God’s bounty that we see others having. This is as old as Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, you and me.
At the suggestion of a congregational member, I have been watching Nine Perfect Strangers, by Liane Moriarity, a favorite author of mine. Nine seemingly perfect strangers pay an exorbitant amount for a 10-day, transformational wellness retreat at Tranquillum House, run by Masha, played by Nicole Kidman. But everyone has a back story, a hurt, a wound that they are protecting. The romance writer has no romance in her life. The ex-football great is an Oxi addict and not strong. The lottery winner feels worthless. The Instagram influencer believes she is unredeemably ugly. The parents feel guilty and inadequate for losing a son. The sister masks her pain with indifference. Masha promises to fix them all, make them the highest versions of themselves. But, of course, the plan goes awry because Masha is using them. There is lots of confession, but no savior. When we see ourselves through others, we forget that they also suffer from the hurt and woundedness of feeling unloved. Only God, who made us, can see us clearly and dearly with the eyes of one-way love.
Like us, these nine are not perfect and they are not strangers to God. These are two traits that God loves about us; we are imperfect and therefore in need of Him, and that He created us and calls us by name.
1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love never fails. You see yourself dimly in the mirror of self, but through Christ you will see God face to face. You are fully known and loved by God, so you do not need to hide. Come out of the tough shell you have built to protect yourself. Your knowledge or wealth or number of people in your Facebook feed do not make you loved. The fact that you were born is all you need to be loved. The love of God will never fail you because you cannot fail Him. The mind-blowing cosmic mystery is that God made himself human as Jesus Christ to show how much he loved you, to the point of death, binding your wounds to his wounds on the cross.
Lastly, I have a story that has always been very meaningful to me in understanding the difference between self-centeredness and being a steward of God’s gift of life.
There was an old jeweler who wanted to make a gift for his beloved child. He found a rock and tumbled it to a beautiful sheen, with all its characteristics and imperfections. He mounted it in a setting made especially for the finger of his child. He made a box for the ring and wrapped it with a bow, waiting for the right time to give the gift to his child. The jeweler watches as his precious child hands the unopened gift to someone else who tells them what’s inside and how they should use it, even though they are not the creator or giver of the gift.
The jeweler is, of course, God and the ring is your one life. We allow others to tell us who we are, instead of our Creator, who loves our imperfections because they drive us to Him, and He made them.
Amazingly, as we realize the love God has for us, which is a grace, a gift, not based on our goodness but on God’s goodness, we love others. It is an overflow, grace upon grace. God’s love and light flowing through us, coming out through the cracks and wounds, healing as it goes. We love because Jesus first loved us. That’s how it works. Love comes through your cracks. I’d loke to close with a prayer by Kate Bowler, “To be fully known and fully loved in all our humanity is a God sized project. Blessed are we, thankful that we can live our human sized lives in the glad company of the vulnerable and broken, the imperfect made whole in the love of God, through Jesus Christ.”
May you know the grace and love of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
