Last month, I did a funeral for a man who I shall call Luke. I visited him biweekly along with his wife for six months. One of his struggles as he approached his death was his inability to experience God’s love. Like most Christians, he was taught that God unconditionally loved him and yet for him this love was a statement of faith. He claimed that he could not recall any time that he had sensed God’s love personally. For me, this was a big surprise considering how gracious and caring this man was. How could such a caring man not be able to feel God’s gracious love for himself? This is the question I want to explore in this blog for I have found that many people struggle to experience God’s unconditional love despite being caring people. When Christians say that God’s love is unconditional, they are saying that God’s love is always present, available for people to encounter. I often compare God’s love to the sun that is always shining on our planet. The sun’s light and warmth is unconditional, that is, the sun is constantly shining upon our earth regardless of what is happening on it. Without this constant shining, there would be no life on Earth. However, as we all know, just because the sun is shining does not mean we experience this warmth and light consistently on the surface of our planet. Sometimes there are heavy clouds that block the sun rays causing our world to be cooler. Sometimes, since the Earth is circular, only half the planet gets sunlight causing there to be a daily cycle when we have brighter warmer days and darker cooler nights. Sometimes, the distance between the sun and earth increases causing us to experience seasons of cool falls and cold winters when the hours of daylight lessen. I want to suggest the same is true about God’s love. God’s love is always emanating from the centre of our soul. This teaching of love appears in many places in the Bible but one place where the theme of God’s love is front and centre is found in the Epistle of 1 John. Here we read the following:
This scripture highlights that any love we express is because we are experiencing this Divine love arising from our centre. This is why Luke, my palliative care client, was able to be so caring to others in his life. He was the ultimate host to anyone who visited his home. When he was in this mental place, we saw a gentler side to him, a gracious side, a playful side, a creative side, a loving side that came out as he related to people. He made others feel special. God’s love was emanating from his centre to all the people he cared for. And yet, this man claimed that he was rarely aware of God’s love flowing toward him in the same way it flowed through him to those around him. I remember asking him if he ever experienced the sense of being God’s beloved, of being special in God’s eye. He answered "no", but he was intrigued about how this could happen. On the day when Luke and I were exploring this notion of him being God’s beloved, I pulled out my Bible and read the story of Jesus’ baptism to him. It goes like this: In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.’ (Mark 1: 9-11) I am a former pastor within the Mennonite Christian tradition. In this tradition, we practice adult baptism. Often at these adult baptisms, these words of Jesus’ baptism are read. And when, I, as a pastor, poured water over the heads of youth and adults for their baptism, I would purposely say to them, “Hear these words from God, “You are my beloved child. With you, I am well pleased.” I wanted each of them to experience and know deep in their hearts that they are one of God’s beloved sons or beloved daughters. Luke was quite fascinated by this story. He did a ton of research on the meaning of the dove in this Bible story, which is a symbol of God’s Holy Spirit. He hoped, I think, that in doing this research, he would find the secret to experiencing this sense of being God’s beloved. While Luke longed to experience being God’s beloved, he believed the way to this goal was to be a perfect Christian man. He highly valued truth, rightness, and integrity and these were values he believed he should live perfectly, at least he tried. However, he often felt he fell short of the ideal that God wanted of him. He could always point to ways that he failed to live up to what God expected of him. He reasoned that this was why he didn’t experience God’s gracious love or the sense of being God’s beloved child. This is why he micromanaged himself so much; he wanted to make sure he lived up to God’s ideal for his life. I remember encouraging Luke to not micromanage himself but have faith in the gracious nature of God. The phrase “don’t micromanage but have faith” was a phrase he wrote down from my visit and became a mantra he often said to himself when he caught himself judging himself too much. This is a common issue I find in my spiritual care work. Many people struggle with an active inner critic voice that is constantly monitoring their behavior and telling them how sinful they are. As a result, the experience of God’s grace or the sense of being God’s beloved, of being special in God’s eye, is hard for people to discover. Within the church, we often encourage people to pray to God about these condemning voices. Some people believe these critical voices is God trying to convict us so we will repent of our mistakes. They are not. But how does one pray to God about these voices so that they might go away? Even within the counseling profession, a common approach is to help people develop strategies so that they stop listening to these inner critic voices. But often these counselling methods teach clients ways to manage these unhelpful dynamics so that they become less of a problem. When we take this approach, we fall into the same trap that Luke did. We end up micromanaging our negative voices/thoughts and as result, we find the experience of being God’s beloved totally elusive. I have found the Internal Family System (IFS) model of psychotherapy a helpful model in understanding these negative voices and how to help people hear and experience the gracious voice of God and the sense of the Beloved. Within IFS, this pattern of micromanaging and hearing condemning thoughts involves a dance between three parts of our personality including two Protector parts and a young Exile part. Our Exile contains all the memories, feelings, and beliefs that arise from painful times in our past. When we are in touch with this part, we often feel very young, vulnerable, and experience to some extent the negative emotions tied to these traumatic memories. If we are really identified with this Exile part, we become this little boy or girl and find ourselves reliving our traumatic memories all over again. Since our soul wants to avoid feeling such traumatic experiences again, a Protector develops early in our life whose goal is to avoid these painful times in the future through micromanaging. Our Micromanager constantly monitors our experience to make sure we do nothing that may trigger the traumatic pain within our unresolved memories. Our Micromanager may cause us to avoid people or situations, numb our bodies and feelings, or be careful with what we say or do so that we never create circumstances that may cause our Exile to relive its past trauma. Our Micromanager does everything it can to keep people from getting angry at us or hurting us in any way. Our Micromanager's goal is to keep our wounded child part hidden away so that we never relive those painful memories again. The downside of having an active Micromanager is that our young Exile is always isolated, disconnected from others, and has to live with its pain alone. As a result, our Exile is frequently looking for safe places to connect with others for support and love. This means that our Exile and Micromanager have cross-purposes. While our Exile longs for caring connection, our Micromanager seeks to avoid this vulnerability so that no future trauma will happen. Despite our Micromanager’s best efforts, painful or scary situations still arise in our life that cause our Exile to relive its painful past. Because this happened regularly when we were young, our soul developed a second Protector, often called the Inner Critic, whose task is to make sure this trauma never happens again by punishing the Exile and Micromanager when it does. Our Inner Critic is often patterned after the people who traumatized us as children. The words our Inner Critic spew out at our Micromanager or Exile often resonate with what we heard as a child from those who hurt us through their words and/or behaviors. This gives you a good description of the various parts, but lets see how this dance plays out in real life. During a normal day, our Micromanager is monitoring our behavior guiding our life in such a cautious way that our Exile feels safe and secure. When that is happening, our inner world is fairly quiet. However, our Exile longs for caring connection which cannot happen if our Micromanager is always protecting it. When our Inner Critic notices our Exile wanting to risk being vulnerable to experience loving connection, it becomes critical of our Exile and our Micromanager through lots of negative thoughts and self-talk triggering feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. These critical thoughts remind us of the dangers of being vulnerable and so we stay cautious and safe. However, due to its loneliness, our Exile sometimes convinces our Micromanager to allow it to come out so caring connection can happen. When this happens, we may take a risk by sharing what we think with a friend or family member. Sometimes, though, they may react in ways that trigger our young Exile’s past trauma. When this happens, immediately our Exile becomes scared. Our Micromanager jumps in quickly to rescue us to safety. But it is the Inner Critic that does the major damage. A major Inner Critic attack happens. It begins to attack our Exile and Micromanager by shaming them for their incompetency. It might call them “worthless”, “useless”, “hopeless”, “unlovable”, “incompetent”, “you did it again”, “stupid”, and the list goes on. Because of this shame attack, our young Exile becomes more traumatized and wants to hide. Our Micromanager becomes even more determined and hypervigilant in making sure such inner critic attacks don’t happen in the future. As a result, our Exile becomes even more hidden, protected, and isolated. All people have these three parts to some extent: a young Exile, a Micromanager, and an Inner Critic. How powerful these dynamics operate in our soul depend on how much trauma we have experienced throughout our life. Knowing this common human dynamic, you can begin to appreciate why people struggle in experiencing the flow of God’s love to them within their soul. To do so means that their soul needs to move into a place a vulnerability, a place of unguardedness where the experience of Being can arise, but this can only arise when our Micromanager is quiet. This is a rare experience, especially for people like Luke who have a very active Micromanager and Inner Critic. In Luke’s case, he had a Micromanager that helped him become his ideal of what a good Christian man should be. His Micromanager constantly monitored his life in terms of truth, rightness, and integrity. Every time his Micromanager noticed a shortcoming or failure, his Inner Critic would jump in and shame him through one of its many condemning critic attacks. Now, we can appreciate why Luke struggled so much with a sense of self-failure and why the experience of God’s gracious love was such an elusive experience for him. To enter that place of vulnerability and Being was a very rare experience for Luke. And yet, Luke’s young Exile so badly wanted to feel this loving connection with God, to feel this sense of being God’s beloved.
It seems that Luke is in a hopeless place with his experience of faith. This is a spiritual dilemma for every human being. On one side, we have Micromanager and Inner Critic parts that keep us from becoming vulnerable so that we can experience the Spirit of God in our lives. On the other hand, we have a young Exile part that struggles often with unworthiness and isolation and longs for caring connection with Being and God. How can we rise above this impossible dilemma to encounter the gracious love of God? That is the goal of next month’s blog. Questions to Ponder: 1. Luke longed to experience God’s gracious love and sense of being God’s beloved, and yet he claimed that it was something he rarely if ever experienced. How do you resonate with his experience? Can you relate with him, or is your experience of God different? 2. How do you experience the three parts that make up this Inner Critic dance:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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