In day 28, Warren tells us “there are no shortcuts to maturity.” You don’t become infinitely patient, compassionate, loving, faithful, honest, what-have-you just by deciding one day that you want to be. Before you can become what you want to be, you have to understand why you’re not that today. A lifetime of ingrained fear, shame, a sense of unworthiness and of incompleteness feed and make it difficult to give up our bad habits of defensiveness, self-pity, controlling, manipulating, anger, abuse and shaming others. It takes time, and it takes practice.
For example, I would like to be infinitely non-judgmental, but I am not that today. When reading this chapter, I got a great deal of satisfaction out of judging Warren for drawing an analogy between how Christ works in our lives and wartime tactics. He says “Christ invades our lives” at the time of conversion to Christianity and describes the pre-conversion experience as “Jesus saying, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and bomb!’” I had such a visceral reaction to this description. Who talks about a “God of love” then describes his tactics as war tactics? Who associates Jesus with bombing people, even figuratively? Who does this?! Can you even call yourself a Christian? And I know that sounds harsh, but don’t forget the Pope just recently said that if you work in the weapons industry in any capacity, you cannot call yourself a Christian.
On top of it, Warren had previously described God and Jesus thus:
God is not a cruel slave driver or a bully who uses brute force to coerce us into submission. He doesn’t try to break our will, but woos us to himself so that we might offer ourselves freely to him. God is a lover and a liberator, and surrendering to him brings freedom, not bondage. When we completely surrender ourselves to Jesus, we discover that he is not a tyrant, but a savior; not a boss, but a brother; not a dictator, but a friend.”
Not only was Warren describing Jesus as a warmonger, which I saw as absurd, he was contradicting himself, too. And I loved judging him for it.
Why?
Because we hate in others what deny in ourselves. Because we shame others for what we are ashamed of in ourselves.
What do you do when someone says something that doesn’t make sense to you? What if they openly contradict themselves? If you’re like me (or like most people, in my experience), you immediately dismiss that person as not knowing what they’re talking about. The logic goes something like “what you said doesn’t make any sense to me, therefore you don’t make any sense, therefore I’m not going to take you seriously.” In reality, dismissive behavior is less about the person being dismissed and more about the dismisser – dismissive behavior simply says “My mind is closed – I’m not open to hearing what you have to say.” It’s a defense mechanism from having to face your own shame and fear of being exactly that for which you are dismissing the other person.
Have you ever been dismissed out of hand like that? It’s a horrible experience. The person or group of people you’re talking to don’t bother to try to understand you or to help you understand them, they just write (and often laugh) you off. It makes you feel small and disrespected. At least, that’s how it makes me feel. I know some really amazing people who give two shits about being written off by others – the closed mind of others is their problem, not a reflection on the target of their derision.
Somewhere along the line, I developed a strong fear of, and aversion to, being dismissed by others. I have prided myself on my logic and rationality, and I have gone to extreme lengths to communicate better, more clearly, more exactly so that others will understand me and take me seriously (of course, there’s also the matter of whether they want to understand me, which is another issue entirely). The idea that someone might dismiss my thoughts and observations as illogical, absurd, or nonsensical is paralyzingly terrifying. The reason it’s terrifying is because a part of me believes that I deserve to be dismissed. That’s what shame is.
I don’t know why I belief that I deserve to be dismissed, but I’d bet money it starts in my childhood. That fear is what makes it so difficult to give up my judgmental habit. Because I believe that I deserve to be dismissed if I do or say something absurd, illogical or nonsensical, I project that onto others and I dismiss them as a way of distancing myself from their absurdity – by pointing out and dismissing someone else’s logical flaws, I can paint myself as perfectly logical and avoid the shame of being dismissed myself.
And it’s not just me. I see this behavior in so many of the people I know. If you’ve ever spent a lot of time with academics – especially in sciences or maths – or with engineers, you’ve definitely seen this dynamic play out over and over again. It’s a dog-eat-dog world we’ve created, y’all. And we do it to ourselves.
We shame others for what we are ashamed of in ourselves. Remember that the next time someone tries to make you feel ashamed about something (or the next time you try to shame someone else).
So, it takes time. It takes time to recognize the drivers behind our had habits – our fear and our shame. It takes time to get comfortable with confronting that fear and shame. It takes time before we can start to see that fear and shame at work in us in the present moment and to take back control. And it takes practice. What I just wrote above was an active practice in facing my fear and shame because what I really wanted to do was indulge (in the comfort and familiarity of) my judgmentalism.
Warren writes “While we worry about how fast we grow, God is concerned about how strong we grow. God views our lives from and for eternity, so he is never in a hurry…You can only give God as much of you as you understand at that moment. That’s okay.” I love this quote because it echoes every other spiritual guidance out there that tells us to be here now, to be present in the moment, not to worry about the past or the future but to focus on right now. When we get down on ourselves for be slow, for making the same mistakes over and over again, for having to learn the same lessons over and over again, it can be comforting to remind ourselves how far we’ve come. But it’s better to leave the past behind us and, instead of worrying about how many times we’ve failed, or congratulating ourselves on our progress, focus on who we want to be, and how we want to be, right here, right now, in this given moment.
Some other observations I found insightful:
We have a lot to unlearn.
Think about that statement – do you understand the gravity of it? All that stuff you learned growing up, but didn’t realize you learned it because no one “taught” it to you, it was just there, like air, and just like air, you breathed it all in without even realizing it – yeah, you have to unlearn that. A family member once said to me “the higher you climb, the harder you fall” in a well-intentioned effort to caution me against reaching too high. It was clear it had never occurred to them to question that belief. Maybe you learned that you had to be the best, and if you couldn’t be the best then you should quit. Maybe you learned that being wrong means being bad. Maybe you learned that men don’t cry. Maybe you learned that women shouldn’t compete with or challenge men. This is the kind of stuff we have to unlearn.
We are afraid to humbly face the truth about ourselves.
We all know this to be true, and if you don’t know this to be true, then you don’t know the truth about yourself and you’ve never tried to find it. Why are we afraid to face the truth about ourselves? Because
Growth is often painful and scary. There is no growth without change; there is no change without fear or loss; and there is no loss without pain. Every change involves a loss of some kind: You must let go of old ways in order to experience the new. We fear these losses, even if our old ways were self-defeating, because, like a worn out pair of shoes, they were at least comfortable and familiar.
I have felt this acutely in my life. I have been so afraid to let go of things I hated holding on to because I was afraid of what would come in to replace it. It’s scary. It’s irrational, but it’s really scary. This is one of those things you take on faith – you let go of something you just can’t hold on to anymore and you hope it works out for the best. And it does. Now you have a positive experience to refer back to the next time you’re confronted with making scary change. But it still takes faith. It always takes faith. But, little by little, it does get easier. Little by little.
TL;DR: No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.
