Personal Worth 5: Two Christians

            I intend in this blog to illustrate a problem with the conception of human worth and worthiness in the context of Christian thought and experience. I will do so using two fictional Christians. The first, Jeremy, is admittedly a foil and less fully dimensioned because I’m not Jeremy. I’m more like Samuel, for whom the issue is much more pressing and painful.

            Jeremy is confident. Jeremy is grand. Jeremy is an upstanding Christian dude with a good name, and a wife and kids. He believes in Original Sin, meaning that he believes that all humanity is “born in sin” and worthy of condemnation because of their sin. He knows that all of his righteousness is filthy rags before God and that he is nothing before God, having no “good” in and of himself (Is. 64:6, Rom. 3:10, Rom. 3:23). He believes he is a wretched sinner and has accepted that he cannot save himself but has been saved by the grace of God. And that is a beautiful thing.

The doctrine of Original Sin is perhaps at the same time a of doctrine of human unworthiness. We deserve nothing but condemnation, but God saves us anyways. We are unworthy of saving, but he saves us anyways. All entirely orthodox, good wholesome stuff, right?

            Note, for interest, however, that while Jeremy believes in his unworthiness, in a theological sense, he also has a pre-rational assumption of self-worth. He believes that he is “unworthy” but at the same time behaves as though he has worth. How so?

            Well, Jeremy believes, truly just assumes on pre-rational level, that he is worth spending time with. He behaves, in fact, as though he is worth spending time with. He has some confidence in his social aptitude. He does not go out expecting to cause harm, and indeed, he usually does not. Jeremy believes he is right about many things and has some confidence in his intelligence. He has, furthermore, significant confidence in his character and in his capacity to behave morally. All of these internal confidences have a great deal to do with self-worth. They are not an assumption of unworthiness on the deepest level.

            Jeremy asserts his self-worth. Jeremy asserts his needs, usually in healthy ways, but behold, sometimes even in wrongs ways. How is he justified in such assertions? Well, he feels justified in them because he believes inwardly, that his needs are worth attending to. Furthermore, Jeremy, believing that his self is worth protecting, defends himself when he is rebuked or insulted. Often, Jeremy is right to do so. Jeremy defends his character with confidence. When he is accused of something, he does not immediately assume that the accusation is correct. Rather, firstly he assumes that they are wrong. How does he have such confidence apart from a belief that he has worthiness of respect? How does he defend himself without some confidence in his character? How does he demand to be heard and understood without the assumption of having worthiness?

            Jeremy’s relationship with his wife is relatively healthy. He is securely attached, meaning that he does not live with constant suspicion that he’s not worthy of companionship and commitment. He trusts implicitly that she counts him to be worthy of her affection and does not worry about her abandoning him.

            There is secure attachment also between him and his friends. He does not live with a constant suspicion that he’s not worthy of their respect and attention. He takes for granted that they want to spend time with him. Again, he assumes implicitly that he’s worth spending time with. He has an innate confidence that, in general, people enjoy his personality and appreciate his words and his presence. He trusts, also, that his relationships are resilient and can withstand conflict.

            Jeremy believes theoretically that he is morally depraved and “unworthy” and yet behaves relationally with an assumption of some kind of worthiness. He doesn’t behave as though he assumes that he is a moral monster. While Jeremy believes theologically that he is nothing and that he was born in sin, he at the same time regularly feels justified in defending his character and his name. He will occasionally defend that he was correct, even when he was in fact wrong.

            Jeremey is not entirely aware of the self-worth that he takes for granted. He is comfortable calling himself a depraved sinner – comfortable calling himself “nothing”. His self-worth, however, is very present and relatively healthy except when exercised at the cost of other people. There’s a contradiction in Jeremy assuming his worthiness while professing his unworthiness.  Apart from a delineation of meanings of “worthiness”, there’s a paradox in this.

            The second man, Samuel, also believes in Original Sin. He believes all the same things theologically, but it interacts very differently with his self-worth. Samuel has had, since a very young age, a pre-rational belief in his unworthiness and nothing since has restored his self-worth. So, when he professes that he is a depraved sinner, born in sin, with no good in and of himself, whose righteousness is filthy rags before God, who is nothing and who is unworthy – when he says this, it means something different for him that it does for Jeremy.

            Samuel has a visceral, active, enflamed sense of personal wrongness and wretchedness. “Unworthiness” is a natural designation for how awful he feels about himself all the time except in moments when he gets significant praise or does something notable. Samuel lives in an inner dark, with a profound sense of having something within him that repels, or not having the capacity to truly love. He fears not having the capacity to be good, and of therefore being consigned to an existence in which he can never truly have trusting intimacy with others. He despises himself and persistently second-guesses the quality and morality of his relational behaviours. He always questions himself and the value of his life. Samuel is in a veritable ocean of existential shame.  

            Samuel doe not assume to be worthy of care, affection, or connection. He does not assume worthiness of understanding, love, or solidarity. It takes very little to confirm this to him about himself.  

            Samuel has a soul-wound, an injury to the sense of existential security that one needs to survive. Those who totally lose it, try to end themselves. Those in whom it falters strive to regain what they’ve lost or never had, which they need like air but can hardly define. The wound then in those like Samuel, becomes a phantom puppeteer. Samuel has needed an intervention at the level of his identity, but it has not arrived, or not so sufficiently. Samuel has needed crisis-level care, but he does not know it. He just blames himself and tries to be better.

            If a child loses his finger in a garburator, the affirmation of his worth in that moment is to stop the bleeding and take him to the ER. The child needs extra attention and surgical care. If his caretakers and society trivialize and neglect his wound immediately and prolongedly, the child will inevitably assume of themselves an unworthiness of care.

            So also does a child with a soul-wound, accrued in grief and trauma – so too does this child need his worth affirmed by special and attentive care to that wound. This child needs his bids for care, no matter what they look like, to be recognized, not trivialized, and not treated as neediness or arrogance. The soul wound is itself a pre-rational sense of being unworthy and the trivialization of his cries for help will be experienced by him as a confirmation of his unworthiness.

            All too often the soul-wounds of children are not seen and attended. It’s not always easy to interpret the heart of a child. Who can rightly discern their acting out or their withdrawal as symptomatic of a significant mental health challenge? Not all parents have psychology degrees.

            Samuel is one of those children for whom the persistence of their soul-wound has resulted in an assumption of unworthiness. This assumption has caused him to react by developing convoluted methods of saving himself from the void-maw of unworthiness. Now he is an adult, and he is suffering.

            Few onlookers could see the gaping wound within him because he has learned to compensate with a fierce and desperate excellence of character. He takes on a great deal of relational responsibility because he craves the shot of self-worth that rescuing people provides. He takes on a great deal of responsibility academically and vocationally because he craves the shot of self-worth he gets from esteem and accomplishment. The self-worth bolstering effect of the shot fades as fast and hard as a street drug, however, and he is left once again assuming his ineptitude, insufficiency, immorality, and un-lovability. So, though he is praised regularly for his accomplishments, there’s a gaping hole in the bottom of his self-worth reservoir. All the affirmation leaks out rapidly even as he tries to bucket it back in.

            He is injured at the soul, and he knows that people are really just praising the illusion-self that he has constructed to save himself. They praise the self that he’s constructed, which is a product of his worth-compensation behaviours. He hates his worth-compensation behaviours, but he also needs them. They are the only means he knows by which to stay above the void-maw of un-worthiness. He is contorted by them, by people-pleasing and perfectionism and hyper-compliance.

            Samuel also knows what legalism is, and so he is aware that attempts to secure God’s love by “works” or performance (of any kind) are futile and humanistically arrogant. For this reason, he has a framework with which to determine that his attempts to validate himself before God and others are futile. “Just trust in the sufficiency of Christ!” he demands of himself, but his persisting experience of shame, depression, and anxiety tell him that, though he tries, he is not able to trust in the sufficiency of Christ. He wonders if he is capable of trusting God’s love. That’s all he’s tried to do, but he does not feel the contentment and security that that love is supposed to provide. He sees, instead, that his worth-compensation patterns rule him. Since they look like legalism, inasmuch as they are attempts to gain God’s love, he condemns himself for legalism. He does not know to call the underlying craving a legitimate need. Instead, he calls it arrogance or even sin.

            Samuel also has a framework with which to understand his worth-compensation behaviours to be visibly odd and even repelling to others. He’s often been evaluated as “too nice” with some derision, and evaluated as needy, desperate, awkward, and arrogant. Some are confused by how much he needs assurance. His friends and family are troubled by the weight of that need for assurance. Most people don’t live at that level of neediness. It looks like narcissism and can be perceived as thinking highly of himself. He sees that his behaviours repel people and he’s rarely exactly sure why. His bids for attention become increasingly sophisticated because, though he can hardly survive judgement and rejection, he still needs assurance like oxygen.

            He sees needy behaviours in other people, but these people might be shameless about it. He sees that these people get ostracized by their communities. He is so, so desperately scared that that will happen to him as well. He feels like the same anathema – the curse – that these other people are treated as. He also feels intimately how consuming and exasperating these people’s neediness is when given purchase, because he cannot protect himself from them. He is hyper-compliant and people-pleasing and unable to set boundaries. So, he lets them exhaust him, despising it, while knowing that he has the same neediness under his more sophisticated façade. He feels very much that his communities will discover that he is as heavy and consuming as these shamelessly needy people.

            He cannot but identify with them, and comes to call himself a problem, a burden. He feels like a menace, a monster, a black hole of need, especially after he is rejected by a girl he loves.

            He falls for her, and though there was some attraction on her part, she communicates to him that his needs are far too great for her to carry. Though he is rejected politely, Samuel has no way of understanding this as anything other than a confirmation of his deep unworthiness. “I am a monster,” he says. It’s not at all clear to his friends how he got to that conclusion. For him, however, it is the naturally conclusion because he has always felt, and now he knows for sure, that he is bound to repel people and is not worthy of true intimacy. No one who sees beyond his façade will love him, he suspects. The intensity of his needs is now more extreme then ever, having come to the fore in a failed romantic pursuit. He cannot receive the rejection with objectivity. He has not the resilience required to withstand the heartbreak and come to more reasonable conclusions.

            Samuel is insecurely attached to his friends. He does not assume that he is worthy of their time and thus he, with survival intensity, remains alert to their responses to him and constantly adapts to those responses to make sure he’s pleasing them – to make himself affirmable. He needs their approval to survive. In complex ways, he does this with his family as well, because he is not securely attached to them either.

            He is hyper-compliant, and does not have power to resist people’s asks or demands because he needs people’s approval to survive. Even mild, passing expressions of disapproval have disproportionate power to wreck his spirit and confirm that he is repellant.

He cannot stand up for himself in conflict. Since he innately assumes his wretchedness and wrongness, Samuel usually is convinced that people’s explicit or implicit accusations against him are correct. Experiencing disapproval, he feels a rush of anger to defend himself, but this anger he instinctively turns on himself, for he is wretched and worthy of condemnation and he surely deserves such disapproval. So, when Samuel is hurt and angry, the ultimate result is that he hates himself for being worthy of being hurt.

            On account of his strong sense of unworthiness and the resulting behaviours, Samuel is legitimately unable to experience intimacy without anxiety. Samuel cannot really feel loved because his inner world does not permit him to trust in given affection or in whatever might otherwise affirm his worth. He is insecurely attached with God and everyone.

            When Samuel hears and absorbs the Christian idea of Original Sin – of human unworthiness – the result is a problematic compounding of these ideas with his shame. He hears that he is nothing, that all his righteousness is filthy rags, that he has no good in and of himself. It is confirmed for him again that he is repellant, that he is a monster, that he is burden, that he is a problem. He has theological justification for the reasons that he wants to die. Christianity has not, at large, given him peace even though he accepted the gospel as a child. Though he theoretically believes that he is saved by grace through faith – he still suffers at an existential level in a way that Christians are not supposed to.

            He is Christian, and believes that he is not worth loving. It’s an active question for him whether he is worth attention and care. He effectively believes he has no rights and has no power to assert rights and needs. He effectively believes that he deserved neglect and abuses that he received at various points in his life. When he does, anxiously, assert his needs, he is often thereafter ashamed, especially when the other responds with derision and dismissal. It takes very little to convince him that he did not have the right to assert and ask in the first place. He becomes ashamed of having the need and of making it known. His needs persist, however, and inevitably surface, often in unhealthy, convoluted ways.

            Believing in Original Sin and human unworthiness is a different experience for Samuel than it is for Jeremy. Jeremy can believe the doctrine and still confidently assert his needs. Samuel cannot. Jeremy can believe in his theological unworthiness but also defend himself in conflict because he has an innate sense of dignity and worthiness of respect. Samuel cannot because he does not. Jeremy can believe in his theological unworthiness and still set boundaries with people and stand up for himself. Samuel believes in his theological unworthiness and has no power to stand up for himself. The two carry the theology of Original Sin in very different ways. The two experience “unworthiness” in very different ways.

            Sadly, Jeremy is not postured in a way that enables him to understand Samuel or have compassion on him. Jeremey is annoyed by Samuel’s hyper-compliance, people pleasing, and other ways by which he demonstrates an aggravated need for assurance. Jeremy is disdainful of it and thinks that it’s an arrogance. Samuel, Jeremy thinks, must think very highly of himself to be so constantly bidding for approval. Samuel, Jeremy thinks, should just accept that he is an unworthy sinner, “like I have.” Jeremy cannot understand that Samuel’s attempts to secure approval come not from high self-worth but rather low self-worth.

            An aspect of the problem is the difference between the twos’ understandings of what “unworthy” means. The other problem is the difference between their experiences of self, particularly that Jeremey does not have a mental illness of note, while Samuel does. I’ll try in a next blog to delineate between meanings of “unworthiness” and provide a way of communicating the necessary ideas in a safe way for someone with mental illness. For now, however, I remark that for Samuel, “unworthiness” is a terrible weight to carry, and his conception of Christian teaching is not helping him.