Beyond Self-Redemption

"The temptation to take over God's role in our life is the essence of the false self" M. Robert Mullholland, The Deeper Journey

As I read that the other day, it struck me that not only am I tempted to take over God's role in my life in asserting myself outwardly (to control the circumstances of my life) but also inwardly--specifically in my own redemption.

We are born weak and helpless. Eventually we develop skills that overcome some of our weaknesses, but we continually find more weaknesses--there's always more stuff that we can't quite do. So we set out in search of redemption and transformation of this weak self, and there's plenty of redemptive stories that we are invited to participate in.

For much of our country's history, there was the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' redemptive story. This had spectacular results in terms of the growth and development of America as the most powerful nation in the world. But it was a story based primarily on fear (failure was always in the near-rear-view mirror) and it demanded a good bit of denial of the internal life. There's no time to be a sissy when you're busy pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

For the latter half of the twentieth century, the counter-redemptive story that was offered was largely therapeutic--with pop-psychology blossoming all over the western world and especially in the U.S. This was the over-reaction of "feelings rule all" to the previous extreme of the bootstraps redemptive story that essentially dismissed feelings.

Of course, there are many other redemptive stories that circulate around (financial success, sexual conquests, popularity contests), but with these two you begin to get the picture.

But basically, these are all the same thing: attempts of "the false self" to do what only God can do: genuine redemption, a real change of the weak and broken self to a fully human person.

God is the Personalizing Person. He meets broken and weak people and invites them into a story that is genuinely re-making them. It consists both of continuity (we are still recognizably tied to our own history and stories and families of origins and ethnicity) and a radical discontinuity (the old is gone, the new has come).

I suggest that all of us hook our lives into one redemptive story or another--even a 'religious' one that actually uses God for our own prop instead of having God re-make us. As Mullholland suggests, to hook our lives into a redemptive story where we play God will always leave us with a false-self, an empty person. It will always be a half-redemption, if that, and the questions and doubts will always linger--am I still that same old person? This false self must die, or we will die with it long before we actually leave this world.