Follow my story as I pondered a great and baffling mystery, and then solved it—and then discovered a whole new mystery.
I was having some strange, inexplicable symptoms. I was sluggish and lacked energy. I wasn’t moving well, and I had lots of reflux. But mostly, and most strangely, my pants felt a little tight. What could it all mean?
I thought about it for a while, analysed the content of the past several weeks, assembled and studied the facts at my disposal, and after a while, I arrived at the conclusion: Me eat too much food, and so me get little bit fat.
That’s it. That’s all that was going on. I had been super busy and distracted, so I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. That’s what happened.
Perhaps you are wondering why this whole situation was in any way a puzzle me. Most people, when faced with a clue like “tight pants” would pretty quickly arrive at the answer “more belly.” Most of my life, I would have done the same thing. So why didn’t I figure it out?
Because one thing was missing: The crushing shame and self-loathing that has always come along with a little bit of weight gain, my entire life. I was just a little bit bigger, and it was because I was eating a little bit more. There wasn’t any “YOU USELESS VERMIN” about it; but without that special ingredient of self castigation, I genuinely didn’t recognise what was going on.
A similar thing happened to me a few years ago. I had to get up and do something, but there was something wrong with my arms and legs. They hurt and felt weak and sore and unready. I didn’t understand what was happening to me for several minutes, but eventually it dawned on me: I was tired.
Same story as the weight gain: I didn’t recognise what was going on, because I wasn’t dragging myself through that familiar wretched landscape of second-guessing and guilt, where I accused myself of being lazy and interrogated myself about why I was so unwilling to do such an easy thing. Without this extra burden of self-loathing, I literally could not identify what I was feeling as simple tiredness. I was very, very used to being tired; I was completely unfamiliar with being tired and just accepting that as an objective fact, without tarting it up in an ugly disguise of self-blame.
If you had asked me, “Is it the worst sin in the world to eat cookies for snacks several days in a row?” or “Should a working mother of ten feel ashamed for being tired?” I would have answered: “What? No! Goodness, of course not!”
But deep down, I believed it. I didn’t even know I believed it for years, until I suddenly stopped believing it.
I’m telling you about my particular brand of crazy because I think most of us are like this, in one way or another. Maybe not about our eating habits or about how much rest we’re getting, but about something. We are very bad at understanding our own lives, and at looking at our experiences simply and directly. Very few people know how to accept a simple existential meal without garnishing it with lots of red herrings.
And we do this spiritually, too. Probably most of all. I think everyone I know does this spiritually, except for young children and some people with intellectual disabilities. Goodness knows it’s rampant among Catholic writers! We say all the right things: That God loves us without reserve; that it is good that we exist; that to follow Jesus is the only way to eternal life. We say God loves us, and we think we believe it.
But the way life goes, it’s almost impossible to avoid dressing up these truths with a lot of unpleasant disguises, because of things we’re taught, or things we begin to intuit because of HOW we’re taught; because of problems with our mental or physical health; because of how we spend our time and who we spend our time listening to. Or because we give over little bits of our will and our powers of perception to things that make us dumber, blinder, and more confused. We say we believe God loves us, but what would it feel like to know this simply and wholeheartedly, without anything extra attached to it because of weakness and sin? Just that: God loves me, full stop.
I don’t know. But knowing that I don’t know is a valuable step.
I realise that, throughout my life, any time I’ve entertained the thought that God loves me, that objective truth has been mixed and tangled and disguised and veiled by a dozen other extraneous, harmful, probably downright false other ideas and emotions; and these have worked together very effectively to make it hard for me to see what’s really happening. God loves me, full stop.
Do I believe this?
I’m making progress. Sometimes I can hear this phrase for minutes at a time before adding on a bunch of dependent clauses and counterarguments and miscellaneous inarticulate howling. I have started to see that the purpose of life is to slowly pare away every dumb, ugly, irrelevant thought besides the thought that God loves me. And if you had told me, 10 years ago, that self-love and God’s love are so intimately entwined with each other, I would have scoffed at your limp and lame theology. But it’s true. That’s how it works.
That is the essential kernel of my existence: That God loves me. It is why God made me; it is what God made me for. God loves me, full stop. I don’t quite believe it yet! But I’m making progress.
Author of The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning