Five Funky Dysfunctions – Self Esteem
March 21, 2010
March 21, 2010
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 18:15-17
As many of you know, I have a son attending college in Minnesota at St. Olaf College. I was driving to pick him up for a visit home in late January, when I noticed that I was losing air in my right rear tire. I stopped in Red Wing, and settled in at the tire store with the dog to wait for the tire repair. While I was there, a man drove in with a van and came inside to inquire about replacing a tire. The store manager showed him a tire, and the man asked “Don’t you have anything bigger?” The manager explained that this was the same size tire as was currently on the van, And the fellow replied, “I’d like something bigger – I want people to know that a MAN is driving.” And as I worked very hard to suppress a giggle, I thought – someone has a self esteem problem.
Ultimately, our self esteem is tied to our self image – who are we? How do we define our own sense of self? By the car we drive? Or its tires? By what we have? By what we do? By our relationships? While we may laugh at the idea of building a sense of self on big tires, many of us define ourselves at least somewhat by what we have. I know I like my funky little PT Cruiser – it is kind of counter-cool in its own way, sort of like me. Similarly, our clothes are even more of a way we express who we are – but there’s a difference between expressing our sense of self, and building a self.
A large part of our identity also comes from what we do – we’re athletes, or honor role students, or skaters – and later in life we’re teachers, or doctors, or managers. And many people find, even later upon retirement, that building a sense of self entirely around what we do turns out not to be adequate. Sometimes people find that even earlier – upon losing a job, or taking time away from work to stay with young children, or to care for an aging parent.
A lot of our identity comes from our relationships – we are someone’s daughter or brother or wife or father. We are friends with some, colleagues with others, teammates with some, and we go to the same church as others. Some of that identity comes in labeling: are you so-and-so’s brother? Sometimes that makes us proud, sometimes it annoys us. We probably love our family members, but it turns out that we’d like to have our own identity, too. Both of these – relationships and individuality – are important to our identity. It’s important to have these in balance – relationships are essential to being human, and if we can’t engage with others, we will not be healthy. But it’s also essential that we not entirely define ourselves through others – we need to learn how to be alone as well. Some people don’t learn this for a long time – they have to be with people all the time, and if they can’t be with friends, they’ll be watching TV or listening to the radio – they are just not comfortable being alone. I was like that when I was a teen and young adult. It took a while before I could appreciate solitude and not confuse it with loneliness.
Contemplative activist and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote this year, while he was on hermitage, “Do you know what the answer for deep loneliness is? Solitude! No one would have ever imagined it, but I promise you it is true. In solitude, we are able to let God [which he also calls reality] define us from the inside out. We stop looking outside of ourselves for diversions, entertainment, or real satisfaction…. When we keep looking outside of ourselves, we always and forever need another and then another diversion. In solitude we slowly learn to live face to face with a Presence that asks nothing of us but presence in return. It is too good to be true. This is the birth of the soul.” (I would have said, the birth of the awareness of the soul.) As we think about God as being present within all of creation, we remember the nurturing, delighting love God has for us as described in the passage from Isaiah, when God says to us “you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” Think of this! In the sight of God, which sees both who we really are, and who we were created to be, we are precious. And God honors us – the love of God is not possessive or manipulative – God honors us. God loves us. In the presence of God, we are totally safe, and we are thoroughly loved. And so we can begin to know ourselves as the beloved children of God that we truly are.
This is what the writer Søren Kierkegaard describes in this way “the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it.” That is, we become centered, grounded, rooted in the love of God. And at our best, we do this transparently – living openly, authentically from our truest self, instead of from an image we construct to keep ourselves safe. We are already safe when we ground ourselves in the love of God. And if this is the beginning of the awareness of our soul, surely it is the center of our identity as well. We can choose to define ourselves through other people, through stuff, through what we do – or we can take as our starting point who we are in God.
But most of us have trouble staying centered on who we are in God – we get distracted, not only by our stuff, and what we do, and our other relationships, but also by all the things we’ve talked about so far in Lent: we hurry, we worry, we get angry, we substitute other things for what God wants to be to us, so that we live by addiction instead of grace. That is, we live by our own efforts to meet our deepest needs instead of in grateful response to the love of God. And, because we never slow down enough to spend time with ourselves, and experience ourselves as deeply beloved by God, we may not even know ourselves or like ourselves very much. Part of the reason we may need to be with other people, whether in person or on TV, is to distract ourselves from facing the discomfort we feel when we spend time with ourselves, if we haven’t become transparently grounded in the love that is the ground of all being.
I remember years ago reading somewhere, “Hurry isn’t of the devil, hurry is the devil.” Perhaps it’s true – if our busy busy lives keep us from being fully present to our families and our friends, to ourselves and to God. We may have time with our families, but it seems like we are always in a hurry, and so spend much of our family time running, or trying to check in quickly, rather than having a long, leisurely chat. And we hurry our time with God, too – we have time in worship, but most Sundays we are hurrying to get to church and have a long list of things to do when we finish.
Because most of the time, our self esteem comes from what we accomplish, and from our sense of our gifts and talents. Of course, on many days these are more than balanced by the things we’re not very good at, or things we would have to describe as flaws, if we were being honest with ourselves. Some days, our dark side seems to swallow up the rest of us, so that all we are is our faults. And we can be very judgmental with ourselves and with others so that flaws are all that we see, and they become our identity. Or we can be so afraid of honestly facing our flaws that we deny them, and judge others to improve our own estimate of ourselves. Our strengths and our weaknesses are really two sides of the same trait, but too often, we forget that. These are the times we need to go back to words like those from Isaiah – You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you. God delights in us – flaws and all!
We need to accept ourselves, and to accept our mistakes – the story is told about Thomas Edison who when he was trying to make an electric light bulb, failed 10,000 times to make it work. A friend said “You must be really discouraged.” Edison, though, responded that he hadn’t failed, but he had successfully eliminated 10,000 combinations that wouldn’t work. When our kids were young, a book called Raising Your Spirited Child, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, taught me to understand my children differently – seeing their most challenging traits in more positive terms. I came to describe the son I experienced as resistant to guidance as ‘very inner-directed’ – and in a world where people so often go with the crowd, that’s a good thing!
And, we need to understand ourselves as children, too – for we are indeed God’s children, and there are childlike qualities that are important to our experiencing ourselves as children of God, and that – according to Jesus – are important to our ever experiencing the Kingdom of God, that is, the reality and wonder of God in the world. And sadly, in our time, when kids have learned from the cynicism and passionless coolness of the Simpsons and South Park, even kids need to learn how to be children.
Children play, children give and receive love freely, children are imaginative and experience life with immediacy – that is, they are present to the moment. And, as David Jensen points out in his book Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood, most of all, children are vulnerable – they are powerless in a world that orders itself around power, and in their vulnerability, they indeed are bearing the image of the vulnerable God. William Placher, in Narratives of a Vulnerable God, describes the vulnerability of God: God the creator who allows God’s heart to be vulnerable to us, who cares whether or not we respond in love to the love that always comes first from God. God the Christ, who relinquished any claim to power in order to come among us, entering our world as an infant, and remaining vulnerable in his death on the cross.
Jesus tells us that we need to be like children to enter the kingdom – so perhaps we need to rediscover our own vulnerability and own it rather than denying it. Let us freely give and receive love, let us dally in the moment, let us wholeheartedly depend on love, especially on the grounding, soul-birthing love of God.
As the apostle Paul writes, to the church at Ephesus, “[May] you, being rooted and grounded in love… have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. ” Amen.
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 18:15-17
As many of you know, I have a son attending college in Minnesota at St. Olaf College. I was driving to pick him up for a visit home in late January, when I noticed that I was losing air in my right rear tire. I stopped in Red Wing, and settled in at the tire store with the dog to wait for the tire repair. While I was there, a man drove in with a van and came inside to inquire about replacing a tire. The store manager showed him a tire, and the man asked “Don’t you have anything bigger?” The manager explained that this was the same size tire as was currently on the van, And the fellow replied, “I’d like something bigger – I want people to know that a MAN is driving.” And as I worked very hard to suppress a giggle, I thought – someone has a self esteem problem.
Ultimately, our self esteem is tied to our self image – who are we? How do we define our own sense of self? By the car we drive? Or its tires? By what we have? By what we do? By our relationships? While we may laugh at the idea of building a sense of self on big tires, many of us define ourselves at least somewhat by what we have. I know I like my funky little PT Cruiser – it is kind of counter-cool in its own way, sort of like me. Similarly, our clothes are even more of a way we express who we are – but there’s a difference between expressing our sense of self, and building a self.
A large part of our identity also comes from what we do – we’re athletes, or honor role students, or skaters – and later in life we’re teachers, or doctors, or managers. And many people find, even later upon retirement, that building a sense of self entirely around what we do turns out not to be adequate. Sometimes people find that even earlier – upon losing a job, or taking time away from work to stay with young children, or to care for an aging parent.
A lot of our identity comes from our relationships – we are someone’s daughter or brother or wife or father. We are friends with some, colleagues with others, teammates with some, and we go to the same church as others. Some of that identity comes in labeling: are you so-and-so’s brother? Sometimes that makes us proud, sometimes it annoys us. We probably love our family members, but it turns out that we’d like to have our own identity, too. Both of these – relationships and individuality – are important to our identity. It’s important to have these in balance – relationships are essential to being human, and if we can’t engage with others, we will not be healthy. But it’s also essential that we not entirely define ourselves through others – we need to learn how to be alone as well. Some people don’t learn this for a long time – they have to be with people all the time, and if they can’t be with friends, they’ll be watching TV or listening to the radio – they are just not comfortable being alone. I was like that when I was a teen and young adult. It took a while before I could appreciate solitude and not confuse it with loneliness.
Contemplative activist and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote this year, while he was on hermitage, “Do you know what the answer for deep loneliness is? Solitude! No one would have ever imagined it, but I promise you it is true. In solitude, we are able to let God [which he also calls reality] define us from the inside out. We stop looking outside of ourselves for diversions, entertainment, or real satisfaction…. When we keep looking outside of ourselves, we always and forever need another and then another diversion. In solitude we slowly learn to live face to face with a Presence that asks nothing of us but presence in return. It is too good to be true. This is the birth of the soul.” (I would have said, the birth of the awareness of the soul.) As we think about God as being present within all of creation, we remember the nurturing, delighting love God has for us as described in the passage from Isaiah, when God says to us “you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” Think of this! In the sight of God, which sees both who we really are, and who we were created to be, we are precious. And God honors us – the love of God is not possessive or manipulative – God honors us. God loves us. In the presence of God, we are totally safe, and we are thoroughly loved. And so we can begin to know ourselves as the beloved children of God that we truly are.
This is what the writer Søren Kierkegaard describes in this way “the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it.” That is, we become centered, grounded, rooted in the love of God. And at our best, we do this transparently – living openly, authentically from our truest self, instead of from an image we construct to keep ourselves safe. We are already safe when we ground ourselves in the love of God. And if this is the beginning of the awareness of our soul, surely it is the center of our identity as well. We can choose to define ourselves through other people, through stuff, through what we do – or we can take as our starting point who we are in God.
But most of us have trouble staying centered on who we are in God – we get distracted, not only by our stuff, and what we do, and our other relationships, but also by all the things we’ve talked about so far in Lent: we hurry, we worry, we get angry, we substitute other things for what God wants to be to us, so that we live by addiction instead of grace. That is, we live by our own efforts to meet our deepest needs instead of in grateful response to the love of God. And, because we never slow down enough to spend time with ourselves, and experience ourselves as deeply beloved by God, we may not even know ourselves or like ourselves very much. Part of the reason we may need to be with other people, whether in person or on TV, is to distract ourselves from facing the discomfort we feel when we spend time with ourselves, if we haven’t become transparently grounded in the love that is the ground of all being.
I remember years ago reading somewhere, “Hurry isn’t of the devil, hurry is the devil.” Perhaps it’s true – if our busy busy lives keep us from being fully present to our families and our friends, to ourselves and to God. We may have time with our families, but it seems like we are always in a hurry, and so spend much of our family time running, or trying to check in quickly, rather than having a long, leisurely chat. And we hurry our time with God, too – we have time in worship, but most Sundays we are hurrying to get to church and have a long list of things to do when we finish.
Because most of the time, our self esteem comes from what we accomplish, and from our sense of our gifts and talents. Of course, on many days these are more than balanced by the things we’re not very good at, or things we would have to describe as flaws, if we were being honest with ourselves. Some days, our dark side seems to swallow up the rest of us, so that all we are is our faults. And we can be very judgmental with ourselves and with others so that flaws are all that we see, and they become our identity. Or we can be so afraid of honestly facing our flaws that we deny them, and judge others to improve our own estimate of ourselves. Our strengths and our weaknesses are really two sides of the same trait, but too often, we forget that. These are the times we need to go back to words like those from Isaiah – You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you. God delights in us – flaws and all!
We need to accept ourselves, and to accept our mistakes – the story is told about Thomas Edison who when he was trying to make an electric light bulb, failed 10,000 times to make it work. A friend said “You must be really discouraged.” Edison, though, responded that he hadn’t failed, but he had successfully eliminated 10,000 combinations that wouldn’t work. When our kids were young, a book called Raising Your Spirited Child, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, taught me to understand my children differently – seeing their most challenging traits in more positive terms. I came to describe the son I experienced as resistant to guidance as ‘very inner-directed’ – and in a world where people so often go with the crowd, that’s a good thing!
And, we need to understand ourselves as children, too – for we are indeed God’s children, and there are childlike qualities that are important to our experiencing ourselves as children of God, and that – according to Jesus – are important to our ever experiencing the Kingdom of God, that is, the reality and wonder of God in the world. And sadly, in our time, when kids have learned from the cynicism and passionless coolness of the Simpsons and South Park, even kids need to learn how to be children.
Children play, children give and receive love freely, children are imaginative and experience life with immediacy – that is, they are present to the moment. And, as David Jensen points out in his book Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood, most of all, children are vulnerable – they are powerless in a world that orders itself around power, and in their vulnerability, they indeed are bearing the image of the vulnerable God. William Placher, in Narratives of a Vulnerable God, describes the vulnerability of God: God the creator who allows God’s heart to be vulnerable to us, who cares whether or not we respond in love to the love that always comes first from God. God the Christ, who relinquished any claim to power in order to come among us, entering our world as an infant, and remaining vulnerable in his death on the cross.
Jesus tells us that we need to be like children to enter the kingdom – so perhaps we need to rediscover our own vulnerability and own it rather than denying it. Let us freely give and receive love, let us dally in the moment, let us wholeheartedly depend on love, especially on the grounding, soul-birthing love of God.
As the apostle Paul writes, to the church at Ephesus, “[May] you, being rooted and grounded in love… have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. ” Amen.