PUBLICATION OF Abba’s Child in 1994, there have been more comments on “The Impostor” than all the other chapters combined.
Well, the impostor continues to reappear in new and devilish disguises.
The slick, sick, and sinister impersonator of my true self stalks me even in my sleep. His latest stratagem is to capitalize on my “senior moments,” blocking any memory of whether I gobbled my anti-depressant and vitamin pills earlier this morning.
Cunning and crafty, this radical poseur of my egocentric desires exploits my temporary amnesia to make me forget that everything I am is grace, that on my own I cannot receive it, for even receiving it is a gift-that is, the grace to grasp grace is grace. Instead of being nonplussed at the extravagance of God’s love, in place of heartfelt gratitude for the sheer and unearned abundance of His gifts, a shameless sense of satisfaction about my accomplishments and a secure feeling of spiritual superiority invade my heart. The impostor is baffling, sly, and seductive.
He persuades me to forsake my true self, Abba’s beloved child, and, as Cummings notes, become “everybody else.”
My greatest difficulty these past years has been bringing the impostor into the presence of Jesus. I am still inclined to flagellate the false self, to beat him mercilessly for self-centeredness, to get disheartened,
discouraged, and decide that my alleged spiritual life is merely self
saltagelton has a personal history with me. When I was twenty. three vears old and a novice in the Franciscan Order in Washington, D.C., the order practiced an ancient spiritual discipline on the Friday nights of Lent. A designated cleric stood flat-footed beside the stair well on the first floor, slowly and loudly reciting Psalm S1 in Latin. Miserere
Meanwhile, the rest of us entered our cells on the second floor clutch. ing a noose-shaped instrument of torture measuring twelve inches lone. it was coiled telephone wire. Throughout the duration of the psalm, we whipped our backs and buttocks to extinguish the fire of lust. I failed away with such reckless abandon that I raised blood blisters on my back.
The following day in the showers, a cleric took one look at my bludgeoned body and reported my condition to the novice master, who reprimanded me for my intemperate zeal. Truth to tell, I was trying desperately to make myself pleasing to God.
Not so with Brother Dismas, who lived in the cell adjacent to mine.
I listened as he scourged himself so savagely I feared for both his health and his sanity. I risked a peek through his cracked door: With a bemused smile and a cigarette in his left hand, he was whacking the wall—thwack, thwack, thwack. My response? I pitied the poor wretch and returned to my cell with an insufferable sense of spiritual superiority.
Flagellation is not healthy for either the body or the soul.
The impostor must be called out of hiding and presented to Jesus, or feelings of hopelessness, confusion, shame, and failure will stalk us from dawn to dusk. Writing Abba’s Child was a profound spiritual experience for me, and I wish to share one last reflection. Certain truths can be spoken only from the well of exaggeration. In trying to describe the transcendent mystery of Abba’s love, I employed a plethora of adjectives such as infinite, outlandish, mind-bending, ineffable, and incomprehensible. Put them all together and they are still inadequate for one simple reason: Mystery is spoiled by a word.
Finally, my old and now retired spiritual director, Larry Hein, who wrote this blessing-“May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothing-ness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit”-has come up with another one:
Today on planet Earth, may you experience the wonder and beauty of yourself as Abba’s Child and temple of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord.
– Brennan Manning
——————————-
We cannot accept love from another human being when we do not love ourselves, much less accept that God could poi sibly love us.
One night a friend asked his handicapped son, “Daniel, when you
see Jesus looking at you, what do you see in His eyes?”
After a pause, the boy replied, “His eyes are filled with tears, Dad”
“Why, Dan?”
An even longer pause. “Because He is sad.”
“And why is He sad?”
Daniel stared at the floor. When at last he looked up, his eyes glit
tened with tears. “Because I’m afraid.”
The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear oflife, and our fer of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency,
Richard Foster wrote,
love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns tha we do not draw near to him. He grieves that we have forgotten him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.”
God’s sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we have sinned and failed. A “slip” for an alcoholic is a terrifying experience The obsession of the mind and body with booze returns with the will fury of a sudden storm in springtime. When the person sobers up, he ar she is devastated. When I relapsed, I had two options: yield once again to guilt, fear, and depression—or rush into the arms of my heavenly Father; choose to live as a victim of my disease—or choose to trust in Abba’s immutable love.
It is one thing to feel loved by God when our life is together and al! our support systems are in place. Then self-acceptance is relatively casy We may even claim that we are coming to like ourselves. When we are strong, on top, in control, and as the Celts say, “in fine form,” a sensed security crystallizes.
Chapter One>
IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S Short story The Turkey, the antihero and principal protagonist is a little boy named Ruller. He has a poor self-image because nothing he turns his hand to seems to work. At night in bed he overhears his parents analyzing him. “Ruller’s an unusual one,” his father says. “Why does he always play by himself?” And his mother answers,
“How am I to know?”
One day in the woods Ruller spots a wild and wounded turkey and sets off in hot pursuit. “Oh, if only I can catch it,” he cries. He will catch it, even if he has to run it out of state. He sees himself triumphantly marching through the front door of his house with the turkey slung over his shoulder and the whole family screaming, “Look at Ruller with that wild turkey! Ruller, where did you get that turkey?”
“Oh, I caught it in the woods. Maybe you would like me to catch you one sometime.”
But then the thought flashes across his mind, God will probably make me chase that damn turkey all afternoon for nothing. He knows he shouldn’t think that way about God— yet that’s the way he feels. If that’s the way he feels, can he help it? He wonders if he is unusual.
Ruller finally captures the turkey when it rolls over dead from a previous gunshot wound. He hoists it on his shoulders and begins his messianic march back through the center of town. He remember da things he had thought before he got the bird. They were pretty bad, to guesses. He figures God has stopped him before it’s too late. He shoul be very thankful. “Thank You, God,” he says. “Much obliged to You: This turkey must weigh ten pounds. You were mighty generous?
Maybe getting the turkey was a sign, he thinks. Maybe God wants him to be a preacher. He thinks of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy as he enters town with the turkey slung over his shoulder. He wants to do something for Giod, but he doesn’t know what. If anybody were playing the accordion on the street today, he would give them his dime. It is the only dime he has, but he would give it to them.
He wishes he would see somebody begging. Suddenly he prays,
“Lord, send me a beggar. Send me one before I get home.” God has put the turkey here. Surely God will send him a beggar. He knows for a fact God will send him one. Because he is an unusual child, he interests God. “Please, one right now—” And the minute he says it, an old beggar woman heads straight toward him. His heart stomps up and down in his chest. He springs at the woman, shouting, “Here, here,” thrusts the dime into her hand, and dashes on without looking back.
Slowly his heart calms, and he begins to feel a new feeling—-like being happy and embarrassed at the same time. Maybe, he thinks, he will give all his money to her. He feels as if the ground does not need to be under him any longer.
Ruller notices a group of country boys shuffling behind him. He
turns around and asks generously, “Y’all wanna see this turkey?”
They stare at him. “Where did ya get that turkey?”
“I found it in the woods. I chased it dead. See, it’s been shot under the wing!
“Lemme see it,” one boy says. Ruller hands him the turkey. The turkey’s head flies into his face as the country boy slings it up in the air and over his own shoulder and turns. The others turn with him and saunter away. They are a quarter of a mile away before Ruller moves. Finally they are so far away he can’t even see them anymore. Then he creeps toward home. He walks for a bit and then, noticing it is dark, suddenly begins to run. And Flannery O’Connor’s exquisite tale ends with these words:
“He ran faster and faster, and as he turned up the road to his house, his heart was running as fast as his legs and he was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.”
In Ruller many of us Christians stand revealed, naked, exposed. Our God, it seems, is One who benevolently gives turkeys and capriciously takes them away. When He gives them, it signals His interest in and pleasure with us. We feel close to God and are spurred to generosity.
When He takes them away, it signals His displeasure and rejection. We feel cast off by God. He is fickle, unpredictable, whimsical. He builds us up only to let us down. He remembers our past sins and retaliates by snatching the turkeys of health, wealth, inner peace, progeny, empire, success, and joy.
And so we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.” Thus, if we feel hateful toward ourselves, we assume that God feels hateful toward us.
But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves—unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely. In human form Jesus revealed to us what God is like. He exposed our projections for the idolatry they are and gave us the way to become free of them. It takes a profound conversion to accept that God is relentlessly tender and compassionate toward us just as we are —not in spite of our sins and faults (that would not be total acceptance), but with them.
Though God does not condone or sanction evil, He does not withhold His love because there is evil in us.
Because of how we feel about ourselves, it’s sometimes difficult to believe this. As numerous Christian authors, wiser and more insightful…
than I, have said: We cannot accept love from another human being when we do not love ourselves, much less accept that God could pos sibly love us.
One night a friend asked his handicapped son, “Daniel, when you see Jesus looking at you, what do you see in His eyes?”
After a pause, the boy replied, “His eyes are filled with tears, Dad”
“Why, Dan?”
An even longer pause. “Because He is sad.”
“And why is He sad?”
Daniel stared at the floor. When at last he looked up, his eyes glis-
tened with tears. “Because I’m afraid.”
The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear oflife, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency.
Richard Foster wrote, “Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near to him. He grieves that we have forgotten him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.”
God’s sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we have sinned and failed. A “slip” for an alcoholic is a terrifying experience.
The obsession of the mind and body with booze returns with the wild fury of a sudden storm in springtime. When the person sobers up, he or she is devastated. When I relapsed, I had two options: yield once again to guilt, fear, and depression—or rush into the arms of my heavenly Father; choose to live as a victim of my disease—or choose to trust in Abba’s immutable love.
It is one thing to feel loved by God when our life is together and all our support systems are in place. Then self-acceptance is relatively easy.
We may even claim that we are coming to like ourselves. When we are strong, on top, in control, and as the Celts say, “in fine form, a sense of security crystallizes.
Running Down Vimy 