Human beings are made to discover the meaning of their lives in a sincere and generous giving and receiving of love. We are to love one another since love comes from God, and everyone who is begotten of God loves God and those whom God has created, as St John reminds us. But Original Sin has damaged our capacity to love God and others, and in a wholesome sense, even to love ourselves.
Like a supermarket trolley with biased castors, no matter how hard we try to go in the right direction, we end up veering in the direction of selfishness. Now we may speak of this bias as “self-love”, but there is actually a difference between a healthy self-love and selfishness. A healthy self-love is necessary for the Christian. It is necessary to believe that I am loveable; love-able, not perfect, massively entitled or the centre of the universe, but just loveable in the unique dignity, gifts and capacity for love that God has given me. If I am lucky, a love that affirms this truth will have been modelled to me by my parents, grandparents or someone close to me, though in a fallen world this is not always the case.
Selfishness is often, I think, the product of doubting that I am loveable. It is similar to the person who grew up in poverty and who remains incapable of generosity towards themselves or others because of the lingering fear of what it is like to have nothing.
Selfishness is at root, not a happy getting everything I want, so much as the terror of slavery to my own needs (which is why no one is more selfish than an addict). The psychology of child development uses the expression “magical thinking” for the way that an infant learns about the world. The infant cries because of some unmet need; in a normal setting someone answers, so the growing child begins to think that the cry controls the world in which it lives.
At an appropriate stage of development, when the infant has learnt to feel its world is safe because its needs are not neglected, a good parent withdraws slightly, to make it realise that the world is not controlled entirely by crying, or else there is power, a pay-off, in always being needy. The good parent reacts in such a way that the child learns to realise it is possible to wait a little, that it has not been abandoned, that the need is not immediately life-threatening. Thus the child learns to tolerate its own emotions; to self-soothe and reassure itself from an experience of the parent which it has “internalised”. In other words, the parent’s care has become real and experiential enough to be identified as another who responds to the cry, not the effect of the cry itself.
Only faith can tell me that God is present, so that when my emotional experience of God tells me He has withdrawn, I have to self-soothe with thoughts of what I have internalised of Him. That means thinking about Him and focusing on what I know Him to be like from previous experience, not fixating on the present experience of His absence and/or the pain of my inability to control Him to get my needs met.
In practical terms, it means prayer of praise and confidence. It means telling God he is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. It means reading again the promises He makes in the Scriptures: “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.’’ It means reading over His own words as one might re-read old love letters or postcards from one loved and far away, and feel again the love with which they were written and, indeed, remind Him of that: remember the love you showed of old? It means singing the songs of Zion in an alien land.
One sees this pattern in the Psalms, which were Jesus’s own prayer. There is the ‘‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’’ cry of the heart which voices the fear and need, but this concludes with expressions of confidence, so that even the emotional experience of abandonment is addressed outwards to someone very much there, so to speak, not rehearsed just to confirm my own distress.
Such faith acknowledges the feelings but does not doubt that in the fearful night, there is one who hears and who will come with comfort because he loves me; and not just because I cry.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.