Assurance for the modern age. (Part 8)

Assurance for the modern age

Part 8: The powerful engine of the inner life

This sounds good in terms of our relationship to the outer world. How can a secular ideology help us in our inner life? Ways of life, such as meditation, enjoyment of beauty and creativity, fostering community life and enriching friendships are all important. What about our relationship with ourself? I struggle to envisage a secular alternative because, for me, my relationship with God is the method, or means, of conducting my relationship with myself. A sceptic, certainly a cynic, might say that this is what my faith in God is: a way of relating to myself, using God as a mechanism to review, direct and improve both my behaviour and my state of mind – to do with my inner happiness, peace of mind, confidence in coping etc. Let’s suppose for a moment that they sceptic/cynic is right – well, it’s a very effective mechanism! If, when I (falsely, perhaps) believe that I am in conversation with God, I am really in conversation with myself, then I have to declare that faith in God is humanity’s most brilliant ever invention. It successfully enables me to have access to inexhaustible reservoirs of goodness, love, forgiveness, peace, reassurance, confidence, strength etc etc etc! It enables me to pour love into my life! If God is not real, then when I believe God is saying to me, “Don’t worry, I love you”, then what is really happening is that I am saying to myself, “Don’t worry, I love you”. In this case, the “lie” -that God loves me – is proving amazingly effective, in making me feel loved. Now, as soon as I confront the possibility that all my faith is doing is saying to myself, “Don’t worry, I love you”, then I am appalled. What I have understood to be a gift from a compassionate and gracious God is really just self-serving massaging of my ego. I could not possibly accept what I currently understand to be a gift of God’s love if I came to believe that I am really just engaging in self-love. I am not certain, but I pick up some signs that in our modern society, expert psychologists might say, “No, this is right! We ought to bestow this sort of self-love on ourselves”. Now I am the sceptical one. Humanity is so intent on self-interested manipulation and distortion of the truth, that I truly doubt that self-love, overtly understood in this way, can be a good thing. Perhaps we will return to consider this point more. For now, my faith experience is that – because I understand the message of love to be coming from God – I can accept it, precisely because I am not doing it to myself, but receiving it as a gift from another. Before our sceptical secularist seizes on this to denounce religion as simply a method for self-love, we can note the religious impulse of constant penitence because, as well as God’s message of love to us, we believers constantly feel the need of confessing, “Forgive me Lord, for I am a wicked sinner!”. While a modern psychologist might criticise this impulse as unhealthy for mental health, for the believer it becomes a vital mechanism for avoiding precisely that self-serving love that humanity is so adept at, and which religious believers might fall into.