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>> Spirituality: What
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Spirituality and the Dimensions of Love
I know old faithful people who tell of their childhood experience that they have been told a God who has kept them small, who made them shy and anxious, who instilled in them constant feelings of guilt and inferiority. It is only through their own personal journey of faith that they have found a God who is not only merciful, but also loving, who gives them freedom, independence and self-confidence, and in return gives them spiritual strength.
Whether people in Christian spirituality are more likely to experience feelings of inferiority or find a healthy sense of self-esteem depends to a large extent on their image of God, on what relationship in their conception God has to man and in what role man sees himself in relation to God. Or to put it in other words, how the authority of God and His work in the world and in the life of the individual is understood.
In Jesus' message, God appears less as a ruler than as a motherly, loving Father. Man is understood less as a servant but as a child of God or a friend of Jesus. Servants must serve, children are allowed to grow up. A person who does not have to function primarily according to the will of authorities, but who is allowed to grow and mature spiritually, has favorable conditions to develope a healthy self-confidence. Like the love of good parents for their children, at different ages, represents different forms of nourishment for the soul, likewise God's love for us human beings also contains different dimensions to nourish the soul, which is essential to build a healthy self-esteem and to overcome feelings of inferiority. These dimensions of love mainly include the following:
Experiencing these dimensions of love in relationship to God - or through "God's representatives" in the form of loving people - and keeping oneself open to the inward flow of these soul energies through spiritual forms of life is essential for a healthy religiosity, which wants to be nourishment and strengthening for a healthy self-esteem. How these dimensions of love are to be understood in the Christian faith: => Top of page
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It is one of the most important spiritual experiences to be perceived and fully loved by God. Some experience this in a kind of wordless prayer: They let themselves be looked at by God and experience themselves accepted with the diversity of their inner being. They feel, here I am affirmed as a whole, here I don't have to hide anything, here I can take off my masks, here I can engage in mental disarmament, I need fewer protective mechanisms and defensive strategies, here I can look at myself honestly and allow myself to be as I am. This gives me the chance to understand myself better and to work on myself without having to bend my mind compulsively. Because basically, I can be who I am first. It is not self-evident that a person perceives himself how things are with him, and it is not self-evident that he accepts himself as he is. The more honest we are with ourselves, the more we discover in ourselves inadequacies, misconduct, burdensome characteristics, from which fellow human beings and the environment have to suffer. But also physical, mental and character weaknesses prevent that we can always realize our goals, our values, our good intentions. We experience ourselves small, often helpless and powerless in the face of a lot that is painful and unjust in our world. These various forms of smallness, weakness and helplessness in one's own life must be consciously perceived and accepted. In the Bible there are helpful words of encouragement and consolation. One of the most beautiful formulations in the Old Testament is the prayer in Psalm 8: "What is man that you remember him, what is man's child that you take care of him?" Similarly in Isa 49.15f: "Can a woman forget her child,… and even if she may forget it, I will not forget you: behold, I have marked you in my hands.“ To man aggrieved by guilt, the prophet Isaiah says, "If your sins were red like scarlatina, they shall become white like snow." (Isa 1,18). In the New Testament, Jesus demonstratively shows that God's special attention is given to the so-called sinners. This he also expresses in his parables, such as the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) and the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7). A key phrase on this subject is the formulation of the first Beatitude in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the poor ..." (Mt 5:3) These texts invite us to perceive ourselves with our own human misery and to experience ourselves as accepted and affirmed in the eyes of God. These formulations want to free ("redeem") man from the manifold attempts to compensate his feelings of inferiority. An essential aspect of "redemption" in the Christian sense can therefore be understood in such a way that we are addressed by God through these sentences of the Bible, through which he assures us of a fundamental right to exist, worthiness and lovableness, which is given to us in our existence as "children of God", and which we therefore do not have to earn, not to make sacrifices for, not to ask for or to work for. => Top of page
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It is the experience that in the relationship with God I do not only experience security in the comprehensive being accepted and loved, but that this love makes me feel that it is not taking possession and keeping me in dependence, that it does not only transmit a feeling of belonging to everything, but that it gives me freedom and leaves me free. With this I can discover my own being, find my own "I myself" and experience the freedom that enables me to shape the basic relationships of my life in my own sovereignty and to realize my gifts and talents in such a way that the originality and uniqueness of my being gets the chance to become visible to me and to other people, so that my soul can "come into the world". This is also about enduring the fear and uncertainty that can arise discovering of one's own originality and in what makes me profoundly different from others. For the freedom that is so important to us human beings, we experience not only as an inner spiritual expanse that opens up many possibilities for us, but also as "being thrown", as existentialism has presented it to us in a drastic way, also as a being " thrown back" to ourselves. Freedom that doesn't know any security and no inner being held can lead to a frightening experience of loneliness. Security, which does not open the way to freedom, we experience like a golden cage, which in the end represents a mental relationship of possession. Genuine love is always giving freedom, enabling independence, is always connected with respect for the otherness of the other person. Discovering and feeling this love in relationship with God gives a strong sense of self-esteem. People who have experienced this become independent in their faith, inwardly free and strong, even if they were taught the faith in childhood with intimidation and fear-mongering. => Top of page
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Soul-nourishing, healthy love not only gives us a sense of belonging and security, not only enables us to develop our need for freedom and self-realization, but also opens our eyes to our interconnectedness with the larger life contexts of human communities and ecological interdependencies. Thus, love that really takes us seriously also confronts us with the challenges of communal life. Since, in the Christian sense, God's love and mercy applies to people of all peoples, all cultures, religions and social classes, which is expressed by the word "catholic" in the sense of "all-embracing, concerning the whole", the believing person, in being loved by God, also experiences the call to broaden the horizons of his compassion, his willingness to understand, his solidarity and his respect for others. He experiences this as a call to "repent," to "rethink," to "convert." Man often experiences this aspect of love as a questioning and uncertainty of previous patterns of behavior and models of life, as a painful "healing of the blind", as a confrontation with the necessities of communal life. For the pacification and healing of human communities, the primary concern is for the disadvantaged, the poor and the most deprived. Even if this dimension of love can be felt as particularly painful and challenging, it ultimately strengthens self-esteem; for the person who is able to recognize the demands of communal life in all dimensions of human existence and meets them in a humanly valuable way develops a different self-confidence than a person who is blind to them and lives along in narrow-minded self-sufficiency. In therapeutic work, too, there is the experience that a person with a growing awareness of their social and existential relationships and a corresponding willingness to take responsibility is more self-confident and satisfied than a person who only represents one’s own interests with a very limited horizon. => Top of page
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We also experience love, which is supposed to nourish our self-esteem, above all, when we are assigned an area of responsibility or grow into an area of responsibility ourselves, as happens, for example, when getting married and starting a family. Here, granted freedom is experienced not only as the offer of various possibilities, but as an obligation to make decisions that binds us to people and tasks. Only in such bonds our talents and gifts, our nature and our originality can unfold in such a way that we can take ourselves seriously as adults in a comprehensive way and experience ourselves taken seriously. Some believing parents experience this "entrusted responsibility" for the newborn at their child's baptism celebration as a spiritual experience that allows them to feel a deep sense of self-worth. In the Bible, spiritual experiences in this sense are often presented as "vocation narratives" of prophets and other eminent persons, in which not infrequently the "vocationee" defends himself and points to his youth, like the prophet Jeremiah, or to his inability to speak, like Moses. Some people initially experience the trust they are given and the area of responsibility they are assigned as an imposition or excessive demand and first have to grow into their tasks. Not only how one deals with trust or with impositions of this kind shapes one's own self-confidence in the long term, but also how one deals with excessive demands, with defeats, with failure and helplessness is essential for the development of our self-esteem. It is the experience of people of faith even today that God expects us to take on responsibility and tasks in the sense of a more human world, but that he also carries us and holds us inwardly in our failures, disappointments and even in our self-inflicted failures. It is precisely this aspect of the spiritual experience of the relationship with God that can be a decisive support for a healthy self-esteem. => Top of page
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Not only in an optimum development of his life man can develop self-esteem and overcome feelings of inferiority, also in the degradation or limitation of his physical and mental possibilities he has a longing for a healthy self-confidence. Anyone who only looks at life from the perspective of success will probably find this to be an impossibility; for him, illness and aging and the associated side effects will only be interpreted as stunted life. But those who have a lot of contact with old and dying people know what peace, what comforting and strengthening energies are emitted by people who have accepted their life story, their physical transience and the fact of their imminent death. Talking with such people about "God and the world", about "life and death", can awaken in others in the full vigor of their life, a sense of the essential and the unessential in everyday human concerns for others. In such conversations, one gets an idea of the spiritual path that these people have gone through, through insecurities and tremors. Some can put it into words that on this path they have learned to let go and let loose so much that used to be so important and valuable to them, and that in this process inner comfort and security have flown to them. Since they cannot understand this spiritual strengthening in connection with their diminishing strengths as a result of their physical situation, they experience this all the more as receiving a gift. It is precisely this experience that makes possible again a new kind of self-esteem, which has a certain similarity with the feeling of a child who experiences himself to be comprehensively loved, endowed, and affirmed; but the old person, in his experience of having to let go, can perceive everything that he has created, all the love that he has given and the creative power he has invested. He knows himself to belong to the world, to human relations and communities in a different way than a child does. He sees what has grown and remains in terms of inner connection and meaning for each other, even if he no longer has life "under control" in the way he did in his earlier years. He can watch and let go, he can "meet his maker" and knows himself connected to the "temporal" as he is to the "eternal".
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A healthy
spirituality is about discovering these different sources of love in God,
becoming open to these different forms of spiritual nourishment and allowing
oneself to be blessed by them.
Manfred Hanglberger (www.hanglberger-manfred.de)
Translated by: Ingeborg Schmutte
LINK to share: https://hanglberger-manfred.de/en-spirituality-and-love.htm
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