(The Nationalist, December 2004)
One of the most debilitating and crippling diseases people suffer from is a sense of worthlessness, of low self-esteem. As is often the case, language is revealing. We say, ‘Your man has notions about himself’. ‘She thinks she’s special’. (The truth is that everyone is special. There are over six thousand million people on earth, and no two of them are the same, even though we all share the one human nature.)
Negative attitudes towards ourselves make us live down to low expectations rather than reach up to high ones. (As an example: when people litter, they are saying, ‘I’m only rubbish anyway, so I deserve to live in rubbish’.) I wonder what lies behind low self-esteem. Is it memories of lost innocence? Is it that fear and guilt are the driving forces behind our morals? Is it the way we were brought up? Is it an echo of what theologians call original sin? Has it always been the case? I don’t know.
Along with this, people often have a more powerful sense of the absence than of the presence of God. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is an example. She wrote, ‘Sometimes… I find it difficult to believe in the existence of anything except the clouds which limit my horizon’. This is not surprising in a society like ours which has lost contact with nature and with community. Dante’s vision of hell – a place where no one knows anyone else, a place of noise and smoke – is a good image of a city.
‘Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Who shall stand in God’s holy place? The one with clean hands and pure heart, who desires not worthless things’, said the Psalmist. That would seem to rule out most of us. But the birth of Christ means we don’t have to climb up to God, because God has climbed down to us. It means God is no longer remote, but with us, among us. ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’, or among you, that is, in your relationships.
God became like us so that we might become like him. God’s coming among us in the person of Jesus is a help for sinners, not a reward for saints. Jesus is the real presence of God among us, the image of the invisible God. He is the saviour, that is to say, the one who takes away sin. (The name “Jesus” means “God is saviour”.)
It was not Jesus’ purpose to bring about self-improvement. He became a person, not to give us a moral toning up, however good that might be. He became human so that God’s life which was in him might also be born in us. In our lives, in our efforts here and now to do right, what is decisive is that we surrender ourselves to God. And that never separates itself from doing God’s will. God comes to us when we offer a cup of water to the thirsty.