By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
During the traditional 40 days of Advent, I set out on a modified fast, eating only what I could produce in my home garden. It’s not an extensive garden, but I can produce quite a bit of food (including eggs from our hens and allowing a few exceptions like olive oil and coffee!)
I had planned to pause for Thanksgiving, then get back on “the wagon” until Christmas Day. But I underestimated the attraction of other foods and overestimated my will power against them. Needless to say, from Thanksgiving onward, it was a struggle between sticking with the plan or abandoning it in the face of piles of holiday treats, none of which originated in my garden.
This leads to the underlying struggle: between shame and acceptance. Fasting — or any spiritual or religious practice for that matter — has no intrinsic value. I am not a practitioner of “magic.” Fasting, or prayer, or Bible study or charitable giving do not magically obligate God to reward me with some prize, be it righteousness, warm feelings or a big congregation. God is not duty-bound to obey when I get the incantation just right. This is a transactional view of deity that many monotheists have stumbled into, and most “spiritual but not religious” folks have consciously adopted. It’s summarized in platitudes like “just be a good person” or when caught in a scandal we say, “that’s not who I am.”
It’s the raw material from which toxic shame is cast, and it affects me, too.
I feel shame because I set out to do something and I did not succeed. The English word for this condition is “failure.” Failure is the bully who has ambushed me every day for, well, as long as I can remember. Every time I get up after he’s pushed me down and bloodied my nose, I limp home, head hanging, tears staining my face, ashamed that he got the better of me. Again. Shame tells me that unless I find a way to beat Failure at his own game, I will fundamentally, by definition and without exception, be a failure. I’m trapped in an eternal fight; an arms race with Failure: I do better, he finds fault. I do better … on and on.
Acceptance is different. Acceptance does not just re-define Failure or try to distract me from the clear outcomes like celebrity psychotherapists do. Neither does it teach useless, pseudo-martial arts techniques guaranteed to defeat Failure like so many YouTube “spiritual senseis” do.
Acceptance excises failure from the world all-together. Acceptance reveals that failure is finally irrelevant. When viewed in the light of a loving deity who is not obligated to deliver on a contract but instead can do as he pleases — and he pleases to extend grace — Failure winks out of existence. A loving deity pleases to focus on the interior world, exploring intent, testing motives, uncovering and confronting lies, discovering beauty, goodness and truth.
The acceptance of a loving god changes the rules. It turns out, he doesn’t need me to succeed in my Advent endeavor. He doesn’t need me to do anything. Turns out that I’m free. And that is worthy of wonder, praise and exploration in this new year.
Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.
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