Near the end of a recent session, my therapist dropped a statement which was uncharacteristically editorial of him: "You are a good person." It stuck with me, perhaps because he typically doesn't interject his judgments and leaves space for me to do the analysis, but also because it's not a statement I've heard much in my life.
"Why do you call me 'good'? No one is good except God alone."
Not even Jesus claimed he was good. If even he didn't claim he was good, then how could I possibly lay claim to that identity? called the echoes of evangelical Christianity in my brain. Though the way that retort comes off in the text, perhaps he was just being coy with the rich dude.
My therapist uttered another statement in the same session that I was also left pondering: "Just because you hurt someone doesn't mean you did something wrong."
Hold on. Is that true? Certainly I can think of a few select instances in which it was, but is it true as a general rule? Hmm. I'll have to think on that one.
For much of my adult life, I've relied on whether someone got hurt as the indicator for the morality of my actions. With that indicator's reliability called into question, I struggled to identify what could be used to measure an action's morality. Is it an action's intention (rather than its outcome)? Is it the proverbial sin of omission ("Anyone who knows the good he ought to do and does not do it sins")? Is it the failure to abide by a promise or commitment made, whether explicitly stated or not?
I tested these candidate rules against a wide selection of prior incidents in which I hurt someone. But in this exercise, I realized that none of these rules was broadly applicable enough to apply in all situations. So I was once again left without a barometer, a compass to indicate moral failure.
But why am I so laser-focused on the ability to discern right and wrong? Why do I have such hyper-sensitivity to moral responsibility?
Certainly my evangelical upbringing instilled in me the paramount importance of the skill of discernment, with the objective being to "come back to your senses as you ought and stop sinning". Of course, that was always hard to square with the premise of Christianity, which is that all your sins had already been forgiven (so why did it matter?).
But I think there's a more practical reason for my excessive focus on morality. I simply want to be able to tell when I have committed a moral error so that I can avoid it in the future. To me, consistently repeating my wrongdoings without any sense of remorse would make me a bad person. Being labeled a bad person is what I am afraid of.
Being a bad person makes one less desirable to be around; it drives other people away. Driving other people away results in a state of loneliness--a self-inflicted loss of community. So my fear associated with being labeled a bad person represents my fear of being alone, of losing the relationships I have. Therefore, perhaps my excessive focus on right and wrong and moral responsibility is a preemptive strategy to stave off being alone.
At this point, I also realized that I could swap out many of the key terms--moral error/wrongdoing/moral failing, remorse, bad person, right, wrong--with loaded religious terminology--sin, guilt, unrepentant sinner, good, evil--and the meanings of the statements would be equivalent to me. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it suggests that my relationship to these concepts is unchanged irrespective of my faith status. If that is true, then what's not clear is whether my prior faith set that relationship, and my current weltanschauung has simply commandeered it, or if the relationship is more fundamental to my being.
So, it bears asking whether there exists a religious analog to my fear of loneliness resulting from being a bad person. Here are the ideas in prior paragraphs, translated:
I want to be able to tell when I have committed a sin so that I can avoid it in the future. Consistently repeating my sins without any sense of guilt would make me an unrepentant sinner. This label is what I am afraid of, because being an unrepentant sinner drives God away. I am afraid of being excluded from heaven as a result of my of my recurrent sin driving God away.
This squares with the theology I grew up believing. I was taught that God cannot be in the presence of sin, so being an unrepentant sinner--a bad person--would keep me separated from God.
What I now have the courage to admit to myself, though, is that exclusion from heaven was so frightening not because of the prospect of being away from God. As far as I was concerned, he was kind of unknowable, and it's hard to feel a strong desire to be with someone for eternity if you don't feel like you know them. The frightening part of exclusion from heaven was that I would be separated from my community, from the people with whom I had grown close on earth. I deeply loved my Christian friends in church, at school, and in my family, but what if I did something or continued to do something that classified me as an unrepentant sinner and barred me from an eternity with these cherished people?
This is what I was afraid of: being alone outside of heaven without the people I knew. Because most everyone in my life at one point or another was a Christian and would be going to heaven. I would be left with no one if I was a bad person by God's standards.
This is one reason why the fact that I couldn't shake looking at gay pornography in high school so demoralizing to me.
I very clearly hear the echoes of my anxieties from my Christian days reverberating in my present-day thoughts about morality and ethics. I am deeply fearful of doing something that will cause me to lose the people around me whom I love.
But what about the people who made it into heaven? I wondered. How would they feel about losing me if I didn't make it in because of something I did?
"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
If I didn't make it into heaven, but my friends did, I would be grieving and in pain for the forever loss of those relationships. But they would not reciprocate that feeling on the other side of the pearly gates. There will be no sadness, no crying, no pain in heaven--no grieving. There will be no grieving for the people who did not make it in, for the relationships forever lost. That's fucked. Grieving is part of the human experience. And that experience is not allowed in heaven. Heaven strips people of their humanity, and they feel nothing for the people who did not make it in.
If that's what heaven is, I want nothing to do with it.
Or perhaps those who made it in would feel morally superior to those who did not. "I got mine; you get yours." I think whenever I imagined a scenario in which I was excluded from heaven, I pictured those inside whom I had loved suddenly turning on me, asserting that it was my own fault for losing my eligibility to enter.
Perhaps this scenario is how evangelicals today make heaven on earth.
Heaven is a sham.
