Our Most-Alive Times

Escaping the Hells We Create

Johann Christoph Arnold

Excerpted from Escape Routes, available FREE in e-book format.

We must change, or die. That is not only a biological fact, but a truth that holds the key to solving the great riddle of heaven and hell in our personal lives. Circumstances can’t always be changed; other people, even if we may try to influence them, are still other people; the future is impossible to predict – even tomorrow is a mystery. In short, our best efforts cannot make heaven out of hell. But there is one thing we can do, and that is choose – to be selfish or selfless; to burn with lust or with love; to defend our power, or dismantle it. And that is why, instead of taking on the futile task of trying to change the whole world, we must, as Gandhi once advised, be the change we wish to see in it.

Real transformation is the opposite of self-improvement. It is one thing, for example, to spruce up an old wall by covering it with a new coat of paint; quite another to check for dry rot or termites and replace every damaged board. The cosmetic solution costs less, at least upfront, whereas the structural one, which requires far greater changes, also requires far more labor and time. But if that is what is needed, that is what must be done. Even if the new paint is shiny, the surface will soon prove itself insufficient to save the wall, and in the end, more will be lost than was temporarily saved.

As with the house, so with each of us. We can – as today’s advertisers seem to have successfully seduced our generation into doing – spend the greater part of our lives repainting ourselves. Upgrading our computer, replacing the old car, shedding those extra pounds, going to the hairstylist to try the newest look. Deep down, however, we all know that none of these changes can bring lasting happiness. Deep down, all of us sense that to some extent, the hells of our lives are related to the brokenness of our own hearts and minds, and that this brokenness is the most vital thing we must examine and fix.

How we go about doing this is another story, for knowing that a problem exists does not mean knowing how to solve it. We are by nature divided; our souls are fissured, and we cannot bind or heal them any more than the victim of heart disease can carry out surgery on himself. And thus our transformation depends not only on us, but on another power, and on our willingness to submit to it, just as the patient submits to the surgeon’s knife.

Because we fear pain (who looks forward to surgery?) most of us do everything we can to avoid it. And not only literally. To be inwardly cut to the quick – to have one’s false fronts torn away and the lies behind them exposed, to have one’s rough edges chipped away and one’s ego cut down to size, to be “pruned,” as the Gospels put it – simply is a painful thing.

That’s why we often settle for more conven-ient, more comfortable ways to change. We aim to fine-tune our marriages, improve relationships at work. We work at being a better team player, a better listener, parent, or friend. We choose something we don’t like about ourselves and resolve to do away with it, or at very least change it. But no matter how many such timid efforts we make, they will not help us any more than painkillers, which suppress symptoms but do nothing to truly combat disease. They simply cannot bring us the much greater relief that comes from having signed up for surgery, and from being able to emerge after it with a clean bill of health.

How different transformation looks to someone who grits his teeth and opts for the full treatment! Such a person knows the exhilaration of undergoing a thorough upheaval, and even if he later reverts to his old self – to weariness, boredom, sickness, or sin – he never forgets the experience so completely that he won’t long for it again.

To use a familiar image from the natural world, we must undergo the same full-fledged metamorphosis as that of a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly. Inside its chrysalis or cocoon, a caterpillar loses all of its defining characteristics: its skin color, shape, mouth, and legs. Even its internal organs and systems are altered during the pupal stage, and its appetites and habits as well. It loses everything that once made up its identity. It ceases to exist as a caterpillar. But that is not all. In submitting to the destruction of its old body, it is no longer confined to crawling on the underside of a leaf, but captures the eye with its beauty and its ability to flutter and float and soar. Whereas previously it could not reproduce, it can now mate and lay eggs: its reincarnation allows it to bear fruit.

What does it mean to “die,” be transformed, and experience rebirth? First and foremost, I believe it means letting ourselves be dismantled – not partially, but completely. That, to me, is the crucial first step – giving up our dreams and ambitions, our worries and fears; yielding control over our social, political, and economic agendas; surrendering our most personal plans; even revealing our darkest secrets.

Equally vital is letting go of our goodness. Not surprisingly, that is difficult. In fact, having talked with countless people at critical moments in their lives, I’ve found that this is often the biggest sticking point. All of us want to change, to become better people, to get rid of the negative baggage we drag after ourselves. But when it comes down to the brass tacks, most of us are just as eager to preserve every inch of our old selves, or at least our good parts. Having gladly dropped everything we didn’t like about ourselves, we still cling desperately to the rest, refusing to believe that it might be tainted, and hoping that it can still be rescued. Yet the fact is that even the most sincerely held virtue can be a great obstacle to transformation. That is because a subjective view of our own goodness is rarely in line with reality; that is to say, few of us are really as pure as we might imagine ourselves.

Simply put, rebirth is impossible for those who are in love with themselves in any way, and that goes for a “religious” person as much as anyone else. Confidence is one thing, of course, and no one can truly live or blossom without it. But the self-love of complacency – the sort that leads people to talk about how they are “saved” because they were “born again” (or how they are “enlightened” because they have “seen the light”) – is quite another. In fact, it seems to me that those who claim such things are among the worst enemies of rebirth, if only because their smugness is often coupled with the assurance that the rest of the world is damned. Maybe that is why Jesus reserved his harshest words for his most pious countrymen -rebuking them as a “brood of vipers” and comparing them to “whitewashed tombs. It is surely why he also warned them – and us – that “whoever saves his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life will save it.”

There is another ingredient to finding new life, other than merely “letting go,” and that is repenting. Unfortunately, to many, the word implies hellfire and brimstone. In fact, repentance is just another word for remorse, or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, for laying down our arms and surrendering, saying we’re sorry, realizing we’re on the wrong track, and moving full speed astern. Repentance, he says, is “the only way out of a hole.”

Naturally there are times when saying sorry is insufficient, and when there is no way to cleanse oneself except by submitting to the heartache of shame and humiliation. But even if such torment has a place, it is never the goal of true repentance, and to wallow in it by beating oneself up repeatedly is futile. In the words of Yitzhak Meir, a Polish rabbi:

Turn muck over and over, it still remains muck, and no good can come of it. Therefore beware of contemplating your own evil too long. For as long as your thoughts are there, so also is your soul – and if you let it sink too deeply, it may not be able to extricate itself and repent.

If you have sinned much, balance it by doing much good. So resolve today, from the depth of your heart and in a joyful mood, to abstain from sin and to do good. Say the prayer “For the Sin,” but do not dwell on it. Meditate preferably on the prayer, “And Thou, O Lord, shalt reign.”

On its own, in other words, self-contempt is useless. Having said that, I still believe that remorse is the natural response of a healthy spiritual immune system taking action to reject and destroy a source of disease. Without repentance, we can’t realize the pain we cause others, and God, through our failings and sins. With it, we will know that pain, but also the freedom that comes from taking stock, facing up, turning around, and moving on. In short, repentance is the catapult that first yanks us downward and backward, but then shoots us upward and forward, right out of hell.

Grace, a woman in my church, has a story that illustrates this well. Until the age of sixteen, she was an average girl, trying to play by the rules. Inside, she longed to be loved, as all teens do, for who she was, not for how she behaved.

Everything changed when she began a sexual relationship with her parish minister. What Grace thought was love soon turned sordid, and three years on, when the affair finally fizzled out, she found herself jaded and hardened. Still, it was only a matter of months before she met a man her own age – her future husband. Yet even before their wedding, Grace says, their relationship was deteriorating. The marriage was a “disappointing eight-month long slog. We were two selfish brats who made half-hearted attempts to please one another.”

Failure – coupled with what she describes as “a deep hunger to find something by which to guide my life” – plagued Grace as she left her husband and tried to bury herself in her work. That’s when a man she calls Frank started talking to her about right and wrong, life and death, obedience and sin. Grace tried to stay aloof, but six months later, something happened:

I was working alone in the photo darkroom (a great place to think) and remember standing there and being overwhelmed with all the deceitful, selfish and evil things I had done in my short life. One by one I saw the faces of the people whose lives I had ruined, actually trampled over, in my drive for selfish gratification.

It was frightening – but even more frightening was the realization that I was not able to redeem myself. I had tried before I met my husband, and yet here I was two years later having left even more trampled people in my wake. What was it going to take to change me? I did not want to have a rerun of this revelation on my deathbed with fifty more years of broken relationships added on top.

Until that moment, Grace says she couldn’t have claimed to believe in God. Yet she found herself begging God to help her, and admitting she couldn’t help herself. “I walked out of that darkroom with new eyes, new ears and a new heart. Nothing looked the same as it had before. I was given a chance to totally start over and life was once again worth living. I still find it incredible and look on it as a touchstone for other experiences that came later…”

Grace says that though she knew this change to be “total and absolute,” Frank, who had meanwhile become her partner in a new business they co-founded, was unable to believe in it. What started as a wonderful conversion experience became another hell, as Frank attempted to take control of her life. His temper proved violent, and more than once Grace found herself facing his fists. He even attempted rape. Grace managed to avert disaster, but the lie she was still living was harder to face. Finally, though, she stopped running in place long enough to admit she was depressed and unhappy: “I longed to rediscover the freeing that had come with my first experience of belief, and I promised God I would give him everything I had to regain a close relationship with Him…”

An additional angle to repentance is the way it draws people together. On the surface this may seem unlikely: after all, repentance means self-exposure – an act we associate with the privacy of the psychiatrist’s office or confessional, and with the guarantee of confidentiality. But as M. Scott Peck points out in his book A Different Drum, that’s only one part of the equation. Everyone, he writes, has something to expose. Every human being is in some way vulnerable and incomplete. And so, instead of letting our brokenness divide us, as it so often does, we ought to recognize it as the unifying quality it is, and see it as a reason for community:

How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others…But even more important is the LOVE that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

Grace found this love, once she emerged from the painful crucible of self-examination. The renewal she was looking for cost her everything: the business she’d helped to build, her home, her career. “My whole life took a new turn as I tried to discern what God wanted me to do,” she says. But, she adds, “in doing all this, I was amazed, once again, at how quickly the deepest yearnings of my heart were filled. I felt like I was given a clean slate to start life completely over. Beyond that, the experience led me – further than I had ever been led before – out of myself, and to community with others.”

Given the fickleness of human nature, the proverbial clean slate is an impermanent thing, and the same goes for love and community. Though perfect in the abstract, in real life they weather quickly and, like once-shiny medallions, must be refurbished again and again. This is why I am so certain that true rebirth has nothing to do with “eternal life insurance.” Yes, death brings new life. But what then? Are we to remain content in the state of a newborn, unable to crawl, stand, or walk? Or is there something more required of us?

Ann Morrow Lindbergh, a woman who suffered repeatedly during her life, suggests there is. She says our task as human beings is not merely to be reborn, but also to grow, and to do that, she says, we cannot only die, but must remain continually vulnerable – “open to love, though also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering.”

For the person who fears change, that may seem an unwelcome thought. But for anyone who has experienced it, it is a veritable lifeline. To quote Grace one more time:

My first conversion, if you want to call it that, was a life-changing thing. So were my subsequent new beginnings. But life doesn’t stop. And I’ve come to realize that if I am going to live it authentically, I must continually go through new cycles of repentance and renewal. I look forward to those times because that’s when I’m most alive.

Reprinted from http://www.bruderhof.com/, used with pernission