‘Acceptable to whom?’
‘To God.’
‘So you still doubt that God accepts you?’
‘Well acceptance, according to the Bible, takes place at the Judgement Seat. That’s the final acceptance. Whereas, I don’t begin to say who He will or will not accept. I wouldn’t dream of it. He’s put down certain guide-lines. They’re only guide-lines. I don’t say that you can ever be Christ-like, you can’t, but you should strive for that intended goal, realizing that you’ll never make it, but forgiveness is there. But I still think this Judgement has a purpose, It’s there to judge. So there has to be a line, a certain demarcation, and it will be different for each individual, according to their abilities and circumstance. But It’s possible not to be on the right side of that line. It’s got to be, otherwise why the Judgement? I’m concerned that I haven’t progressed far enough. And this is good to a degree, for it keeps you striving, but I’m quite concerned about myself at this point, that I need to progress further. Now the people around me don’t tell me that. They say of course you’ll make it. You’re hanging in there until the end and that’s what counts and perhaps they’re right. But I don’t want to play the odds in the wrong direction. You want to stack your deck the best you can.’
‘If you were God would you forgive you?’
‘No.’
‘So, if you can’t forgive yourself, you can’t expect God to forgive you?’
‘No, there are things that I wouldn’t even begin to tell you about me that have me convinced that I’m a pretty poor character. They’re in the past, but they show what I’ve been. These thing bother me a lot. I have worked on myself as a result, and It’s my great hope that that will count for something.’
‘That is what counts, what our intentions are and that we recognize our mistakes. In the past we acted in ignorance. We can’t change the past but we can come to understand why we did what we did and try not to make similar mistakes, but if we go on punishing ourselves we actually prevent ourselves from becoming wiser.’
‘I just wonder if there are things that I should be reading. I’ve started going to classes that are free, some things that will occupy my mind, a couple of financial classes, one a self-esteem class, a very popular class. I’m hoping that attending that class will help too.’
‘Feeling yourself to be bad and inadequate and then have your conscience come after you, that’s what you need to work on, and coming to feel better about yourself and turning your conscience into a good friend.’
‘I need to learn how to avoid my inadequacies.’
‘Until we accept our inadequacies, we can’t change them. If we can accept our own inadequacies we can accept other people’s inadequacies and then we can love them.’
‘That’s a big problem too, being critical.’
‘What you turn on yourself you turn on other people.’
‘I expect them to be much better than me. I think that they should be. I don’t know why I lay that on them. It’s something I’m trying to come to terms with.’
Thus George in this conversation showed that he experienced his sense of existence in the development of individual achievement and organization, not just in getting things done, but in gaining greater clarity of understanding. All the things that had gone wrong in his life he experienced as being mess and chaos, the circumstances which threatened to overwhelm and annihilate him.
When we experience our sense of existence in terms of individual achievement we need some standard to measure our achievement against. We look at what other people have achieved, and, if we approve of their achievements, we then seek their approval of our achievements. George set himself very high standards, and when other people failed to live up to his standards he was most critical of them. The one person whose standards he approved of was God, and so he sought God’s approval.
This would have been a satisfactory way of living, except for one thing. George did not value, accept and forgive himself, and so he did not believe that God would value, accept and forgive him. He was drawn to his fellow believers because they gave him the warmth and acceptance his family had never given him, but to belong meant to believe in God’s Judgement, and until he could see himself as worthy of God’s forgiveness his nights of restless torment would continue.
Not all of us are like George, experiencing our sense of existence in individual achievement, and the threat of annihilation as the loss of control and chaos. Many of us are like Ruth.
When I went into the waiting room to meet Ruth she smiled at me and we began talking like we had known one another for years. She had that immediate, wonderful talent for easy conversation, laughter, and making people feel that she is interested in them.
Ruth was fifty-two and had had a very sad life. She had been diagnosed as having ‘recurrent major depressive disorder’ and had made two serious suicide attempts. Once we were settled in the consulting room Ruth began to tell me about her desire to die.
She said, ‘I came out here and fell in love with the wrong man and decided to go to Washington and that’s really where the trouble began. The boyfriend from here, who had never been able to say the words “I love you”, suddenly sent me a tape which ended with “I love you”. That didn’t help. He finally came to see me and never uttered the words, and when he left it was with the announcement that it was all over and he did not expect to see me again. I went straight downhill.
‘A few weeks after that, I made my first suicide attempt. Very spur of the moment. One grand and glorious evening I decided I’d had it and, talk about the foolishness of American doctors, I called a doctor I had seen only once and right over the phone he gave me a prescription for a hundred phenobarb, quarter grains, and I took that whole bottle that night. I very carefully disposed of all the things I didn’t want anyone to find. Unfortunately, I woke up and found myself in hospital. Then I had to see a psychiatrist. My mother came to visit me and so he decided to discharge me. I discovered that I was terribly angry. I never knew I was angry. Somehow through that experience I discovered enormous anger and I still don’t know what with. I’m not as mad now as I was then, but there’s an awful lot of anger still in me. I don’t know why.
‘I got better. Did a lot of crying and a lot of talking. I found I could say almost anything to my mother. Only one subject I do not discuss with her, and that’s that my father sexually abused me. I don’t say that to her because she thinks he was God on earth. So we talked a lot and I cried a lot. We came back out here and I called the man in question and told him what I had done and said I’m planning to come back and I don’t want to run into you in the neighbourhood and feel this horrible constraint. I want to feel we can just say hello to each other. I realize that’s not really what I was doing but I thought that’s what I was doing, and he of course got an enormous case of the guilts and said I should come and live with him.
‘I had some questions about that, but I wanted it so badly that I decided to do that and got back out here and moved in with him and for about a year it went quite well, and then it began to go wrong and I began to get depressed again. I went to talk to a therapist who was a great help to me, but it was not enough. It didn’t solve the problem and so one afternoon I decided, okay, that’s enough. I’m going to check into a hotel and take every pill I can find and that’s that. It’s not fair to my therapist, but I’m a fairly good actress. She knew that something was wrong, but she didn’t know how badly wrong. So I checked into my hotel and I had three litres of wine. I drank almost all of that and took all the pills and went to bed.
‘The hotel maid found me the next morning. So I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. I was quite annoyed. Stayed there a few days, saw my therapist some more and started to function a bit better. I don’t think it’s really gone. I don’t feel suicidal any more, but I’ve never got over the feeling of, “Gee, I wish it had worked”.