Reflections: Abba's Child

Dear Friends,

Recently, some of my devotional reading has brought forth some amazing spiritual revelations. I've read Brennan Manning's Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging. I share these excerpts with you because I have seen myself mirrored in these pages today. Since this is such a common issue for so many people, I'm wondering if you might also see images of your own heart and soul in the text that follows. Please know that you are holding my heart in your hands. I believe that you already care for me and that I am safe with each of you....

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Excerpts from Brennan Manning's Abba's Child. Navpress Books, 1994.
Chapter 2: The Impostor

"Impostors are preoccupied with acceptance and approval. Because of their suffocating need to please others, they cannot say no with the same confidence with which they say yes. And so they overextend themselves in people, projects, and causes, motivated not by personal commitment but by the fear of not living up to others' expectations."

"The false self was born when as children we were not loved well or were rejected or abandoned. John Bradshaw defines codependency as a disease 'characterized by a loss of identity. To be codependent is to be out of touch with one's feelings, needs, and desires.' The impostor is the classic codependent. To gain acceptance and approval, the false self suppresses or camouflages feelings, making emotional honesty impossible. Living out of the false self creates a compulsive desire to present a perfect image to the public so that everybody will admire us and nobody will know us. The impostor's life becomes a perpetual roller-coaster ride of elation and depression...."

"Craving the approbation withheld in childhood, my false self staggers into each day with an insatiable appetite for affirmation...."

"The impostor is attentive to the size, shape, and color of the bandages that veil my nothingness. The false self persuades me to be preoccupied with my weight....but they kidnap my attention away from the indwelling God and temporarily rob me of the joy of God's Holy Spirit. Yet the false self rationalizes my preoccupation with my waistline and overall appearance and whispers, 'A fat, sloppy image will diminish your credibility in ministry.' Cunning."

"I suspect I am not alone here. The narcissistic obsession with weight-watching in North America is a formidable ploy of the imposor. Despite the valid and important health factor, the amount of time and energy devoted to acquiring and maintaining a slender figure is staggering....To paraphrase Cardinal Wolsey, 'Would that I had served my God the way I have watched my waistline!'"

".....'Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self,' Thomas Merton observed. He went on to explain: 'This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altoghether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we were born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.'"

"Merton's notion of sin focuses not primarily on individual sinful acts but on a fundamental option for a life of pretense. 'There can only be two basic loves,' wrote Augustine, 'the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.'"

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Manning goes on to talk about this "false self", the "impostor" being the reason why we have such a hard time praying sincerely and honestly with God. Dear friends, the deep intimacy and heart-yearning for meaning, love, and acceptance that I crave leads me straight back to God. Manning talks about how the impostor cannot experience intimacy and deep relationship with anyone because he is denying the reality of his own feelings. Yet what is Manning's solution? To abhor this impostor? No, but to humbly admit that this impostor exists within us, confess it to our Savior, and to treat ourselves as gently and kindly as we would treat "the least of Christ's brethren."

What a refreshing place of peace wherein to rest my soul on this precious day.