Holding space for the cold sharp sunlight and my breath on the wind. Holding space for us coming together as the moon waxes and my days grow longer.
CW: A discussion of Hell in Christian beliefs.
Dear Reader,
Recently I have been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The discourse around productivity and time management tells us that we can accomplish everything we want to as long as we block schedule or Pomodoro our way into being perfect productivity machines. Burkeman, on the other hand says: hey, we are all going to die, we all have a finite amount of time left, so we should come to terms with the fact that we can’t do everything and instead choose what we spend our time on wisely.
There’s a lot I could say about the book, but I will focus on a question that Burkeman asks near the end: “In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?” (p. 222) Or, to put it another way, do you “quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority”? Once I read that phrase, “justify your existence” something clicked for me. I have been very much hung up on trying to justify my existence in the eyes of my own (shifting and arbitrary) authority.
This need to justify my existence shows up for me as shame about not doing enough to save the world—not doing enough activism, not sacrificing enough for others, not taking on my fair share of suffering. And while I am obviously distressed about all of the bad things happening in the world, I think this shame is more motivated by fear of being a bad person than the desire to change things for good. That’s why this shame more often keeps me from acting instead motivating me to act. Because I fear that if I actually did the activism, other people would see how bad and selfish I really am.
I have done so much inner work over the years, and yet I am somehow always surprised when I find that my motivation for something, at bottom, is fear of being a bad person. I play whack-a-mole in my psyche with the fear that I am irredeemably bad—it disappears in one form and then pops up in another. I recently came to understand a big (and sort of obvious) source of this fear: my background as a Christian. I have not been a practicing Christian for over 20 years, but I am an ethnic Christian—specifically a Protestant. When I was young I thought that choosing not to believe in God would somehow mean that I left Christianity behind. Well, it’s hard to leave behind the entire worldview that you were raised with, as it turns out. So over the past year or so, I have been doing an extensive re-evaluation of Christianity, finding some parts that are truly awful, some parts that I really like, and some parts that became a lot less scary when I started examining them.
Despite not believing in God, Heaven, or Hell, I have nonetheless been indoctrinated with the idea that I must do something to justify my existence on Earth.** That I need to avoid being a bad person, and that in some sense not being a bad person is a matter of life and death. This all stems from the version of Christian belief I was raised with: God created me and loves me unconditionally, as long as I believe that Jesus is my lord and savior. If I don’t believe that, then I will endure eternal conscious torment after I die. The world contains two kinds of people, therefore: good ones and bad ones, and despite my best efforts to be good, I can never quite tell if I’m actually bad and don’t know it.
Instead of getting in to Heaven, my goal is to make my existence seem worthwhile. I have been believing that in order to be worthy, loved, and safe, it is not enough to just exist. It’s not enough for me to be myself, living a life that is meaningful to me and those around me. Rather, I have to do something grand and self-sacrificing to avoid being a waste of oxygen. I may not believe in burning in Hell for eternity, but I am nonetheless afraid of my own badness.
What’s messed up about this is that this is totally at odds with the human rights/civil rights view of the world that I ascribe to: that people have rights and dignity simply because they exist. I find it hard to extend that grace to myself: it’s alright for other people to just live their lives, but for me not to do something remarkable is unforgivable. And the very idea that I have to be remarkable has been keeping me from doing things that are unremarkable-but-meaningful.
The main argument of Four Thousand Weeks is that, when we finally accept that we can’t do everything, we decide what we can and will do. And so this year I am giving up on the dream and expectation that I will change the world through traditional activism. That’s really scary to say because so much of my idea of being a good person depends on my narrow and arbitrary definition of being an activist. But it’s a dream I need to give up on, because I am not a traditional activist; I am a source of support for activists.
This year, I will make facilitating The Work That Reconnects a priority, so that I can support my community in ways that are needed and that I am trained to do. The Work That Reconnects is so important to me and I think it would be so helpful to so many. And yet I’ve been using the pandemic as an excuse to not engage with it for the past two years. In fact, I almost self-sabotaged my way out of not completing the requirements for my facilitator training in 2019. I think that’s because if I start putting my time and energy into facilitating the Work That Reconnects, I will have to give up on other initiatives I have hoped (but failed) to do. Here’s to focusing on what I will do rather than what I could do.
** An aside for those who carry Christian religious trauma related to Hell: here are lots of resources out there to help folks who have been harmed by Christianity re-evaluate the idea of Hell in scripture. Once you start digging into the original texts of the Bible, it becomes clear that there isn’t a super strong biblical case for the existence of eternal conscious torment in the afterlife. For one: there is not a concept of Hell in Judaism, so even the people who wrote what Christians call the Old Testament didn’t derive that idea from their holy scriptures. A lot of Christian ideas about Hell—flames, demons with pitch forks, etc.—are extrapolations which were then exaggerated by poor biblical translation. A source that I have found helpful is the podcast Almost Heretical, which has a series about Hell that’s worth listening to if you find yourself dogged by this concept whether or not you are a practicing Christian. There is also a tradition of Christian Universalism that is as old as Christianity itself, to which many of the greatest Christian thinkers belong. Those of us who were raised Christian do not need to spend our lives terrorized by this concept, whether we literally believe it or not.
That’s it for this week since this essay was a little long! I’d love to hear from you if this or any other of these newsletters has been helpful to you. My tarot books are still closed to new clients until April, but hopefully I’ll be able to take some new clients, as well as announce some Work That Reconnects workshops, later this spring!
As someone who has also been grappling with similar thoughts, I found the way you put this so thoughtful, elegant. A sense of unworthiness is definitely there-- (fallen Catholic here)-- and for me, it goes back a lot to "this demi-god here DIED for you WORTHLESS people! Do BETTER" (in my head the comment almost spits in my face..). It's a lot, and thanks for the podcast rec, I will definitely be checking it out!