God Said We are Good...and We Said No

Behold God beholding you...and smiling.

~ Anthony De Mello, S.J.

Tonight I went to a talk by my friend Terry Devino, S.J., a wonderful Jesuit priest at BC whom I first met back in the day as an undergrad and who married my wife and I in May 2011 (I should say "officiated," as we are not married to him).  Terry's talk, titled "You're Kinda a Big Deal," focused on the essential goodness within each of us, the God-given goodness that forms the core of our unique personhood and makes every one of us lovable at heart.  Terry shared some very cool insights about getting in touch with that goodness, seeing it in others and ourselves, and letting it shine.  

One of the things he shared that struck me and stuck with me was his take on Genesis 3: 8-11, when God looked for Adam and Eve in the garden, but they hid from God because they realized they were naked.  Terry focused on God's response: "Who told you that you were naked?" and interpreted it as God's way of saying "Who said you weren't good enough as you are, as I made you?"  In the Genesis story, God said of creation, including humanity, that "it is good" - and we said no.  

Terry's imaginative interpretation of that passage got me thinking.  Setting aside disputes about whether the Genesis account was "true" and how it should be understood, I am struck by the notion that the first sin was rooted not in pride but in shame, the flip side of pride.  Adam and Eve rejected their own God-given goodness and refused to believe that they were good enough as they were, and so they succumbed to the serpent's temptation "to be like gods."  And we do the same thing today, time and again.

The reasons we reject our own goodness are legion.  We are devalued by a relentlessly degrading consumer culture that constantly tells us we're not good enough unless we look a certain way, have certain things, or make enough money.  We are condemned by Pharisaical judges and judgments within our religious traditions.  And we are robbed of our dignity by haters who affix negative labels to us and reduce us to the stereotypes associated with those labels.  

Worst of all, however, is when we ourselves reject our own goodness.  A character in The Princess Diaries (yes, I did see that movie) said something that stuck with me: "Oh look at me, I'm a princess!  Wow, I'm so pretty!  Me, me, me, me, me!"  Okay, not that quote, but this one: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."  Damn straight.  Unfortunately, the painful fact of human existence is that we so often give this consent; we so often reject and hate ourselves; and wish we were someone else.

I am intimately familiar with such self-hatred, having struggled with depression and seen many family members and friends do the same.  It breaks my heart when I see others punish themselves this way.  I want to shake them and tell them to refuse to submit to undue shame, but instead to get in touch with their own goodness, to believe in it and make it the starting point for all thought and behavior.  The well-worn saying "if you can't say something nice, don't say it at all" applies not only to the way we treat others, but also the way we treat ourselves.

So, in closing, I pray that we can accept God's invitation of love, calling us to know that we are loved, to rediscover our indelible goodness, and to live from this core conviction.  I hope that we can remove barriers to receiving God's love and that of others, and instead let ourselves be touched and changed by that love.  And I pray that we come to know how good we really are, and to live into that knowledge.  

God said we are good, and it's high time we agreed.