Met my friend Sukey for coffee down at the new retro-'60s coffee bar downtown. She's very worried about Beth. Beth is recently separated from a Real Jerk called Marvin. Marvin expects Beth to do his laundry. Marvin wanders through the house at will. Marvin wants her to call his insurance agent for him. (Marvin is also having it off with the latest of a whole string of attractive young ladies, which is why he and Beth are no longer under the same roof.) Marvin very much wants to have his cake and eat it too, and Beth is busily cutting him another slice.

This, for me, put a new spin on a favourite phrase: "With what part of the word 'no' are you experiencing these difficulties?" I've often used this on my kids, when they ask for something and disagree with my decision not to give it to them. But I realize that it can go the other way: we can have as much trouble saying that word as accepting it when it's said to us. Beth cannot say "no". And therefore she cannot set boundaries. And therefore Marvin is having a field day taking advantage of her in every way he can. No fool, Marvin....

Beth, you see, is heavily invested in being a Loving and Giving Person, a nice woman. Loving/ giving/ nice people don't say "no" because it interferes with their need to feel good about being loving/ giving/ nice--but that's basically a self-image problem. Beth really is a loving/giving sort of person, but she's elevated loving/giving to a level that's doing her no good--nor Marvin, either. The most truly loving thing she could do for the guy is to administer a swift and well-aimed kick and say "Grow up, bucky!" Instead, she's so worried about behaving like a bitch that she's making like a doormat. Which is terribly destructive to both parties.

Why is the pattern so common?--and I speak as one who has played this particular game myself, big time. We take an ordinary good sort of characteristic--being loyal, say, or kind-hearted, or logically consistent, or honest, or responsible, or professional, or parental, or idealistic--and we elevate it to God-status, putting it up on a pedestal and falling down and worshipping before it, sacrificing our selves, our souls and bodies (and rather frequently other people as well) to the Great God whatever-it-is. And this Great God whatever-it-is is invariably a legalistic sort of deity, demanding endless tribute, constantly raising the stakes, and purely terrible at forgiveness or mercy. We're not allowing ourselves to be merely reasonably good at what we're good at; we have to be PERFECT at what we're good at. Because that's what the Great God expects, and nothing less than perfection is good enough.

Idols--even handsome idols, like Patriotism or Self-Sufficiency --are not loving; they are not human, they cannot give. They can only stand there, spotless and perfect marble, with just about the same level of warmth and comfort and reassurance, giving us the Uglies and keeping us from a true and proper appreciation of the reality of who we are, our sins and virtues. They sap our energy, these false gods; they lead us into morasses and keep us floundering around because try as we may, we cannot be perfectly like them. We're only flesh, not marble, and we can't ever get away from that fact. Faced with our humanity, we see ourselves as failure by marble-standards--and that sense of failure gives people like Marvin the handle they need to take control and whip our tiny heads around until we think the sun rises in the west, which just exactly what Marvin is doing to Beth.

Much better, I think, to accept that we're only human, and beloved by God not in spite of, but BECAUSE of, our very humanity. We're supposed to worship God, not our need to be nice guys or good parents or endlessly forgiving people. Nor can we be God, any more than we can be blue-footed booby birds; God's power to be infinitely, perfectly loving is more than even the best of us can manage. And God knows that, and going by the good news Christ brought to us, this is (strangely, wonderfully, astoundingly) all right by God.

The knack is to put God in the middle, not some marble ideal, and let God do the worst of the work for us. If we worship God, sooner or later all those qualities we so value in ourselves will flow out of that worship, more naturally and easily than if we try to be that way on our own. And conversely, if we ignore humanity, neglect it too much, it's apt to get up to some interesting tricks behind our backs...

It may sound harsh, but Beth's cross is one she's chosen for herself and refuses to put down. Been there, done that... looking back, I can see that I was the one insisting on being nailed to my self-appointed cross, much against God's will. Pure spiritual vanity on my part, because it's so humiliating to admit that I'm not in fact a perfectly Christlike person. I do hope Beth figures that out sooner than I did, for her own sake--but also for Marvin's.

(For CJ, with love)