Unlearning Christian Concepts: Selflessness
For most of my life, I thought of selfishness as the root of all evils. It was the hardest sin to forgive and the most harmful to the world at large. Pretty much all other forms of sin seemed to stem from it: war, adultery, laziness — all were just sub-species of the same core flaw.
There’s a pretty ubiquitous phrase within Christendom, “Deny the self.” It has roots in this concept that we are at war with our own desires. That Man, without God, is only wretched, and that the only way to not be wretched is to use the power of Jesus to deny your lusts and your greed, which is what Jesus wants and what Jesus embodied. The “Deny the self” mantra fits well into an overall feeling that doing things for yourself is sinful.
Many Christians swallow this idea whole, internalize it. We identify ourselves as servants, as Marthas. We align ourselves with the behaviors of the foot-washers and the sacrifice makers. We say “yes” to others as much as we can, we are always in support mode, and we are always ready to help. And in all of this, we truly mean well. All too often though, this path leads to exhaustion and instability, and opens people up to being used and taken advantage of. It is a perspective that commonly lacks boundaries and balance. And ultimately, this spirit of denying the self can actually end up getting in the way of one of our core responsibilities as humans: good stewardship of our physical, mental, and social health.
How did we get here? The first place to look is the Bible: do a quick search, and you can find dozens of verses about being a servant, or about giving of yourself. Does it have anything to say about taking care of yourself? Not really. While you can build an argument by gleaning and interpreting verses here and there, it certainly isn’t explicit or emphasized. For the most part, it emphasizes this concept of turning the other cheek, of giving the man who steals your shirt your coat as well.
Don’t get me wrong — these are beautiful ideas. I love them. I find them to be heroic and romantic. I also find them to be impractical, harmful, and vastly over-simplified. The battered domestic violence survivor should not be told that selfless love means to allow her partner to blacken her other eye, too. The tired parents shouldn’t feel guilty for prioritizing their date-nights. There are an infinite number of scenarios in which putting other obligations aside to take care of your own self is not just defensible, it’s a necessity. And yet, so many Christians don’t know this. People need to be taught to have some loyalty to themselves and trust that it’s for the best. Ultimately, it will balance out, and the investments you make in yourself pay off and do contribute to a better world on the whole. For those who don’t protect, fiercely, their own mental, emotional, and physical being — they’ll burn out much faster. And they’ll become someone else’s burden to carry, much faster, too.
I learned this firsthand as a young adult. In fact, it was a lesson I needed to learn repeatedly. My first real wake-up call was while volunteering in suicide intervention. The organization I was volunteering with wasn’t particularly well organized, and volunteers spent far, far too many hours with callers and not near enough times policing themselves for burn out and compassion fatigue. I watched volunteer after volunteer run themselves into exhaustion within their first couple of months of volunteering, and it wasn’t long before I had done the same to myself. The price I paid for so many back-to-back shifts included lack of sleep, weight-loss, withdrawal from my friends and family, and a rapidly skewing dark and imbalanced mindset. I thought I was doing the right thing by sacrificing myself. I didn’t understand that all I was really doing was stealing from myself in order to give to others. I gave so much I didn’t have anything left to keep me sane, stable, and healthy. And in turn, I began to lose my ability to be a functioning human being at all, let alone a good friend or volunteer.
This is where that buzzword, self-care, comes in. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but just in case, here’s a brief piece about what it is. Similarly to how you can’t go into battle if you’ve been starving yourself for days — you can’t be emotionally there for someone else if you haven’t been caring for your own emotional needs. You won’t have the physical capacity if you haven’t been keeping up your nutrition and exercise, you won’t have the intellectual capacity if you haven’t been sleeping enough and giving your brain enough down time, you just won’t be able to be much or do much if you’ve been neglecting yourself. It seems so obvious, and yet, the concept is utterly ignored in every single one of my experiences within Christianity. Nobody ever encouraged me to take care of myself, beyond my mom and grandma reminding me to eat healthy. At the same time, I watched my own mother sacrifice everything, constantly, for her children — including always eating the smallest amounts and the least appetizing bits of food, so that we could have more and better. And yeah, I picked up on that, and learned to emulate it, too.
Now that I am no longer a Christian, my thoughts on self-care vs. self-denial have turned a 180. I no longer view my impulses and desires as being temptations to squelch. I view them as my body and spirit signalling to me what my needs are. I know when I’m hungry, tired, need a break, need a friend, need love, and I listen. I’m grateful that humans work this way. It makes every positive act feel so interconnected and symbiotic — when I buy myself something fun or take a day off to do nothing, I no longer feel guilty that I could’ve used that money to donate to someone with less or I could’ve used that time to volunteer or do something productive. Instead, I know that I am investing in myself, and in my capacity to carry on, and therefore, in the world. In my new mindset, self-serving and self-giving aren’t opposites, they’re sisters. When I give of myself, it makes me happy, and so I have served myself at the same time. When I serve myself, I am investing in my ability to help others, and so I have given at the same time. It makes so much more sense to me, this way. And it feels infinitely healthier.
I’m not saying that selfishness and self-indulgence don’t exist, or aren’t harmful. I fully acknowledge that much of American culture does tend to be superficial, impulsive, and hedonistic in ways that aren’t really about investing in yourself in order to give back. We Millennials do seem to have a pretty serious case. At least, that’s how it seems on my Tumblr feed and in my snapchat news. My understanding of mainstream millennial morality is that we should prioritize our individual needs and desires above all else, and deem anyone who gets in the way of our rigorous self-protection as toxic. And it’s equally as discouraging as religious self-denial, just in the opposite direction. As far as I can tell, it’s ridiculous to pick only one side or the other side. Either one, without the other, crashes and burns quickly.
Maybe it’s a pendulum swinging back and forth, slowly winding down towards middle ground. I can’t tell. But as long as some Christian organizations actually are taking an adamant anti-self-care stance, even in the face of medical recommendation — this is going to be a topic that we need to talk about.
