Healing Our Separation from God

I am haunted by the creation story. It’s not that I believe in the literal six-day creation or even an actual place called the garden of Eden. What amazes me about the story of the garden and our fall – our original occasion for sin – is that sin is the recognition that we are separate from God. We are created; God is creator. The myth of Eden has us walking in the cool evening with God in communion. Original sin — eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — opened our eyes to the infinite distance between our created beings and God’s perfect self. How can a human respond to this infinite distance? There are really only two ways. We can heed the serpent’s call, “you shall be like the gods.” In this way we seek esteem and power to show how godlike we think we are, our ultimate golden calf the ego. Or we can fall to our knees and worship God when what God really wants is to walk in the garden with us. Too often our worship raises up our separation instead of seeking communion.

I have spent my life struggling between these two poles. So much of my life I feel inadequate. The protestant tradition would say I am very aware of my sin. But I don’t think of sin as something I do. I think of sin as a state of separation and personal suffering because of the universal human condition. When I am unable to deal with this separation, shame and inadequacy, I often turn to psychological compensation and fill myself with pride. I believe pride is the ultimate separation from God. But battling pride isn’t as easy as cultivating humility. Father Thomas Keating named what he considered to be the specific flavors of psychological compensation. Why do we feel incomplete like something is missing in our lives? Why are we gripped by fear? Why are we greedy and turn to possessions and fierce scarcity? Why do we allow these things to interfere with our union with God?

Keating provides a biblical lens to understand original sin in a way that is focused on separation from God, and not on our actions. In other words, God‘s work in Jesus is to heal that separation not to declare us guilty or not guilty based on some legal definition of atonement. Regular readers will know that I am a universalist, but my purpose here is not to argue for universalism. My purpose is to expose you to a new way of thinking about sin that may free you from the burden of shame and point you in a direction of union with God.

Keating posits that human children grow into maturity through a fairly standard existential model: security and survival; next affection, esteem and pleasure; next power and control; next group identification; and then finally an age of reason. (I’m not a psychologist and not here to debate Maslow, Frankl or others, I’m simply presenting what Keating has put forth.) The problem is that we mature into our reasoning capabilities before we have healed the categories of security, affection, control and identification. Sometime before we are teenagers we come to realize there are potentially hostile forces all around us. We are too young to face those forces, and so we seek to cope with defense mechanisms and psychological compensation. Keating calls the dysfunction that results the “undigested emotional material of a lifetime.” The need for security-survival, affection-esteem, and power-control drive us to seek programs for happiness rather than face the reality of our separation from God. Keating’s more commonly used phrase for these happiness programs are energy centers.

The first energy center he discusses on the existential evolution model is survival and security. I personally feel stuck here for a range of issues related to a lot of abandonment issues in my childhood. It is also perhaps the reason I am a five on the enneagram. Of course, security and survival is an instinctual need for the good of all, but those of us who are stuck here dwell on specific programs for happiness that makes security an absolute. In my life, I might even call security my idol. I want to guarantee as much of it as possible, and I derive a lot of my energy here in sometimes damaging ways.

The next energy system or program for happiness involves affection and esteem. We all seek esteem, honor, and in some cases vanity. The thing that is really driving this energy is the need to be accepted, esteemed, approved and praised. We all desire affection and esteem but when we suffer some affront, we can feel anger welling up and the more intense the affront the higher our outrage. We often only imagined the affront in the first place, making up our injuries in our own cycles of rumination. Our demand for esteem causes jealousy and resentment, what Keating calls, “stirring the pot of human misery.” It’s a hard cycle to break. You feel wounded and thus you inflict wounds on others.

The third program for happiness is power and control. As a young child, you entered the age of reason, but with your other insecurities, you want to use your reason to control others. We climb ladders of success and use our talents to control people. I understand this to be very tied to tribal identification. Keating warned of overidentification with your groups where tribal loyalty becomes your idol because this mythical membership in the group provides an almost compulsive insistence to belong, to control and to resist change. For most of us the first group we come into contact with us our family, so it is natural for us to overidentify with that group and feel a sense of loyalty. But when tribal loyalty interferes with union with God and love of neighbor, such as allegiances to a political party, a company, even your country, these impulses for control and group membership can easily become authoritarian.

The result of all of these stuck energy centers is what Keating calls the false self. Your reason has kicked in before you are capable of circumventing all of these energy centers. So your reasoning powers actually feed those energy centers and create these happiness programs where you want more and more security, esteem and control. If we feel we are missing control in our lives, we end up grasping for control in ways that ultimately give us less control and then we seek more control somewhere else in a vicious cycle. Our reason allows us to rationalize, justify, and even glorify these ways of getting what we think will make us happy. Our reason tells us to do it again even when it fails us over and over.

Here’s an example of how this might operate. Liam thinks esteem and recognition will create happiness in his life–his “happiness program,” or energy center is esteem-affection. Who knows why he is stuck there, maybe he didn’t get picked for the top reading group in first grade or he believes his sister was really his dad’s favorite. He joins a nonprofit board telling himself and others that he believes in their mission. That may be true, but his real agenda, hidden even from himself, is esteem. Eventually there will be a moment where that hidden agenda comes into conflict and it triggers intense frustration, anger, resentment and emotions. The frustration is probably way out of proportion compared to the triggering event. Let’s say that Liam wants to be named president of the board, not because he is capable or it would be the best uses of his talent for the vision of the nonprofit organization, but simply because his hidden agenda is to try to feed his esteem energy center. Someone who is better suited is named president instead and Liam feels more than disappointment, it feels like a familiar sting deep down because he is stuck in the esteem energy center. With God’s help, Liam could see disproportional disappointment and frustration as a call to understand himself and seek some healing. But like most of us, Liam will ruminate on it wondering why no one ever recognizes his talents and go back into his happiness programs to seek another way to get esteem. So the cycle reinforces itself.

Keating points out that Christ’s incarnation at once affirms humanity, and also shows us the way to work through our issues related to sin, energy centers, programs of happiness, or what I refer to as psychological compensation. To me, the ultimate psychological compensation is to cover our separation from God through our own striving — we eat of the apple to be like God instead of just spending time walking in the Garden. We’re using these programs for happiness — our apples — to compensate for the disconnect and infinite gap we feel from God and the pain we feel living in a broken world. But consider this, if Jesus was fully human, then Jesus was born with our lizard brain stem too, and also went through an existential evolution in His psychology.

In the story of Jesus’s temptation in the desert, Satan knows exactly how to tap into the spiritual energy centers. Satan tells Jesus to turn stones into bread. In other words, put your needs for security and survival in front of God. Satan tells Jesus to throw himself off the temple because he will be saved by angels and esteemed as a miracle worker. Finally, Satan tells Christ to fall down and worship him and he will hand over the world in power and control. Jesus is experiencing the exact psychological compensation we evolve through in our own very human lives. We suffer on our spiritual journey. The Christ shows us that union with God is above all.

Among the many ways Jesus models how we can reconnect with God, Keating emphasizes centering prayer and the beatitudes. I think both of these are life-changing and central to anyone trying to follow Jesus. Keating says that when a beatitude starts with, “blessed are,” we should really be hearing Jesus say, “imagine how happy you could be.”

Imagine how happy you would be if you were poor in spirit because you wouldn’t remember your need for security you would put your trust in God and you would finally inherent the kingdom of heaven. Imagine how happy you would be if you were poor trusting God to protect you instead of carrying your insecurity around your neck like a millstone. Imagine how happy you would be if you were open to mourning and carrying a hole in your heart, and by accepting the pain of loss setting some attachment aside and accepting God’s comfort. Imagine how happy you would be if you were meek and didn’t have power over anyone so you couldn’t care less if you were insulted. Imagine how happy you would be if you were a peacemaker because peacemakers have left behind tribal identification and even their own ego identification.

The gospel message helps us get over these happiness programs and our psychological compensation and invites us to deeper union with God. We crucify our false self to be born into our true Christ consciousness. Our true self recognizes Christ living in our very being. We happily walked with God in the garden before eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Our union with God has been there all along before our coming into our age of reason gave us so many reasons to believe we were separated and start compensating.