`I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to be “good”. Suffering from what I call the `Good-Girl Complex or Perfectionism’. I see so many people that are ultimately locked up inside, for fear of making a `bad’ mistake, or looking like a bad person…So it is not really about owning your goodness, it is about disowning your badness. When we disengage from a part of ourselves, we’re doing ourselves a great disservice.’ (Kammie, life coach)
Yes the great effort that good people invested in trying to be `good’ has often resulted in reaping a `wounded self-esteem’ when they fail to measure up to their own ideals. One such person is the great Russian 19th-century author, Leo Tolstoy, whose books have become classics. From Tolstoy, we can learn a deep respect of God’s inflexible absolute standards of perfection. These ethical ideals that were elaborated by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount had put tremendous pressure on Tolstoy to be good and attracted him like a flame. But his failure to live up to those ideals ultimately consumed him like the moth destroying itself in the flame. Tolstoy tried to follow the Sermon on the Mount literally in his quest for holiness. In one significant instance, after reading Jesus’ command to the rich young man to give away everything, Tolstoy decided to free his serfs, give away his copyrights, and sell his vast estate. Subsequently, he wore peasant clothes, made his own shoes, and began working in the fields. In the face of rapidly-disappearing financial security, his wife protested strongly until Tolstoy made some concessions to set aside sufficient assets for his family. In his attempt to achieve goodness and perfection, he kept devising new lists of rules such as giving up smoking, hunting, drinking and meat. He also created new rules for developing the emotional will and eliminating base instincts. But Tolstoy could never achieve the self-discipline necessary to keep the rules. More than once, he even took a public vow of chastity and asked for separate bedrooms. However, he could never keep the vow for long and much to his shame, his wife, Sonia, had 16 pregnancies to broadcast to the world to proclaim of Tolstoy’s failure in becoming chaste. His diaries reveal many struggles between Tolstoy and his family and more importantly, many more between Tolstoy and himself. As a result, Tolstoy suffered from a deeply wounded self-esteem because of his failure to live up to his ideal based on the Sermon on the Mount. His scheme for self-improvement all foundered. In the end, Tolstoy fled from his fame, his family, his estate, his identity and died like a vagrant in a rural railway station. In spite of his apparent failure in life, Tolstoy told his critics `Don’t judge God’s holy ideals by my inability to meet them. Don’t judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name.’ At the end of his life, Tolstoy concluded, “Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not misled me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: `Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!’ No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.”
In the words of Philip Yancey, “I feel sad as I read Tolstoy’s religious writings. The X-ray vision into the human heart that made him a great novelist also made him a tortured Christian. Like a spawning salmon, he fought upstream all his life, in the end collapsing from moral exhaustion… Yet I also feel grateful to Tolstoy for his relentless pursuit of authentic faith has made an indelible impression upon me… The churches I grew up in contained too many frauds, or at least that is how I saw it in the arrogance of youth. When I observed the huge gap between the ideals of the gospel and the flaws of its followers, I was sorely tempted to abandon those ideals as hopelessly unattainable.”
Luckily for Philip Yancey, the author of `The Jesus I Never Knew’, he came across another famous Russian author, Dostoevsky. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were opposites in every way. Where Tolstoy wrote bright sunny novels, Dostoevsky focused on dark, gloomy and brooding ones that were shaped and influenced by his life experiences. When he was young, he was arrested for belonging to a group that was considered treasonous by the Tsar Nicholas I. In order to impress upon the young radicals the seriousness of their errors, the Russian emperor sentenced them to death and staged a mock execution. The blindfolded conspirators were attired in white death gowns and led to a public square to face a firing squat. At the very last moment, as the order `Ready, aim!’ was heard and rifles were cocked, a horseman galloped up with a pre-arranged message from the emperor that he would mercifully downgrade their death sentence and commute it to hard labour. Dostoevsky never recovered from that terrible experience in which he had peered into the jaw of death and came out alive. As he boarded the convict train, a devout woman handed him a New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. Believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling, Dostoevsky pored over the New Testament during his confinement. After ten years in confinement, he was convinced that “If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth… then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.”
The long prison term gave Dostoevsky a rare opportunity to live at close quarters with thieves, murderers, and drunken peasants. It gave him a deep understanding of human nature on the darker side of life that later provided the inspiration for his masterpiece, `Crime and Punishment’. Dostoevsky’s liberal view of the inherent goodness of humanity was shattered by his perception of the granite evil he found in his cellmates. Yet over time he also glimpsed the image of God in even the lowest of prisoners. He became convinced that only through being loved is a human being capable of love; just as the apostle John says, `We love because he (God) first loved us.’
From the writings of these two great classical authors, Philip Yancey arrived at the following profound insights, “Taken together, these two Russians became for me, at a crucial time in my Christian pilgrimage, spiritual directors. They helped me come to terms with a central paradox of the Christian life. From Tolstoy, I learned the need to look inside, to the kingdom of God that is within me. I saw how miserably I had failed the high ideals of the gospel. But from Dostoevsky I learned the full extent of grace. Not only the kingdom of God is within me; Christ himself dwells there. `Where sin increased, grace increased all the more,’ is how Paul expressed it.
There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to. We are judged by the righteousness of the Christ who lives within, not our own. Tolstoy got it halfway right: anything that makes me feel comfort with God’s moral standard, anything that makes me feel, `At last, I have arrived’, is a cruel deception. But Dostoevsky got the other half right: anything that makes me feel discomfort with God’s forgiving love is also a cruel deception. ‘ There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’: that message, Leo Tolstoy never fully grasped.”
(Adapted from `The Jesus I Never Knew’ by Philip Yancey)
Food For Thought
All human beings are short of God’s ideal standards of perfection. It is a matter of degree- some are shorter than others. We are all trying to play a game of illusion of who can jump the highest to touch the ceiling of heaven. The so-called spiritual giants may jump ten thousand meters high but they still can’t touch that high moral ceiling. They are still far too short! In measuring the distance between heaven and earth, no human being in history can ever touch the ceiling of heaven on their own merits or strength. It does not matter whether you miss heaven by an inch or by a mile. From God’s perspective, we poor mortals will be forever defined as `failures by a miss’. So all of us- saints or sinners- have to need God’s grace and love to gain access to heaven. God gives everyone a level playing field. We have no option but to depend on God’s unconditional love and grace to nurture our inner peace and self-acceptance.
Submitted by David YKK
