I’m still thinking about the Charles Schulz biography I reviewed last night. There are so many similarities between my personality and Schulz’ (if you read the review, you know that’s not what you’d call bragging) that the story of his life was for me a vivid cautionary tale, and I’m trying not to waste it.
Schulz had (and I have) an emotional problem, which is a misfortune. But the condition provides a convenient excuse for shirking spiritual duty, which is a not a misfortune but a sin. (I think it’s a reasonable argument that people like us can’t be expected to do everything that more outgoing people do, but that’s not the same thing as being excused from service altogether.)
I said last night that I believe faith is an adventure. People who don’t wrestle with faith (you don’t hold faith; you wrestle with it, as every believer knows) have a hard time understanding that. In their eyes, a life of faith is a life of conformity, doing prescribed things in prescribed ways, following the list of do’s and don’ts. Real adventure, they believe, consists of doing whatever you want to do, as often as you want, without regard to anybody else’s opinion.
But the adventure of faith consists in precisely the opposite—doing the things you don’t want to do. There’s no real challenge in indulging your appetites—you’re taking the line of least resistance when you do that. It’s in defying your own likes and dislikes that you really move into Unknown Territory and break Fresh Ground.
Supremely shy people like Schulz and I fear encountering other people. I frequently tell myself, “I’m really doing right by avoiding people. I’m such a jerk—I do and say the wrong thing so often—that the best thing I can do for God is to keep His association with me a secret.” Schulz felt that because (he believed) nobody loved him, he was under no obligation to show love to anyone else.
That’s a major reason (in my theory) why Schulz lost his faith. He found an excuse to be disobedient to Christ’s call to love his neighbor. In that way he failed to exercise his faith (why do you think we call it “exercise?”) and it grew flaccid and died. I tend to do the same thing. (And frankly, it’s been getting worse.)
I remember sitting on an upstairs porch in Cleveland, Ohio one summer night back in 1969. I was talking to a young man who had no religious faith at all, but he said something at once insightful and ignorant. “That business of the Cross,” he said. “That just messes everything up. I mean, when somebody gives up their life for you, it puts this huge obligation on you.”
Immature Christians (the kind we used to call “carnal”) think of the life of faith as a sort of transaction. “God did X for me, so I have to do X for Him.” They’re like the hireling who “runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.” (John 10:13) “This job doesn’t pay enough for me to risk my life.” But genuine faith understands that there’s no balance sheet involved. Christ gave all, and we give all. It’s not a long, long balance sheet with eternally running columns. The balance sheet has been thrown away entirely. When Jesus said “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” (Matthew 16:24) his listeners knew what He meant. You take up a cross to go and die, very unpleasantly. It’s a thing you don’t want to do by its very nature. Faith is as much about doing stuff as it is about holding convictions. And that stuff is, as often as not, unpleasant. Stuff that makes us want to say, “If I try that, I’ll just die.”
But those who learn to die that way also learn that dying isn’t so bad.
And then they’re not afraid anymore.
Lars,
I just started reading this blog regularly and look forward to your posts. This particular one concerning Shulz and your own struggle with shyness hit home. Shyness/fear have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The shyness, or mostly the fear of saying or doing something others might find silly has kept me from doing many things. The jobs that I have had required me to work with the public and that was helpful, but my daily reliance on the guidance of Jesus has been the most liberating thing that I have ever experienced. There are times when I simply forget He is with me and then the fear creeps back over, but then something like a silent whisper reminds me I am not alone and the freedom comes back. Sorry for the long post, I had to summon the courage, with Help, to post this, as it is a bit intimdiating to think someone I don’t even know will (might) read it. Just remember, you are being heard through your writing and it is just as an effective witness as speaking aloud and I have received insight and much encouragement from your work. Thank you.
Thank you for the compliment, and thank you for commenting, Deborah.
Great post!
I understand where you are coming from (I think).
I have a problem with my faith (very weak at times)
I sometimes have to force myself to go to worship. But I think it is there that God uses His Word to kill me off to myself, to my doubts and fears, to my goodness.
I think that is one of the reasons that He commanded that we gather to worship Him and partake in His sacraments. That He could work His power of love and forgiveness in us, even if we don’t want it.
The great thing about faith is that it doesn’t take very much. A mustard seed or less will do.
What a great God we have that keeps battling for us, even when we give up.
I very much appreciate your terrific blog, by the way…you are a great encouragement to me.
Thanks!
What you said about nature — ie shy people not being expected to function like outgoing people but not being excused, either — makes me think of an exchange I had in Confession this evening. I was going on (and despite being a rather shy person, I don’t mind sharing this) about my own tendency to be unforgiving, and how something had come into my mind only today, regarding an incident which happened years ago, and I’d been overcome with anger about it all over again, which made me realize that I hadn’t entirely forgiven the other party involved.
My confessor then said a very wise thing. He said, “Well, you know, women are like that. When someone hurts you, you have a hard time letting go of it, and you think about it for a long, long time.” Well, I thought. Father gets it. Thank you, Father. And then he said an even wiser thing: “Which means that you have to work twice as hard to overcome that tendency. It’s your nature, but you can’t just rest in it.”
I think that to a great extent that wisdom could apply to other elements of our human nature. It’s a double-edged thing, our nature: there are very real gifts which go with shyness, for example, gifts of sensitivity and observation. When you’re the person standing in the corner of the room not talking to anyone, you’re positioned to see and feel things which the people yakking away at each other don’t see and feel, because they’re in the middle of it all. This is a gift — it’s part of what makes a good writer, for one thing. The shy person’s shyness is part of the gift of his life, given by God, for some reason and some use which maybe He alone knows, but which serves Him nonetheless.
On the other hand, as my confessor put it, we can’t rest in our nature too much. That may be one way to frame the tragedy of Schulz’s life: as you said, his innate shyness became not a gift to be used in obedience, but an excuse for disobedience. Our natural self is a gift, but it’s a damaged gift, thanks to original sin, and it has a dark side which, with God’s help and grace, we are to try to overcome. And I tell you, if I didn’t have the prospect of frequent conversations on this theme in the confessional, I would not be trying nearly so hard (sloth is another of my great besetting sins, and sloth loves being shy, and being distracted by children, and having a computer available all the time . . . you know, whatever excuse there is to do anything but pray . . . ). And I could still try much harder than I do. It’s not as though He wouldn’t do — or hadn’t done — the hardest work Himself.
Anyway, I’ve gone on too long, when I really wanted to say: a beautiful post, and I too appreciate your blog.
Very well put, Sally.
I’m really grateful for these thought-provoking comments. As usual, Gene Veith nails the issue on his blog today where he quotes from Bonhoeffer: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall:
[Man] is free for the worship of the Creator. In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others. No man is free “as such,” that is, in a vacuum, in the way that he may be musical, intelligent or blind as such. […] Freedom is not a quality which can be revealed–it is not a possession, a presence, an object, nor is it a form for existence–but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means “being free for the other,” because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.
This, of course, has to do with vocation, the purpose of which is to love and serve your neighbor whom God brings to you in your various callings (in the family, the workplace, the church, and the culture).
May I point out a couple of things? I may appear incredibly arrogant, and if so I apologize.
Lars, God has seen fit for you to be born in a time and place that allows a lot of your social interactions, for at least part of your life, to take place on line. You don’t seem to be shy here, or a jerk. You’re a nice, thoughtful person. That’s the real you.
Deborah, have you considered being silly on purpose? It will be scary at first, but it’s a way to get rid of that inhibition. Being funny is incredibly valuable. Once you have people laugh at you on purpose, you won’t be afraid it might happen accidentally.
When I teach, I do a mistake on purpose and after the students agree with me, I call them up on it. I then explain why I did it:
1. I want them to think about what I’m saying and pay attention, not just go on autopilot. The people I teach are grownups who usually have full lives, so they have a lot of other concerns.
2. If later in the class I make a real mistake, I can always pretend it was another mock mistake.