Therapaedeutics

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THE TITLE IS A neologism. Just made it up. It comes from Greek roots meaning “healing” and “education”. And I think we all need an education, not in “healing” but rather in what is therapy and why we’re trapped in a culture that always wants to give us therapy instead of hard news. The title is also wordplay around Pope Francis requiring seminarians to take a propaedeutic year – meaning a year that comes before (pro) education (paedeutic). And, in fact, there may be a purpose for Therapy before something else. But we’ll get to that in a few. I did discuss all this with my therapist, very frankly. I used the sentence, “I mean, I pay you to tell me if something is wrong…”

So, why is this coming up?

Two priests here, one friend, one of my professors in seminary, and a speaker we had at Church on Wednesday night, plus more than a few others around this corner of the Catholic Church have all used the same reading of St Matthew (and, behind that, the Book of Leviticus).

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Matthew 22:39

So, runs the reading, you must love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself. You cannot love your neighbor without loving yourself. This is where I’m having my problem.

It’s not in the Hebrew or the Greek, both avoid the language of comparison (love them exactly as you love you) and, instead, both languages seem to redirect one’s love: love your neighbor as if they are, exactly, your own self. They are yourself. They are the Subject of your life, of your love, of your personhood. This grows into deeper meaning in Christian Trinitarian Anthropology: only the Father can be his own subject and, even then, he pours himself out into the Son and the Spirit. It is they who return the contemplation back to himself and to each other. So, yes, while the Father is the monarch, the trinity, itself, in its communion of persons is engaged in perpetual self-as-other: not a one of them could be said to “love himself” first.

Is the “love yourself” reading correct? If so, is there something I’m missing in my walk? Should I buy myself flowers and write my own name in the sand? Or, is this “the therapeutic” creeping in to otherwise orthodox Catholicism? If so, what is the corrective needed to bring a fuller truth? What is the most charitable reading I can find?

Therapy as a bad thing

What is “the therapeutic” in this conversation? It is somewhat political in the secular sense. Accusations of “being therapeutic” usually come from the “right” and are directed at the “left”. So there are “culture war” overtones. But it is not new. Therapy for this conversation arises in Freud. The source of the worry is in a 1966 book called the Triumph of the Therapeutic by Phillip Rieff. Full disclosure: I have not read this work – I was tracing the genealogy of the ideas. This continues to evolve. How is it playing out in the world now, 60 years later? Writer Darel Paul sees it playing out most in the world of gay rights, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg:

… Freud’s therapeutic mission continues unabated, even heightened in the coronavirus era when no less an authority than the World Health Organization urges “self-care” practices as we face new stresses of work, home, and everyday life. Therapeutic discourse organizes our lives around emotional experience and a narrative of emotional suffering and healing. The therapeutic ethos holds up the authentic and liberated self as the ideal of character. Therapeutic politics instructs us to overcome both internal repression and external oppression by creating a society in which not simply the pursuit of happiness but happiness itself is a right owed to all. The long-running popularity of American psychotherapeutic or “mind-cure” movements including transcendentalism, New Thought, Christian Science, Scientology, and New Age spirituality has made the United States unusually fertile soil for the therapeutic. Its influence overflows the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and counseling to fill schools, churches, corporations, and the state. It stands today as our national collective moral philosophy.
“Under the Rainbow Banner“, Darel E. Paul, First Things, June 2020

The key point, that “It stands today as our national collective moral philosophy” pairs well the third dictate of our secular religion, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). This seems to be the general “spiritual but not religious” mindset of even atheists who judge religion by MTD. This seems to be also the general mindset of secular people who describe themselves as religious. They may go to church or Temple or synagogue and then just forget about it when they walk out the door. They read the Bible on Sunday and then A Course in Miracles the rest of the week. They give up the ten commandments because it’s too moralistic and instead just try to be nice. The “Five Commandments” of MTD are:

A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.

“The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” This requires, in a general way, some Therapy. And things that cause us to be not-happy, and perhaps to “feel bad” are thus wrong. Therapy helps us to be happy and feel good about ourselves which, it is argued, helps us to feel good about other people.

But no

Stop right there! as Meatloaf sings. Before we go any further… For there is some tiny modicum of truth and my Therapist asked me to check in on what was true (for any lie of Satan has to have some truth in it or it won’t work). What is true? God actually does want us to be, not happy, but Joyful. And that’s in the scriptures. “Rejoice always.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16) “Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.” (Philippians 4:4) “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations” (James 1:2). So, being happy is something close to “rejoice always”. But it falls short of the mark. And, let us be honest, “falling short of the mark” is the definition the Bible uses for sin. But there is something true there.

On the other hand, “feeling good about oneself” is nowhere in the Bible or in the writings of the saints. At all. But there is something close to it: being honest about who one is, being honest about one’s status. And, again, the Bible is full of examples of this (there are many more):

Made from the dust of the earth. (Genesis 2:7)
Clay before the potter. (Isaiah 64:8)
A sinner, conceived in sins and born in sin. (Psalm 51:5)
Depart from me, Lord, I am a sinner. (Luke 5:8)
Sit at the lower end of the table at a banquet. (Luke 14:10)
I am what I am. (1 Corinthians 15:10)
Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord. (James 4:10)

We know who we are by revelation. Living into this is what’s called “humility” from the word meaning “Dirt” which is what God used to make Adam. We are literally Earthlings – beings made from dirt. The opposite of humility is called hubris, which comes from Greek and means “wanton violence, insolence, outrage” it can even mean violence and outrage of a sexual nature. Very unhumble! Knowing who we are doesn’t sound to me like “loving oneself” at all. But, knowing who we are can help us to see who we are in God’s sight. We can, thus, find another truth buried in therapeutic culture. For to grow into the sort of human beings God wants us to be we do need to know where we are on the spectrum. It’s good to be realistic about where we are, who we are, and who God is.

So, there is some truth to both the morality and the therapy parts of MTD. Yet, to be clear: there are many things in Christian revelation that are not in accord with secular therapeutic models. Christians believe in a revealed sexual ethic that rejects physical sexual expression outside of the bonds of a sacramental marriage and even then only for the purposes of procreation and the marital union. Christians believe that any deviation from this is, exactly, “sin”. And that word makes a lot of people unhappy and – so those people say – that word also makes them feel bad about themselves. The revealed Christian anthropology says, “You are not your sin. When you feel about about your sin you’re not feeling bad about yourself. In fact, you’re feeling exactly what sin is supposed to make you feel: bad about sin.” We are all sinners, fallen short of the glory of God. That is realistic about who we are and who God is. (Fulton Sheen said, “We are no longer penitents, we have become patients.”)

And that’s where another word comes in: mercy. God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

Maybe Mercy is Better?

If we fail to understand the meaning of “mercy” the whole thing will be lost. When we hear “have mercy” we may imagine a victim being beaten and crying out for mercy. We may imagine a prisoner on death row begging for mercy. Or perhaps we imagine a heroine in a classic drama begging for mercy on behalf of her parents or village. This mercy is “don’t do a bad thing to me, please, even if I deserve it.” This conceptions of mercy is rather late though. The idea that we would need God to stop beating us up is not what is implied by the word, “mercy”.

In Latin, mercy is misericordiae. In Greek, ἐλέησόν, eleison. In Hebrew, חַסְדֶּ, chesed. The Latin carries the poetic resonance of “let your heart beat with mine”. The Hebrew is such a strong word that traditional English translations of the Bible like the Authorized Version render it as its own neologism (for the 15th Century): lovingkindness. Yet it is the same word used for “grace” in Hebrew translations of the Christian texts. For example: “Hail Mary, full of Chesed”. The Greek is even more poetic, for it comes from the word for olive oil. It implies soothing, healing, and luxurious touch. It’s a warm massage after a hard workout. When we pray at Mass or the Divine Liturgy, “Lord, have mercy” we should hear these overtones instead of “don’t do bad things”. When we pray for peace or healing, an end to violence or injustice, we are not asking God to stop whipping us with these scourges. Rather we are asking for the loving, soothing oil of God’s presence to heal us, struggling through a world of sin.

When we ask for Jesus to have mercy on us, we mean – literally – in his blood, the sacramental and real presence of his mercy in our lives. Grace.

This is not “love yourself” but I think we are to have mercy on ourselves: we are not to be harder on ourselves than God is. God calls us to specific things as does the Church. But the Church never calls us to say yes so many times that we can meet none of our obligations, for example. Or to be abused by those in authority over us. Yet the Church does call us to sacrificial self-giving. So the first act of mercy may be to find a Spiritual Director who can walk with you and help you discern the Spirit’s call in your life. Again, this is not therapy: a Spiritual Director that tells you it’s ok to live a sinful lifestyle, or break the teachings on contraception in your marriage is not helping you. A Spiritual Director that is not calling you to constant repentence is not helping you. They are, in fact, hurting you. Your second act of “self mercy” would be to find a better director.

And I think, “mercy, not sacrifice” is our directive from the Lord to bring people to the Gospel with whatever might be the easiest way in for them. Yes, they may be sitting in Church wondering why they are there – some vague sense of sinfulness or incompleteness that brought them in, but do we need to start at the beginning with letting them know how utterly deep the sin is? And we are to have mercy on ourselves the same way Jesus has Mercy on us. He knows what we are and he also knows what we have done to ourselves. In other words he knows that we are dirt destined for divinity but we tend to be happy just to wallow in the mud. In other words being honest about who we are helps us to see that we need a bath, that we need to do some work on ourselves.

It’s possible to hear mercy as a sort of “comfort me”, some hand-holding, huggy-squeezy moment. A bad translation of mercy might be love. But if you’ve ever had deep tissue massage, physical therapy, or even surgery you know that not all things comforting are comfortable. And, if you’ve ever sat on a soft sofa, lain on the wrong mattress, or had too much chocolate, you know that comfortable is not always the right thing. The comfort of God’s mercy may not be the comfort we’re looking for, for it comes in the unshielded openness of Confession, it arises in the middle of a hard day’s work in the vineyard. The comfort of God’s mercy is like the muscle memory where you make the motions because it is easy to do so – where you’ve schooled everything in your life to bend to God’s will. Only in doing God’s will, then, is there any sense of rightness, of comfort. God’s mercy only ever brings us in line with his will. Self-mercy will do that too. Self-love, however, won’t.

In charity, I need to hear “love yourself first” in the best way. I think the best way is a bad “American” translation of “self-mercy”.

Update 9/25/23 I was listening this morning to a lecture by Dr Lawrence Feingold, entitled Why Was the Chosen People Chosen? (from October 2007). In the question and answer section he addresses self-honest and refers to self esteem. That would be the exact phrase I’m looking for to replace “Self Love”. We need to know our place, to have a valid estimation of who we are and who God is. The lecture as well as the question and answer section are linked here.

The article I cited, “Under the Rainbow Banner“, Darel E. Paul, (First Things, June 2020) is a very good discussion of why the BLT+GQ movement is a sign of the the triumph of the Therapeutic in our culture. He writes, “Queerness has conquered America because it is the distilled essence of the country’s post-1960s therapeutic culture.” The article is worth a read. Here is a more recent discussion with the same author on how drag story hour is more of the same (from the folks at Catholic Culture).