Broadly speaking, people come on spiritual journeys for freedom from torment. And the usual torment is self-loathing. And the self-loathing, at least in my experience, has its origins in childhood environments of strenuous morality, that sometimes includes strict religious upbringing.
Journeys like this are not freeing. I suggest that they’re not even spiritual. What ensues is a dogged impulse to be worthy and at the same time a constantly reinforced, and negative, self-preoccupation. It goes nowhere.
This is probably part of what makes overcoming addictions so difficult. We stand and pick at the problem of the constantly critical voice instead of walking free from it. The addiction promises relief, but actually compounds the problem. Maybe the negativity against the self is the real addiction. Mormon feminist podcaster Susan Hinckley says it this way. ‘Sometimes we choose guilt over happiness because happiness is a risk and guilt is safe’.
On journeys like this, our solution is to Get Right with God. If we’re secular people, we Try to be a Good Person. The idea is that we’ll do a moral inventory of ourselves, and then stop doing all the bad things we do. Then we’ll feel okay.
I suggest that moral inventory done this way is really just marination in what we’re ashamed of, and no more.
What if the goal instead were not perfect avoidance of being bad (and good luck with that if you’ve ever tried it), but simply an honest, and unshaming, process of engaging with the struggle?
What if the mere process of seeing and naming our faults were the goal? What if simply acknowledging them made them feel less damning? And ourselves easier to live with?
What if the truth set us free like that?