making self-righteousness be still

Spiritual resource to share: releasing the heart

This is a tricky one. Self-righteousness can be such a tangled mess. But getting out of that mess is such a JOY!

It sometimes starts like this: I have a question about the rightness of an activity - usually it is the rightness of someone else's activity. I pray about it and come up with a conclusion that seems reasonable. I start studying and find all kinds of quotes and rules that support my view.
I make my stand. There is a subtle (or sometimes blatant) sense that others' behaviours need to change. I come to feel that by making this stand I am doing the only right thing. And that, if I don't make this stand, the world would be compromised.

So what is wrong with this picture? There is no God in this picture - except as a back up to justify my pre-conceived right way to do things! There is no humility, listening, dropping all sense of self, and willingness to change. This picture hides the unspoken fears, the pride of position and prejudices. Somehow it feeds the small ego into thinking that it is very important to be the one who can right this wrong. It also suggests that by restricting or controlling the behaviours of others, we are doing the right thing.

Here are some ideas have come to my rescue when I have struggled with this: "...humility... is the genius of Christian Science (Miscellaneous Writings by Mary Baker Eddy). Cast the beam out of one's own eye. (See Luke 6.) Let go (of ego) and let God. All of these ideas have helped me break the back of self-righteousness from time to time.

I once worked in a traveling performing group. Our schedule was tight with a show in a different city almost every night. The five of us were together 24/7. When little tensions would flare up, we dealt with them fleetingly, but enough so that we could get back to work. Finally at one point, the tension and pressure of the performance schedule fueled with self-righteousness and a growing frustration led to one very alert member to call for a time out.

What happened next was lovely. After one of our shows, we all met in the back of our traveling RV. We all agreed that we needed to talk.

We first established that we loved each other and that we appreciated each other. This was a surprising and delightful thing to do! It helped to disarm any self-righteousness any of us may have felt. We kept it up until we felt that we firmly had a foundation of love, trust and respect.

We openly talked about our hopes and our motive to make our whole adventure a blessing to others and a support to each another. Even though we all understood what the mission and purpose of our adventure was when we signed up, we needed to re-fresh that and affirm what we were all about and what noble goals we had hoped to achieve. It was in this atmosphere of a unified purpose that we could go forward.

It was only then that we brought up some things that were a concern to us. Then and only then could we go into removing what were becoming increasingly heavy burdens to our work. Being sure to not accuse anyone of wrongdoing, we were able to impersonalize the errant actions and re-establish our trust of one another. Then we each stated individually how certain actions made us feel.

Gone was the sense that if a person felt a concern about something, then they obviously didn't know enough about God! (Doesn't that even sound silly?) Gone was the sense that one person had to carry the whole group. (Whew!) And what was revealed was a sweet kindness that we had always had toward one another, but had been temporarily buried under the pressure of the schedule, misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

The tour went on very successfully. But even more so, I walked away with a major lesson on how to make self-righteousness be still. It is that can be constantly fine-tuned!








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