On An Encounter With Grace

A Liturgical Redirection of my Toxic Inner Monologue

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more seen than when watching the sixth episode of Bojack Horseman’s fourth season. Entitled “Stupid Piece of Sh*t,” it follows Bojack’s inner monologue, within which the titular phrase makes frequent, self-directed appearances. As Bojack experiences his own frustrations and disappointments with himself, he also abuses himself with a barrage of self-loathing vitriol.

This was the song of my people.

I wrote a bit in my first post about my own struggles with and towards mental and emotional health. I don’t want to go into too many details here, but I’ll just note that over the first 35 or so years of my life, I allowed a more or less unchecked onslaught of abusive self-talk to form its grooves within my mind. Self-hatred and insults came to be something of the 60 cycle hum in the background of my mental activities. In times of particular stress, I’d often ramp this up, finding a perverse comfort in the familiar cadences of venomous self-talk. For the last six years or so, I’ve been working on this, and have gotten better about it, but like a recovering addict, there are times when that comforting familiarity’s sweetly sung siren song pierces through and tortures my naked ears like brave Ulysses.

Let me break for a moment from something of a PSA: no one deserves to be talked to the way that I’ve so often talked to myself. And I urge anyone who finds themselves in a situation like the one I’m describing, or like the one rendered in animated technicolor by the Bojack episode, to seek help, whether through therapy, or (physician prescribed!) chemical assistance, or through whatever helps. I remember hearing one of my comedic heroes, Conan O’Brien, relate his realization that he would never stand for someone to talk to one of his children the way he talks to himself. This really resonated with me, and motivates me to speak to myself the way that I know in my heart of hearts that everyone deserves to be spoken to (even if my mental habits have not always caught up to this). I’m not a therapist, so I’ll forego any advice beyond that: everyone deserves love and to be spoken to like someone who is beloved, so if you’re not doing that for yourself, find some help so that you can.

Okay, all of that is more or less preambulary to what I actually want to talk about.

In general, I’m a fairly even-keeled person, but from time to time the voyage of my life experiences some choppy water, and, in particularly fraught circumstances, capsizes a bit. One such event happened a few weeks ago.

The details are not entirely mine to share, so I’ll leave you, dear readers, to be tantalized by the mystery of what actually happened, but suffice it to say that I was far from my best self for an evening. I essentially lost my equanimity, and devolved into a dense mass of self-pitying woundedness and irritation at those around me. By the end of the evening, I could tell that my righteous indignation was not so righteous after all, that my cause for frustration, to the extent that it was in any way legitimate was slight, and that in any case, my response was all out of proportion to it.

Upon this realization, the self-abusing monologue cycled back up, as I attempted to draw comfort from mental self-flagellation. Upon reflection, I think that what draws me to this is the misguided thought that if I punish myself enough, I’ll somehow expiate the wrong and merit some sort of consolation. It’s the sort of tentative, questing self-deprecation that’s proffered in anticipation of someone saying, “Oh, no. You’re actually quite wonderful. Here, allow me to fluff your ego a bit so you can feel better.”

The self-pile-on continued as I eventually drifted into an uneasy sleep, and I awoke the next morning feeling sobered, and full of regret. I reiterated apologies to my wife, who’d borne the brunt of my seething, and went on about my morning routine (exercise, shower, morning prayer). When we turned to morning prayer, I was immediately struck by the confession of sin:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.

These are familiar words; I’ve recited them more or less daily for 15 years. But, that morning, they (as the youths say) hit different. Here was an honest self-appraisal without opprobrium; a frank acknowledgement of failures, a sincere desire to do better, and a manifest confidence that one is, for all that, loved and regarded with mercy and compassion.

This set the stage for the rest of my engagement with that morning’s liturgy. And while I don’t remember any specifics, I do remember that throughout, from the psalms to the lessons to the creed, Our Father, and collects, being struck by that same honest, yet gentle tone. It was just what I needed. And, I also realized, it’s just what I always need.

I don’t often conceptualize my relationship with God in terms of sin and forgiveness. I tend to follow a more Athanasian/patristic paradigm that focuses on deification. My hope is not just to be forgiven, but to be raised into the immortal life of the Trinity. This is not to say that sin and forgiveness don’t factor at all. I’m certainly aware of my sins, but I’m also generally confident that they are forgiven for Jesus’s sake.

For a time, I was rather taken with the Reformed tradition, which places quite a bit of stock in the guilt/forgiveness framework. Speaking only for myself, thinking in those terms tends to feed right into my Bojack-esque inner monologue: “Yes, you are indeed a piece of sh*t, but God love you anyway, forgives you, even imputes to you the alien righteousness of Christ. You remain intrinsically a piece of sh*t, but you’re accepted despite yourself.” Again, there’s a good chance that’s more my hangup than a liability of the theology, but even so, I tend not to find it especially edifying. In times where I’ve fallen into serious sin, confidence in God’s forgiveness is great (it’s nice for more minor sins too!), but that’s not my baseline.

All that said, on that morning after, when I needed to reckon with my tendency towards (and actual commission of) sin, and when I also needed gentleness amid my self-inflicted barrage of abuse, the liturgical provision for a confession of sin was just what I needed. I’d probably not have come across it if it weren’t already my routine to pray the office every morning. And so there’s a lesson there, too: be in the habit of saying your prayers. Sometimes it’s a matter of rote routine. Usually, it’s edifying (particularly to the extent that you engage in full, conscious, and active participation). But then, sometimes, it affords you just the encounter with grace that you need in order to move forward. And unless you’re engaged in the practice, such occasions can easily pass you by.

In the liturgy, I found the words to express what I knew was true, in a way that was life-giving, at a time when my own thoughts were decidedly not affording me that opportunity. Thanks be to God, for the grace of the gospel, of course, but also for the gift of the liturgy, and, in my particular case, the Book of Common Prayer.