I wrote the other day about how our lack of "good enough" is destructive in our society -- destructive, particularly, of our humanity. Our drive for excellence actually betrays a delusion anthropology, a false conception of who we are. Specifically, I argued that our success ethos presumes that we are gods
rather than finite creatures. The success ethos -- believing we are
gods -- presumes that we have inexhaustible resources of time, energy and
talent that can be leveraged into greater and greater success,
improvement, betterment and excellence.
But we aren't gods and we don't have inexhaustible resources. We are
finite. We have limits. Only so much energy. Only so many hours in the
day.
That is one of the lessons of Lent.
Today, I want to expand on that idea, and explore how our culture of shame and lack of vulnerability lead us to feelings of worthlessness. To feeling that we aren't enough.
Ours is what Brown calls in her Daring Greatly a "culture of scarcity". For example, she asks participants in her studies to answer the question: "What do you hear or see in the phrase: Never ________ enough." Brown writes:
I can't count the number of my women friends who lament this "scarcity". "I'm not pretty enough." "I need to lose weight." "Why would he love me for me?" "Why would I love me for me?"
So what do we do about it?
The solution isn't to replace scarcity with abundance. That just plays into our culture of excellence. More. Better. As if we're living in Eden. As if we're god-like beings with a cornucopia of resources.
No. What we need is a culture of "enough". What we need, is to know that we're enough.
To be enough is to be vulnerable. In our vulnerability, we expose our weakness, insecurities and failures to ourselves and others. To be vulnerable is to stop living the lies. We're not god-like. We're not perfect. And we needn't try to keep that illusion up for others.
Sure, that's not easy in our culture. We shame folks who live in such vulnerability. Excellence and perfection are the rules, after all. So if we're living into our human finitude, you'd better believe someone will come along and tempt you (or shame you) into believing the lies. (It worked in the Garden of Eden, after all.) Living into that finitude is meant to bring shame, because we're taught that anxiety is the only way we can really be human.
And I tend to root those fears and anxieties in our human temptation to deny death. We're slaves to our fears because we're slaves to death.
What we need to learn to say: Being human is good enough.
That is one of the lessons of Lent.
Today, I want to expand on that idea, and explore how our culture of shame and lack of vulnerability lead us to feelings of worthlessness. To feeling that we aren't enough.
Ours is what Brown calls in her Daring Greatly a "culture of scarcity". For example, she asks participants in her studies to answer the question: "What do you hear or see in the phrase: Never ________ enough." Brown writes:
It only takes a few seconds before people fill in the blanks with their own tapes:She concludes: "We get scarcity because we live it". There's never enough. Brown goes on to elaborate:
- Never good enough
- Never perfect enough
- Never thin enough
- Never powerful enough
- Never smart enough
- Never certain enough
- Never safe enough
- Never extraordinary enough
Scarcity is the "never enough" problem. The word scarce is from the Old Norman French scars, meaning "restricted in quantity" (c. 1300). Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted and lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don't have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.What is the source of this experience of lack? Brown traces it back to the very things I was describing the other day:
What makes the constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we're holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it.Driven by these lies -- "visions of perfection," "fictional accounts" -- we create what Brown calls a "shame-prone culture" where many within the culture struggle with feelings of worthiness, feelings rooted in feeling a failure, feeling not good enough.
I can't count the number of my women friends who lament this "scarcity". "I'm not pretty enough." "I need to lose weight." "Why would he love me for me?" "Why would I love me for me?"
So what do we do about it?
The solution isn't to replace scarcity with abundance. That just plays into our culture of excellence. More. Better. As if we're living in Eden. As if we're god-like beings with a cornucopia of resources.
No. What we need is a culture of "enough". What we need, is to know that we're enough.
To be enough is to be vulnerable. In our vulnerability, we expose our weakness, insecurities and failures to ourselves and others. To be vulnerable is to stop living the lies. We're not god-like. We're not perfect. And we needn't try to keep that illusion up for others.
Sure, that's not easy in our culture. We shame folks who live in such vulnerability. Excellence and perfection are the rules, after all. So if we're living into our human finitude, you'd better believe someone will come along and tempt you (or shame you) into believing the lies. (It worked in the Garden of Eden, after all.) Living into that finitude is meant to bring shame, because we're taught that anxiety is the only way we can really be human.
And I tend to root those fears and anxieties in our human temptation to deny death. We're slaves to our fears because we're slaves to death.
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death -- that is, the devil -- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death (Hebrews 2.14-15).So the solution to all this fear, to all this drive, to all this anxiety, is learning to be a vulnerable human being. Learning to overcome the shame our culture puts on "being enough".
What we need to learn to say: Being human is good enough.