This is how we set our hearts at rest . . . God is greater than our hearts.
In the 1977 film High Anxiety Mel Brooks, in the role of eminent psychiatrist Richard Harpo Thorndyke, suffers from high anxiety – in other words he is afraid of heights. He fears flying; we witness his horror through a jet plane window as he lands in San Francisco to take over a mental hospital. Other instances of this fear occur as when he attends a convention of psychiatrists at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency and must go up one of those glass-enclosed elevators that rise high above the lobby and then must negotiate the balcony overlooking the depths below while trying to find his room. All of this is a Brooks’ parody of Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. Ultimately Brooks (Thorndyke) discovers – in a Freudian way – that his fear of heights goes all the way back to his infancy when he fell out of his highchair during a violent argument of his parents! Knowing the cause of his fear, he now can set it aside and get on with his life.
Knowing the whole story, getting the whole picture can indeed relieve us of things that otherwise distress us, that weigh upon us unconsciously. And today’s second reading from the 1st Letter of John can do that for us. I mean, from our earliest years we carry the burden of our mistakes (let’s call them sins) upon our shoulders much as the Greek god Atlas was condemned to carry the heavens or the whole globe upon his shoulders for deeds of rebellion. There is that huge bronze statue of him bending under the weight of the heavens in front of the Rockefeller Center in New York.
We feel guilty – even guiltier as we grow older, blame ourselves almost as a reflex for major and even minor failures (such as allowing the soup to boil over). We wind up adopting the remark of Groucho Marx – who resigned from a country club stating: “I refuse to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” We doubt our worth and often a certain kind of puritanical religious education aggravates that doubt until a person says, “To hell with it – so I’m a sinner, even the greatest sinner that ever lived. Case settled. No need to exhaust myself hoping any more.”
First of all it takes a big ego to claim being the greatest sinner in the world. You seem to forget that you have a lot of competition, real “pro’s” (like Heinrich Himmler) to whom you are just one more face in the concentration camp. But even St. Paul had a severe case of low self-esteem as he writes in 1st Corinthians: I am the least of the apostles . . . because I persecuted the Church of God. And in 1st Timothy we read: . . . Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.
Which brings us to today’s second reading. There is a line in this reading that dates from 2000 years prior to the modern discovery of what Freud called the Unconscious (the things we don’t know about ourselves). “Dear children,” writes John, “ . . this is how we set our hearts (consciences) at rest . . . If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts (consciences), and he knows everything.” In other words, he knows the whole story, the influences, fears, the toxic elements of the culture we have grown up in, the distortions that were presented to us as “truth”. He knows not only our failings but why we fail, the full scope and origin of it, even the highchair episodes, the ancestral ripple effects.
In other words he understands even as a father or mother knows so much more about their child than the world that would condemn him or her. He also recalls all our other deeds motivated by love. It’s this fact [that God is greater than our hearts/consciences] that “makes Christians (as one scholar put it) hurl themselves into the ocean of the infinite understanding and mercy of God.”