When I was mired in the throes of a chronic illness, often confined to my bed for days or week at a time, people would come over and pray for me. The first ten or so times this happened, I welcomed the petitions. As surely as my symptoms arrived, I thought, they could disappear. Maybe Jim or Sally had the right words, the correct correlation of phrases to unlock the door to my healing.
Eventually, though, frustration took over. Why was I frustrated? And at whom? God? Myself? My unrelenting pain? The answer, of course, is yes. I grew to resent every visitor, every guest aroused my anxiety.
And my anxiety led to more shame. Shame because I was ungrateful for the graciousness of my guests. These people, many of whom pastors and elders and leaders at our church, didn't have to come see me. They did so, I told myself, because they love me. And I believed they did. I believed their prayers were genuine as well, heartfelt. I believe they thought their words could pierce the veil of heaven and saturate my sinews with holy healing.
Still, my gut told me something was awry. Wrong. Disingenuous.
Only in hindsight can I give words to my gut's promptings. You see, no one was interested in being present with me in my plight. Prayer was a pill to relieve the anxiety of my suffering. I needed someone to dignify my presence rather than pray away my pain. No one seemed interest in that, though. They wanted to petition the Holy One on my behalf as a massage for their ego, so they could tell themselves they did all they could do.
KJ Ramsey writes beautifully about this when she says,
"My story
of suffering
is not something
to pray away.
My presence is not
a prayer request.
Don't ask
to pray away
my diseases
unless you have
first dignified
my presence."
Too often, we avoid pain because it makes us uncomfortable. Rather than giving someone the gift of presence, we settle for prayer. It's not that prayer doesn't matter, that our words to God are insignificant. I couldn't call myself a Christian if I believed that.
What I'm saying is that we use God to avoid sitting with discomfort. My experience of suffering is just one example of this. We also do this with hard emotions or unresolved conflict. Rather than taking steps to address an addiction to porn, for example, we pray harder or read the Bible more often. Rather than taking steps to address the conflict in our marriage, we tell ourself that we need to focus more on Jesus. Rather than looking honestly at the issues facing the church - racism and systemic abuse and gender inequality - we say the devil and his minions are fighting for our hearts and we need a spiritual revival.
Behind all of these responses is the same defense mechanism: spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing is using God-talk or religious practices to avoid hard or difficult situations.
Spiritual bypassing is the ego's attempt to make you feel good about yourself without ever engaging the hard work of change. Spiritual bypassing forms the chasm that keeps people from True Life.
I've already given you an example of this defense mechanism, but I want to offer you a few more, hoping to expose the subtle ways your ego tries to keep you from God.
You assume God's love for you is based on what you believe.
Think about all the issues facing society right now. Transgenderism. Racism. Global warming. The list goes on and on. I bet you have an opinion about them, don't you? I do. But here's the thing: have you ever met someone on the other side of these issues? Have you met a girl who believes she is a boy? Have you met a gay person? Sat down with this person for no other reason than to hear his story?
If you haven't, then you're allowing ideas to trump people. And this is spiritual bypassing. Because if you sat down with some of these people, you would learn that the answers aren't as black-and-white as you thought. Human beings are messy, complicated. And this might disrupt your worldview. It might force you re-think what you believe. And that would be too hard, require too much effort. So, instead, you settle for being a keyboard evangelist.
You believe some emotions are good and others are bad.
Good Christians aren’t bitter or angry. They don’t struggle with cynicism or fear or anxiety or any of the other emotions we, humans, label as negative.
This is hogwash, of course.
Good Christians do struggle with negative emotions because they are human and all humans struggle with all emotions.
I was not taught this in the church of my youth. Or the church of my adolescent or adult years. Too often, Christians gather in a bubble of positivity, and there is no place for negative emotions. We assume evolved, faithful followers don’t struggle with darkness, so we gloss over it with happiness or joy, and that is like covering a hole in your head with a gauze pad and assuming you don’t need medical treatment. You go on like that long enough and the hole will become infected and you will end up in a much worse state than if you stopped to treat the wound properly.
Christian maturity is the realization that emotions aren’t good or bad, and therefore, we don’t need to suppress them. Sometimes life is hard, really hard, and the last thing you need is to pretend it’s not. We’re all a collection of emotions. Learning to express the full scale of these emotions in healthy ways is essential to spiritual growth.
There's a disconnect between your perception and your actions.
When I was a pastor, a random number showed up on my phone, and against my better judgment, I answered. Turns out, the number was a lady I knew well, and she was crying. Her husband was an elder at a church, but he was emotionally and verbally abusive, and she wanted to know how she could leave him without ruining his life.
I don't remember what I said, but I remember the shock I felt. I couldn't believe what she was saying. I knew this man. He was godly, humble, sincere. His actions were all a front, though. He wasn't the man he portrayed to the world.
And he knew this. He knew his actions didn't match others' perceptions, but he was able to gloss over his immoral inconsistencies by convincing himself that he was a good Christian, that he was serving the church, sacrificing his time for the community of believers.
But he wasn't becoming like Christ. Spiritual bypassing makes you believe you’re a good Christian if you serve the world or evangelize your neighbor, regardless of how you treat those closest to you. It avoids the real work of changing the man in the mirror by doing a bunch of godly things. Tell me, though. What good is it if you convert the whole world, but lose your soul? It's no good. It’s no good at all.
You believe you become like God by separating from the world.
Here's where I'm going to upset some folks. But I believe this with all of my heart. One of the big mistakes Christians make is to assume that you must create a Christian sub-culture to become more like God. That the more things you do that have "Christian" in their name, the more likely you are to grow into the image of Christ. Christian school. Christian workout group. And so on.
Meanwhile, Jesus immerses himself in the world. His closest friends are fishermen and tax collectors. He dines with the worst sinners in his society. So, tell me, where does this separation mindset come from? It doesn’t come from Christ. No, instead it comes from our desire to avoid the messy, unclean, impossible to resolve parts of life. This is spiritual bypassing.
We think we become like God by separating from the world. Jesus tells us that your salvation is found by loving your enemies.
If Jesus is the model, then we become like God by engaging with the world, not separating from it. Until we begin to rub elbows with people who make us uncomfortable, we will continue to settle for do-goodedness and call it spiritual maturity.
You use spiritual warfare to explain away hard times.
When someone dies, we blame Satan. When our marriage falls on hard times, we blame the Evil One. When a random bout of depression strikes us, we chalk it up to the forces of darkness. In doing so, we miss out on an opportunity to grow, to learn, to lean into our discomfort and become more human.
Spiritual warfare is one of Christianity’s greatest attempts to make sense of every awful and tragic thing. Not every bad thing is the work of the devil. Not every tragic circumstance is the result of the powers of darkness. That’s a clever disguise by the ego to keep you from living in reality. In reality, not everything resolves, and some circumstances don’t have a cause-and-effect. And as long as you live in a black-and-white world, you avoid the mindset required to grow. You avoid the crucible of pain that forges the road to change.
I'm not sure whether spiritual warfare exists. Maybe it does. That's not the point. The point is we can't grow unless we live in reality, unless we accept that things don't always resolve.
You think the next life matters more than this one.
As a teenager, Christians often asked "What would happen to you if you died tonight?" In other words, would you spend eternity in heaven or hell? I've never liked that question. It's rooted in fear and escapism.
Here's a better question: What would you do if you woke up tomorrow?" In other words, how would you live? Especially in evangelical circles, we devote far too much energy to the afterlife. Meanwhile, Jesus seemed much more concerned with how we live right now. He rarely talked about the afterlife.
When I long for heaven, it's often because I'm experiencing something hard in my own life. And when I'm going through a hard time, longing for heaven won't help me become more like Christ. Focus on the afterlife is often spiritual escapism. It's removing your mind and heart and body from the present moment because you don't want to deal with hard parts of being human. But in the hard parts of being human, we find God. We find a deeper experience of True Life, of peace and joy and connection.
How you care for creation matters. How you treat people matters. How you deal with your own demons matters. Heaven is something you experience right now.
__________
Spiritual bypassing is an invisible cancer that drains life from our soul. If we want to become like God, we must commit to choosing the right action over the easy action. We must be willing to look honestly at our motives. This takes great courage, but it also leads to a great reward.
Grace and peace, friends.