Authenticity and “Negative” Emotions
Christian Culture Tip #12: Always Be Happy
The bible encourages us to be loving, and joyful, and patient and a whole other load of “good” emotions and from the moment we become Christians we are pressured to do experience such. This is positive pressure, perhaps, but dangerous because it causes us to disengage from our emotions when they don’t meet the standard and become unauthentic.
I had a Christian friend post a status update today: “Is it ok to hate someone just a bit??”
It really ticked me off. Why does he care to ask for permission, and are they after the permission of us or God? Why can’t they acknowledge that a problem obviously exists even if they don’t “hate”? What make’s “hate” the point at which we decide a relationship is in a bad state? Why can’t we be honest enough to feel what we actually feel what we feel and find redemption from that broken, real place?
Someone pointed out that it sounds like my friend merely “dislikes” them. But “dislike” is just a Christian term that we hide behind to avoid loving someone in a permitable way. No non-Christian uses the term “dislike” in real life. It’s Christianise for I-don’t-like-you-and-will-give-my-attention-to-someone-else. I dislike mentally disabled people, smelly people, the elderly, annoying people, and people who are bad conversationalists. They don’t have anything to give me. So I ignore them, and contribute to society’s general rejection of them. That’s cruel.
When does “dislike” become “hate” anyway? It’s such a weak and cowardly term. It’s those people from whom I have nothing to gain that Jesus commands me to love the most. I can get a lot of entertainment or other value from my friends. When I give to them, I get just as much back. But the rejects of society – I have nothing to gain from them. Learning to love them – rather than hate, reject, or dislike them – is at the core of Christianity.
But when we hide behind “dislike” or don’t permit ourselves to experience negative emotions like hate we fail to realise the way in which we treat the rejects of society. I do hate them. I would much rather hang out with my friends. I don’t want to give them anything. But at least I realise it. At least I know where I am at, and know the direction I need to head in. I know that love is hard – and not some fluffy emotion.
A lot of Christians don’t know what love really is because they don’t know what hate is and they don’t know how hard it is to love someone they hate. They’re not willing to admit the difficulty of love.
My friend, Rhys, recently wrote a blog about his poetry, which people commented was often very sad. He made some good comments about authenticity and negative emotions:
“Why are most people scared of ‘ugly’ emotions? They see crying and think – ‘this person has been though horrible trauma and sadness’. Well, duh, we all have. I see crying and think it is beautiful, because that person is recognising their emotions; they are getting it OUT and going through a process of healing.
“It’s the same with my creative writing. A lot of people feel uncomfortable with the stuff I write. The greatest and probably the only real criticism I have received for my poetry is that it is ‘not happy‘. But I think that’s an emotionally immature view. I have never felt depressed or saddened by any of my poems, and if it wasn’t for people telling me how horrible they are, I probably wouldn’t even realise.
“I think they are beautiful, because yes, life is not perfect, and sometimes we love people who don’t care about us, sometimes people fail us, they fall short of our expectations, we fall short of our own expectations. And just have to give it a voice and admit that it happened.
Because that is life.“And life is beautiful.
“It’s not pretty.
“But it is beautiful.”
Maybe I am just exaggerating things a bit. The staggering disconnect between what my friend was feeling and what they were willing to let them feel was just really annoying. Let’s be honest about our hate, so we can heal, and then love.
