The Absurdity of Misanthropy

The concept that humans are worthless is very popular in both Catholic and Protestant circles. I’ve been in Protestant services where the extended worship time focused on repeating mantras of self-immolation in song. I’m glad my husband stopped attending that church. To be fair, I stopped attending Protestant services with him entirely because I’m burned out on all of them.

But self depreciation certainly isn’t confined to Protestantism. Catholics have a long history of self hatred, which they have demonstrated through absurd physical means such as flagellation and the wearing of hair shirts. I don’t have a problem with self denial at all; fasting is biblical and can take our focus off the emphasis of meeting our physical needs and onto crying out to God to meet our spiritual needs. But the intentional acts of self hatred and proving our worthlessness to the world is 100% lost on me and, in my opinion, not consistent with either God or other Christian beliefs. Thankfully, these are private rather than corporate Catholic practices. In other words, the Mass is the Mass; there will never be a “led by the spirit” lengthy worship service in which Christians chant about how they need to disappear so that God’s glory can shine.

There is a viral Catholic prayer, The Unity Prayer by Elizabeth Kindelmann, that has caught fire in Catholic circles. The prayer itself is lovely (I will post it below) and the testimonies about it binding Satan’s influence over us probably true. That is the power of praying to Jesus. Being that these types of viral movements, in which numerous miracles are attributed to a specific prayer, fascinate me, I decided to read Kindelmann’s autobiography for more context. What a mistake that was! It wasn’t entirely a mistake. However, it is a tale of human suffering that can be very depressing to dwell on for any length of time. On the other hand, trust in God in the midst of suffering can be inspirational. There is both in the text, but unfortunately too much of the former for my mental health.

I stopped reading not too long after the words spoken to her by the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus turned the direction of “your priority is to remember that you are nothing.” Granted, this is a translation into English. In fact, it went from Hungarian to Spanish and then to English from the Spanish, so what I’m reading is twice removed from the original language. How difficult is that concept to translate from any language? I don’t know. I’m asking an honest question. Hungarian is a Uralic language and is therefore quite different from English or Spanish, but it still has a word that translates as “nothing.”

Why is this such a problem for me? On an emotional level, I struggle with nihilism. If there is no purpose to my or anyone else’s life on earth, I’d rather just off myself right now. Please don’t be alarmed by that, as I don’t believe my life is meaningless. I don’t buy that lie the evil one is selling. On a practical level, the pro-life movement, which is very important to the Catholic church, has as its core philosophy the value of all human life. Humans aren’t nothing. They matter. That’s why Catholic crusaders are willing to go to jail for protesting against abortion and euthanasia, as well as the maltreatment of humans. That’s why thousands of priests were killed by Nazis — they stood against the Nazi maltreatment of humans. How can they hold that philosophy while believing they themselves are nothing? Are they not as human and, therefore valuable, as the lives they’re fighting for? It’s a strange dichotomy you find all over the Christian world. I’m meaningless; I don’t have value, but I’m going to save the starving people in a refugee camp because somehow they have value despite being humans, too.

In a larger theological framework, there doesn’t seem much sense to God creating humans and sending his Son to die self-sacrificially for them if he regards them as nothing. What kind of capricious God would do that, and then advise these same humans when they are struggling through poverty and loneliness, as Kindelmann clearly was throughout her life, that their number one job was to remember that they are nothing? Her life as a poor woman and young widow had already taught her she didn’t have value. If she is writing that she is nothing, my guess is it’s coming from the worm in her brain implanted by maltreatment and not from God.

The Good Shepherd does not look pragmatically at his sheepfold and say, “Well, I have ninety-nine here. It would probably be better if I keep watch over these than go out and look for that one that left the fold. She left of her own free will. Her choice. She was warned about wolves. Besides, that’s one less mouth to feed, and who wants to give food to a poor female nobody loves? She’s nothing to us. Should we take a vote?” Those are not godly words. Jesus said he would leave the fold to find that one sheep that was lost. The sheep obviously being a metaphor for us, does the Good Shepherd strike you as a savior who would tell us we are nothing? That we don’t matter?

Humans want and need love. They want and need to know that they have value. They want to matter. It is no surprise to me that God built us chemically to produce pleasurable feelings when we do good for others. Doing good gives us a sense of purpose, a vocation. Yes, our chemical reactions can be tainted; there are sadists who instead feel pleasure when harming others. But we are appalled by that twisting of our God-given natures, condemning such people and their behavior, and rightfully so.

Maybe if I read the rest of her story, I would learn why it was important for her to remember she was nothing. I do not know because I’m not going to finish reading something that has already struck me as being false, closer to Zen Buddhism than Christianity. Instead, I’ll return to my fictional murder mysteries, where the sense of justice enacted in the end is predicated off human life mattering. If it didn’t, there would be little point to punishing murderers — which is, by the way, a biblical concept.