Cross-Carrying and Self-Destruction
Remembering Self-Denial
About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.
This summer I wrote a post on Ludwig Wittgenstein's pastoral theology that included the following line: “the invocation to turn away from self to others can also easily evoke self-denial, which tends to make one's well-being a cause for shame.” These words were written to try and guard against a risk internal to Wittgenstein's ethics, one which plagued him over the course of his life—namely, the risk of thinking that I can only love others if I hate myself. A reader commented on this line, writing:
Would you mind expanding a bit more on the distinction you draw between “turning away from self to others” and “self-denial”? This is a point on which I struggle. On one hand, I am beginning to see the importance of looking after one’s own well-being. On the other, though, doesn’t Christ command us to take up our crosses and deny ourselves if we want to be his disciples?
I left a reply which offered less than half the thought this question deserves. Three months later, I am attempting to give the reader's question the care and time it deserves.
Christ does indeed command us to take up our crosses and deny ourselves if we want to be his disciples. As recorded in Mark's Gospel, Jesus calls out to the crowd:
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? (8:34-37)
The same passage appears with minimal variation in Matthew 16:24-28 and Luke 9:23-26.1 With this passage in full view, one could reasonably ask how one can claim Christian faith and warn against self-denial in the same breath. Indeed, does not this gesture substitute Gospel teaching with “niceness,” as stern Christian ethicists sometimes warn against.
I want to begin by saying that if I were to rewrite my post on Wittgenstein, I would amend my words by substituting “self-destruction” for “self-denial.” An ethic of self-denial need not entail self-destruction, and it is this latter possibility that I am primarily concerned with.
There is a real danger, however, that an ethic of self-denial can impel self-destructive practices, both at the level of both physical harm and spiritual misery. I certainly know too many Christians who have learned to reflexively feel guilt and shame whenever they are loved or celebrated because this presses against how they have learned self-denial,” and my faith convinces me that this is not how things should be. Part of this danger is a matter of distortion and hypocrisy. Many Christians have been taught to feel this guilt by men in expensive suits, by people who preach the necessity of cross-carrying from positions of comfort and complacency. The danger also rests, however, in the Gospel itself. It is easy to read Mark's witness and hear a call to self-destruction as God's call. After all, Jesus does in fact carry his cross to his own destruction (and for my eternal sake at that). What, then, could self-denial here mean apart from a willingness to accept my own destruction for Jesus' sake, and through this for the sake of my neighbor?
There is an important distinction here, of course. Jesus' suffering is the work of sin performed by imperial power. It is not self-inflicted, not “self-destruction.” All the same, willingness to accept destruction for another's sake can imply that I should always seek out opportunities to suffer for my neighbor, for if I am not, then I am not truly denying myself. The idea that I must be willing to accept my own destruction then contains within itself an impulse toward self-destruction—for it implies that I must actively take suffering upon myself, not just passively accept it when circumstances demand. Any attempt to cast things otherwise then looks like an evasion of the Gospel command. It looks like an attempt to make of Jesus' words a metaphor. “Not a real cross, you see, the kind that leaves splinters in the shoulder and weighs upon the back; no, a metaphor, which can be picked up or put down depending on the occasion.”
Even with this amendment, the question thus remains: how can one articulate self-denial apart from self-destruction without betraying the Gospel?
When I set out to write this post, I had in mind a kind of analysis that could disentangle the various dynamics at work in this question. While thinking about how to approach the language of carrying one's own cross, however, I found myself trying to remember the various times I have heard people talk about the necessity of this particular self-denial. After all, it is important to root theological reflection in how theology has in fact been performed, in how it has formed one's own thinking. In most cases I do not have a clear memory of any particular speaker so much as a clear memory of my reaction—an old anger, typically, for reasons gestured toward above. I do remember someone who embodied this language with absolute integrity, however. And the more I thought about this person, the more it struck me that his words and deeds communicate the essential things better than I could hope to do so.
So, instead of a fine-grained analysis, this post takes the elliptical form of a story. I have done my best to tell it as clearly as possible—the events below took place between 2015 and 2016, so my memory of the precise words is hazy at best. I sincerely apologize for anything I have misremembered, or anything that memory has changed in the intervening years. I also apologize for a small amount of inappropriate language. I have not used any names. The words “what can they give in return for their life?” echoed in my mind while putting this together.
A Story
I met him at the Network Coffee House in Denver, while I was working for St. John's Cathedral across the street. The Network is somewhere folks on the street can get a cup of coffee, sit, rest, and chat. It is one of the only places I've spent time in where a homeless person could feel the way I feel in any local coffee shop. He was severely schizophrenic. He was also a gregarious fellow who liked to ask me about the books I was reading, so I usually found myself chatting with him most days I was at the Network. One day I asked if he was close to being housed. He told me that he was one of those voluntarily homeless people that the city hated, going on to say something like: “walls aren't for me. Whenever I've been housed, I go crazier, and it's worse than when I'm outside. So I like to be on the streets. I make my own way, don't get me wrong. But it's better for me out there.” He then said that it also enabled him to be there for other people. As I remember things, he put this in terms of being able to carry his cross. I am not absolutely certain, however, whether this is precisely what he said or whether these were my thoughts in reaction to his words, so I will not here write these words in his voice.
I responded by saying that it made sense that walls made things worse, then said it was good that he could be present for others. He looked directly into the eyes and replied—“it's all grace, man. On good days, I know it's grace that gets me through the bad days. On bad days, it's grace that gets me through, even when I don't know it. I don't know if I believe shit about Christianity, but I know it's all grace. So, you know, on my good days I gotta be that grace for other people. Bad days too, if I can. Can't do that in walls. Don't see the people I need to see when they need to be seen. But it's all good, I'm happy, happier than I would be.”2
This was sometime in October or November 2015. Over the next few months, I chatted with him whenever he was at the Network and having a good day (he usually wasn't there on bad days). This was when I first read Vol. 2:2 of Barth's Dogmatics at the time, as well as Wittgenstein's “remarks” and “last writings” on the philosophy of psychology, so we'd usually talk theology or philosophy; my interpretation of both is still fundamentally shaped by these conversations. One February night—freezing, snowy—I was walking home at around 11:30 PM after getting a late drink with friends, and I saw him setting up for the night in the doorway of a disused concert hall with a couple of others. We chatted for about five minutes, then I said goodnight, went home, and failed to sleep. This was the first time I'd walked past someone sleeping outside and known their name. I hated myself for sleeping inside that night. I mentioned this to him the next time I saw him, and he told me not to even think about it. “ I want you to be happy, I want you to be safe, I want you to be warm. Can't hate yourself because of me for being what I want you to be.” I was afraid this was just a way to absolve myself of something I couldn't express, but he was absolutely insistent on this point.3
In the springtime, April 5th (I know the date because the picture is on my Instagram), I walked into the Network and he was having a bad day. At least, that's what it looked like, for several reasons. Still, he came up to me holding variously colored sharpies and asked to see my arm. I held it up, he spent a while picking the right color—which happened to be the exact pink of my dressing gown—and he wrote “SMILE” on my forearm. I beamed. I had been having a bad day too, and this cut right through it. He laughed at me and said in his characteristic drawl “it's all grace, man.” Then he moved on, writing “SMILE” on as many arms as were offered to him.
To my mind, this man is one of the only people I've known who carried his cross in a way that Jesus would recognize. He often said he was an asshole, and in plenty of ways this was true. He was also an entirely selfless person. Within this, the thing that strikes me most about him in memory is the extent to which the fullness of others filled him, how much joy he found in others' joy, and how much joy he wanted others to feel. He fought with demons I cannot comprehend. And he wanted my happiness, not my guilt; my well-being, not my shame. He wanted his own happiness, and he wanted my happiness as part of his happiness. I remember thinking while reading my arm a few hours later how self-centered it would have been to deny him a real smile. Rereading Mark's Gospel with this story in mind, the idea of saving one's life by losing it makes a clearer kind of sense. Conversely, self-denial seems to be a kind of openness. There is self-denial in allowing oneself to be loved, to accept happiness because love desires happiness, to allow that love to overcome the shame one has learned to feel at being happy (as hard, and as “nice,” as this can be). Remembering him, I am convinced that calling someone to bear a cross that denies all this is to call them to bear a cross which is not Christ's.
I could offer more reflections on this story and make my sense of its meaning clearer. I had planned to set it alongside pages 450–454 of Volume 1:2 of the Dogmatics, where Barth reflects on what it means that "we can and should love our neighbor only as the people we are, and therefore 'as ourselves.' We cannot meet them in a self-invented mask of love."4 I would still highly recommend reading these pages of Barth with this story in mind. But having reached this point, I think it best that I leave that work to those readers who are still reading. I just hope that I have given the question which motivated this post the honor and care that it deserves.
I am citing Mark's Gospel not so much because of its likely chronological priority but because it is my favorite of the Gospels (though it may well be that the reasons I am so drawn to Mark are grounded in its likely priority, not least its relative simplicity and lack of any ornamentation). See also Matthew 10:37-38 and Luke 14:27.
Another of the Network's guests who also had a form of schizophrenia said something similar, in an entirely different context. In this case, he was reflecting on how he experienced the world, especially the past in light of unimaginable pain.
I talked about this with the group of homeless women who stayed at the cathedral each month as well, and received the same response. I've passed on these words to others at various times, and I think they've made it easier for them to do the work they're called to do.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. 1:2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), 452–3.
Thanks, Ed! In this post I see you wrestling with two imperatives that stand in tension, and maybe that’s part of what it means to be a good dialectical theologian. I deeply respect the way you take seriously what Paul would have called the dangers of a teaching role: wanting to give good, healing, trustworthy advice, while avoiding insofar as possible the sin that lies within even our best intentions. This may be one of those situations in which Luther might have advised us to “sin boldly”: to work out this dialectic between self-denial and rejecting self-hatred in fear and trembling, and to live by the results of our struggles as best we can, for we know that despite our proneness to sin and error, the grace of God is at work in us.
Someone wrote “The charge is to hold onto your faith until you die.” That’s from memory, so not the least authority behind it.
I think that the self-denial is required to hold on to faith; the hours will come when only blind holding will yield to confirmation, and at those times all hopes for “self” must die — but to be reborn as a self somewhat more steeped in the faith and thus somewhat better suited to spreading the word of Christ.
I went conservative evangelical upbringing (witness the key word) to Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein (mostly slow study of PI and later works) CD 1/2 (for years) and then finally the rest of CD.
Thanks for this 🙏