Self-Pity
Excerpt from the book We Sing While There is Voice Left
Self-pity is a contemptible state of being. In it we curl up into a cave of self not caring to acknowledge our place in the world or God’s will for us. We care not to suffer, but yet enjoy our own suffering. It a state of continual contradiction. In our modern age of the internet and virtual reality we can easily fall into self-pity and self-absorption. Social media creates echo chambers where we can find voices that encourage our self-pity and tell us that we are all-important. We must guard ourselves against these false worlds and seek God and His will for us, remembering that if we suffer we do it for love of Him.
From the book We Sing While There is Voice Left by Dom Hubert Van Zeller (Sheed and Ward, 1950, pages 18-20).
Self-Pity
Such is the perversity of the human mind that a man will prefer an unhappiness of his own choice to a happiness which God is holding out to him. He makes himself at home in his artificial world, the world which he has built up for himself at the cost of heaven knows what waste of God's will, and does not want to be dislodged. In his heart he knows that he is made for something more than the snug selfishness of his cocoon existence, but he cannot bring himself to accept the terms of the offer. He cannot, though acknowledging the validity of God's promise, throw off his petty egoism and greed.
This is why we prefer the idea of living on earth to the idea of living in heaven: we admit that heaven is happiness, but we like our kind of happiness better than God's. This is also why we are prepared to go on heaping up for ourselves our hell on earth: it is at least ours. We know that we have no one to blame but ourselves for our misery. We hate being miserable, but we feel we should be far more miserable if we were not.
People imagine that self-pity is the same as canvassing for sympathy. It is not. The real expert in self-pity has no need of other people's commiseration: he can do it all himself. Indeed he has sufficient insight into the working of the human mind to realize that the world would soon get tired of giving him sympathy. He takes care not to be pitied for being pathetic. So he keeps as far as possible out of men's way. Which forces him back upon himself and gives him further opportunity. Of all indulgences, that of secret self-pity is surely one of the most harmful. The secret drinker feels ashamed, the glutton feels the ache of satiety, the man whose passion carries him to excess feels a reaction against the pleasures which excited him; but the man who hugs his misery wants more and more . . . and there is no shame or remorse.
Why don't we see that our indulgence is sheer luxury, sheer waste? The truth is that we do see, but that we prefer to wallow and to spend ourselves uselessly, “Why should I look at reality,” we say, “when I have got television?” It is the old story of substitutions: the choice of what is less worth while leading us so far down the scale of values that we end up by having neither the energy nor the desire to climb up again. The substance is refusal, the shadows come to stay . . . Plato's cave-dwellers will not look beyond the wall. God offers a fact, and man takes refuge in a fake; it is man's own fault if he pities himself for the hardness of his lot. This is precisely the point; he knows the fault is his. Yet he goes on pitying and adding to the hardness.
There can be no remedy for this but to surrender into the hands of God. As it was the lust for independence which caused the trouble so it must be a return to submission which will get it right. Very little use to resolve not to complain, not to dwell deliberately upon the subject of one's afflictions: one must get at the cause as well as strangle the effects. The cause is simply self-will. Unless the will to be potentially pitiable is ruthlessly denied it is difficult to see how anything can be done.
One of the most subtle pieces of character-drawing in The Pilgrims Progress is that which gives us Mr. Fearing, who, it will be remembered, “had a Slough of Despond in his mind; a slough that he carried everywhere with him or else he could never have been as he was.” Mr. Great-heart gives an account of how his dejected companion responded to what they passed on the way to the Celestial City. “When we were come to where the three fellows were hanged, he said that such would, he feared, be his end also.” At the House Beautiful, which Mr. Fearing entered “before he was willing,” he “desired much to be alone.” Coming to the Valley of Humiliation, “he went down as well as ever I saw man in my life,” and “when he was come to the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I thought I should have lost my man.”
But even Mr. Fearing, with all his awareness of suffering and his reluctance to make the act of trust, was not beyond rescue in the end. To Mr. Honest's inquiry as to how the poor man fared in the finish, Great-heart says, “I never had doubt about him . . . he was a man of choice spirit, but always kept very low, and that made his life so burdensome to himself and so troublesome to others.” Christiana's conclusions about Fearing are worth noting. “His troubles lay so hard upon him,” she reflects, “that they made him so that he could not knock at the houses of entertainment. This relation of Mr. Fearing has done me much good. I thought there had been nobody like me.”
Precisely because there are so many of us like her there is reason to hope that we shall be able to climb out of our particular Sloughs of Despond.