A Pure Heart Needs No Apology

Confidence Can Only Come From Within

“If I pray to God that everybody would have confidence in me, I will be found at the door of each one, apologizing. But I am more inclined to pray that my heart be pure with all.” — Amma Sarah

I’ll admit it: I’m a recovering validation-seeker. I’m not sure where I learned it, but by the time I was a young adult I had developed the insecure habit of currying the good favor of those whose opinions mattered the most to me. I still remember my girlfriend in graduate school, annoyed by my people-pleasing ways, snarling at me, “Why must you always be so dependent on my approval!?! At the time, her criticism stung, although forty years later I have come to appreciate how it gave me insight into my own shadow.

The desert mother Amma Sarah seems to be cut from the same cloth as my ex-girlfriend. She recognizes that the kind of person who seeks the confidence of others sooner or later must deal with how we inevitably let others down — at the very least, some of the time. If we hunger for the good opinion of others, we must be prepared to accept that not everyone is going to like us, or applaud for us, or flood our social media accounts with “Likes.” The confidence, approval, or validation of others can be likened to an addictive substance, as enslaving as alcohol or nicotine or any other dependency-prone drug. We seek the pleasure that it promises us, only to find that it also extracts far too high a price (and the rent just keeps going up). The result: we are always apologizing for not being the person we think others want us to be. Yikes!

So what is the antidote? Again, Amma Sarah: “pray that my heart be pure with all.” In other words, can I structure my life around God’s confidence in me — or, perhaps, my confidence in myself — so that I might live out of radical authenticity, being true to who God created me to be, no matter how others may like it (or not)?

To the approval-addict, this might sound terrifying. But once we take the risk of placing our trust in the Spirit within (and also trusting in who we know deep within who God created us to be), we find a place of radical freedom. This may not sound especially mystical or even contemplative: but it is an aspect of the “purgative way,” the process of shedding the so-called false self in order to be more authentically whom God created us to be: for it is only in that authenticity that the promise of the mystical life can be realized within us.

Quotation source: John Wortley, ed. The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Systematic Collection (Cistercian Studies Series 240) (p. 169-170). Kindle Edition.