Do It Myself
Creatures are born vulnerable and utterly dependent. Human babies are especially helpless. It is amazing to see how soon horses stand after birth. Survival for such species hinges on mobility and reach, The foal has to be able to move to its mother and reach its food source. The foal is up on all fours within about thirty minutes of birth. Human parents have arms to hold and carry their babies. Walking and other capabilities come many months after birth. Youngsters come, in time, to moments when, skill by skill, they assert their independence. A little one has watched their parent get the clothes on the doll, or put the wheel back on the toy car, and before long, when assistance is offered, the child announces, “No, I can do it myself!”
Our stubborn streak about doing and achieving the task all by ourselves never leaves us. Resistance to asking for help is common. This tendency finds play in our connection to God, as we develop our spiritual life. Strong is the drive for personal full potential, and the drive for union with the Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is. In Hebrew theological thought, the root of the Christian faith, the goal is to please God, standing in righteousness before the Holy One.
There is an intrinsic difficulty in this goal. God is holy, and we, consistently, are not. We may want to achieve holiness on our own, saying, “I can do it myself!” but it never works. The commandments, and the whole of the Mosaic law and tradition, guide us. It is simply impossible consistently to comply with it. St. Paul, in the letter to the Romans (3:20-22) that the law does not resolve the problem of sin, so much as it heightens our awareness of sin. The law, nevertheless, remains a divine gift. Psalm 119 is the longest psalm in the Psalter. It extols extensively God’s law as a treasure. [This psalm has twenty-two stanzas, each with eight couplets. The first word of each stanza begins with a letter from the Hebrew alphabet, from Aleph to Taw, twenty-two letters in all. That is how Psalm 119 gets its 176 verses.] In verses 1, 5, and 6 we see the longing of the human soul for right standing before God:
Psalm 119
1 Happy are they whose way is blameless, *
who walk in the law of the Lord!
5 Oh, that my ways were made so direct *
that I might keep your statutes!
6 Then I should not be put to shame, *
when I regard all your commandments.
You see right away the premise: that happiness comes with perfect conformity to God’s law. You see quickly, however, the difficulty. We do not keep all the statutes, we do not perfectly regard God’s ways to avoid shame. The yearning for this perfect walk and blamelessness is deep, but what persons exist who can achieve it on their own? We can lift high the virtue of God’s testimonies, statutes, laws, and commandments for 176 verses and still be no closer to keeping them all out of our own personal goodness and strength.
The Christian faith rises from the revelation that Jesus is the perfect God, who invites us to unite spiritually with him and to be in a life-long relationship with him. A prominent tradition in Christian theology asserts that any good at all that we do comes from the power of grace given by God. This is a belief that apart from God, we can do no good thing. With grace, however, with Christ, we come into a relationship pleasing to God. Look carefully at the language of the Collect for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany:
O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Putting our trust in God, we find strength. The central request of the prayer is, “Give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed.” However much we want to say, “Wait, I can do it myself!” the truth is, we need God’s help; we need divine grace. Do your best, but don’t forget to ask for help. God is faithful and provides it.