THE FEAR OF SUCCESS and VOLUNTARY SELF-CRIPPLING

 

This is the word of the Lord that came to Jonah, son of Amittai: "Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it; their wickedness has come up before me." But Jonah made ready to flee to Tarshish away from the Lord. He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish, paid the fare, and went aboard to journey with them to Tarshish, away from the Lord.

Jonah 1:1-2

In the first pages of the Bible, we are told that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. This mystery both triggers fear and fascination causing us to attempt to be more than we are or less than we are, but not fully who we are. The psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “We both crave and fear becoming truly ourselves.”

This is a very old problem. It goes all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve. According to that story, at the end of creation God, humans and the animals lived in harmony. They were interconnected and interdependent. As a colorful Baptist preacher said at one of my graduations, “In the beginning, God was happy being God. The animals were happy being animals. Human beings, however, have never been happy being human beings. They've wanted to be God one day and animals the next!” Because we are created in the image and likeness of God, we all have the chance to become our very best selves. We all feel something inside, a quiet “maybe” that is often silenced as quickly as it is surfaced. We enjoy and even thrill before the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves and simultaneously shiver with fear before these very same possibilities. As a result, the overwhelming majority of people fail to achieve a life even close to what they are capable of achieving. Norman Cousins said, “The tragedy of life is not death…but what we let die inside of us while we live.” The Letter of James 4:17 says, “Remember, it is a sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.”

Jonah was called to preach to the people of Nineveh.  He considered himself a poor preacher on one hand and the Ninevites not worth saving on the other. To get away from his unwelcomed call, he went down to the docks and bought a ticket on the next ship sailing in the opposite direction from Nineveh. He thought he could outrun God!

In his version of a get-away-car, Jonah is pictured going to sleep in the bottom of his boat while a storm raged, a symbol today of “denial.” The psychologist Abraham Maslow calls such spiritual and emotional truancy the Jonah Complex: “The evasion of one’s own growth, the setting of low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock humility.”

We are afraid of failure and success. A calling makes us wonder if we are good enough, smart enough, disciplined enough, educated enough, patient enough, and inspired enough. We manage our fear by “going to sleep” as Jonah did in his boat, “settling for too little” and “self-sabotage.”

It is true that narcissism, exaggerating our importance can be a problem, but so can the minimization of our importance. Maslow proposes that there is a cluster of fears underlying the fear of greatness that cause us to evade our true calling and instead adhere to the security of simply having undemanding goals instead of grand ones. Thomas Merton was right, “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” Sometimes, especially in presbyterates, convents and monasteries, under what can be called “mock humility,” we set low aims for ourselves and call it virtue. Michelangelo put it this way. “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”