Emotions drive our lives. They can drive us forward to accomplish great things, or they can drive us into a ditch. But they are the drivers. So, as we seek to live a life that connects to God and serve Him, we cannot neglect this important aspect of our lives.
Rafael Pardo’s book Emociones, Espiritualidad, y Evangelio helps us integrate our emotional life into our spiritual life. Pardo’s first goal is to help Christians embrace emotions as a positive force in the Christian spiritual life. He contends that they have often been neglected or downplayed. A simple example of this is the book of Job in the common Christian consciousness. Job’s famous statement is often remembered: “The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Viewed in abstraction, this phrase might seem to downplay the emotions associated with loss. However, the rest of the book of Job is all about his emotional struggles processing his great loss! The former is remembered. The latter is forgotten. Pardo wants to remind us of all the emotional struggles in the Bible, including those of Job and Jesus!
Emotions, according to Pardo, help us adapt to our environment. They begin with a cognitive evaluation of something as pleasurable or unpleasurable and move us toward the former and away from the latter.
The problem with emotions is that our cognitive evaluations are often wrong or irrational. Examples of irrational beliefs are “I cannot live without you,” “I should never make a mistake,” “no one should ever criticize me,” “everyone should like me,” etc. These irrational beliefs give us emotions that move us away from things that we should embrace or accept and toward things that we should move away from.
Because emotions are based in part on cognitive beliefs, we have some control over them. We can learn to re-shape the beliefs that drive our emotions. This is the basis of cognitive therapy. Pardo argues Jesus was doing a sort of cognitive therapy long before people invented the technical term. Jesus seeks to replace one set of beliefs with another that will cause a different emotional outcome. For example, people often base their happiness on love, money, or health. Jesus teaches us that these things are not the foundation. They are important and significant, but they are not the foundation. He is the foundation, the cornerstone on which we build a happy and blessed life.
After explaining the emotions in general, Pardo applies his framework to a variety of emotions. Here are a couple of examples. Surprise is an emotion that moves us to discovery and creativity. It grabs hold of us and takes us toward new and different things. Pardo notes that the emotion of surprise is a big part of the Gospel. Why? Because Jesus and His actions evoked the emotion of surprise and wonder. The question is, what did it lead people to do? It led some to investigate who Jesus was. It led others to move away in disgust. Pardo notes that this teaches the Christian to be open to new experiences and how Jesus may want to surprise us still. The Gospel teaches us to have an open attitude to the new things God may want to lead us to.
Another example is sadness. Some cultures look more positively on sadness than our own. Our culture tends to want continual optimism. Pardo argues that sadness has a great value. It can help us look inward and see ourselves more clearly. Sadness turns our heart to reconsider what we value, what we need, and what we desire. It enables us to adapt to new realities. Sadness is part of life, he says, including the spiritual life. The Gospel that there is a sadness that leads to life as well as one that leads to death. We weep, as the Apostle Paul says, but not as those who have no hope.
One more example is that of anxiety. Fear, he says, is an emotion directed at a specific object. Anxiety is more general and long-lasting. It consumes a lot of resources and can be debilitating. So, how do we get our anxiety under control? He has a lot of examples, but the main thing is to confront our anxieties and not keep them on the edge of our conscience. He suggests that we consider that many things we have anxiety over never come to pass. We lose sight of how much this is the case. He suggests even making a notebook of “catastrophes that didn’t happen.” A good example of this is what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 8. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” He asks. This is a mental confrontation of all the things that can go wrong, and he concludes that in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. The key thing here is that the Apostle Paul confronts his anxiety and views the objects of anxiety in light of the Gospel instead of his own limited resources.
Pardo’s book is a book of hope. We often think we are stuck with the emotions we experience. We often think the emotions that drive us into a ditch are just going to be what they are. This is not the case. The Gospel comes to re-shape our emotions and take them away from the irrational and conform them to the truth of God’s love and God’s world. This transformation is not easy, but it is possible. The Gospel shows a different way forward. Pardo’s book is a call to be more aware of what our emotional life is and give them over to God to be re-shaped and reformed in a way that drives us forward in our spiritual life and walk with God.
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