The Problem With Self-reliance
As an American, I am steeped in a culture of self-reliance. It’s the American dream: You pull yourself up by your bootstraps, regardless of circumstances, and you achieve great success—alone.
The problem is that self-reliance is not a Catholic idea. It’s not a virtue. And, it’s not how we were created. God created us to be reliant on each other and, most of all, on him. When we lose sight of that fact, we fall prey to perfectionism, to pride, and eventually to burnout.
“I Do It!”
When we started feeding my daughter solid food, she liked to grab the spoon and tried to guide it into her mouth—which she often missed. Frequently, she would end up playing with the spoon (and the food on it) rather than eating the food. As she started getting the hang of solid food, she stopped trying to feed herself. Now, she leans forward, and I meet her in the middle with the spoonful of food.
My daughter is not quite ready to feed herself yet. She is actively involved in the process, but she still needs my help to get the food in her mouth. Similarly, while God expects us to meet him in the middle some of the time, he never expects us to rely solely on ourselves. He doesn’t even want us to try. Our reliance on him brings us closer to him, just as a child’s reliance on her mother helps cement their bond early on.
I know that as my daughter grows, we will start hearing, “I do it!” She’ll want to do everything all by herself, and we’ll let her do more and more on her own, as she learns. But she’ll still need her parents, at least while she is still a child—and that childlike relationship is exactly the one Jesus asks of us (Matthew 18:1-5).
“Undue Exaltation”
It seems like the further we go in our spiritual growth, the more growth we realize we still have ahead of us. Over the last year or so, I’ve come to understand that pride is at the root of a lot of my problems. I wrote last fall about my realization that my perfectionism stems from pride—a lack of the humility required to surrender to God. Similarly, we can only believe that self-reliance is something to strive for if we believe that self-reliance is possible. And self-reliance is only possible if we don’t need God.
“Pride is the beginning of sin,” wrote St. Augustine in “City of God.” “And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation—when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.” Self-reliance is that end to itself.
The pride of self-reliance doesn’t just keep us from relying on God; it keeps us from relying on his other children. In 2019, I had excision surgery to remove endometriosis. Recovery included rest at home—and a lesson in relying on other people. When I got home, I needed my boyfriend (now my husband) to help me up the daunting three flights of steps to my apartment. I needed him, my mom, and my sister to come over to make sure I had food, since my roommate was out of town. And, when a friend asked if she could come over and cook me dinner one evening, I swallowed my pride and said yes.
It was hard to sit on my couch and watch someone else cook dinner for me in my own kitchen, but because self-reliance in this case would have meant potentially damaging my health, I was able to accept her help with humility. It was a lesson that served me well two years later, when my husband and I brought our daughter home from the hospital, when we relied on family, friends, and God to get us through the difficult postpartum months.
God wants us to rely on him, and he wants us to serve each other. The Gospels tell us that even Jesus relied on Mary Magdalene, Joanna (the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza), Susanna, and “many others” to support his ministry (Luke 8:1-3). Jesus could have decided he needed to do it all and continued his carpentry work while trying to accomplish his mission. He could have tried to do it without the apostles and the women who helped him. Would he have succeeded? Maybe; he was God, after all. But he was also man, and “it is not good for [man] to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Jesus humbled himself (Philippians 2:5-8) and relied on his Father in heaven and on his friends on earth. And the world was never the same.
Taryn Oesch DeLong is a Catholic wife and mother in North Carolina. After 10 years in nonprofit and editorial work, she left the workplace to be a stay-at-home mom and freelance editor and writer. She encourages women to live out their feminine genius as the managing editor of Catholic Women in Business, a FEMM fertility awareness instructor, and a contributor to publications for Catholic women. Taryn enjoys curling up with a cup of Earl Grey and a good novel, playing the piano, and taking walks in the sunshine with her family. Connect with her on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or read her blog, Everyday Roses.