A Correct Way to Understand Unworthiness?

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You know how at Mass we always say “I’m not worthy for you to enter my roof, but just say the word and my soul will be healed”? As well as how it’s often said that we are all unworthy sinners, or even unworthy of God’s love for us?

Well, the dictionary definition of “worthy” essentially means deserving. If this is exactly what unworthiness means in the context of spirituality, then this solves a lot of problems, and has a lot of implications. The meaning of “worth” in “unworthy” has a completely different meaning from “worth” in the sense of value. In the first sense, worth refers to merit or deserving something, while the second is independent of that.

This solves a lot of problems as unworthiness then doesn’t have any association with being worthless, ugly or unlovable. To be unworthy simply means to not deserve something, and in the context of what God offers us, He does that out of love. And you know what that means? When you give a friend a gift, that gift is obviously undeserved by definition of what a gift is, but does that mean your friend isn’t worth the gift or is not valuable? Of course not! In fact, the opposite is the case - you wouldn’t give your friend a gift if you didn’t value your friend or considered him worth the gift! The same goes with the love parents have for their children - both when they decide to have them, and when they care for them afterwards. So our unworthiness as sinners to receive God or to be forgiven or whatever you have, far from making us depressed or being a negative, should fill us with joy and make us realise how valued we are by God!

So the realisation of our unworthiness, as a part of humility, has as it’s goal not to make us sad but to point us to great joy! The person who is prideful - who thinks he deserves something that he doesn’t deserve and is proud of this as if it were a personal accomplishment of his - is in reality depriving himself of the greatest joy there is, which is to be valued in love! This is also a part of gratitude - not to make us feel bad about the fact we don’t deserve something, as if we are to walk on stern eggshells in recognising we don’t deserve something - but give us true joy and optimism in focusing on what we have and on who gave it to us, and why! And just like with other virtues, the world makes us think that God wants to take away our pleasure with this as if He were the enemy of joy, when instead He is the author of joy!

What do you think?
 
This is also relevant with regards to how people conceive of our value in God’s eyes. In a Mother Angelica article about an unworthiness prayer over a decade ago here: Mother Angelica's favorite prayer

A poster wrote that:

“I see it as being the other way around. We are worth something BECAUSE God sent His only begotten Son to die for us. Without Him we are indeed nothing - all we have and are comes from Him.”

And another concurred:

“I agree with LilyM…All we have of any worth is from Him. In fact it IS Him.”

There are important distinctions to make here. Basically, there are two ways in which love can value a thing - either by recognising a prior value of something and then loving that, or by giving it value in the first place. Parents do the latter when they love a child before it is conceived by deciding to have it and having joyful excitement over it, and thinking it would be wonderful to have it. They do the former when they have the child in existence, recognise the child’s actual existing value, and even are attracted by the child’s beauty and lovability, and love the existing child as it is.

Depending on how you understand it, to say we are valuable because God died for us seems ungrounded - why exactly did God die for us if it’s not because we were valuable and worth dying for, or because God didn’t value us? It would mean God loves us for no reason, and basically just decided to love us without much of a motivation. You could also understand in the sense that we are valuable because God valued us first, which is true, but only partially so.

For example, we know marriage and the family reflect God, so the love of God towards us is analogous to the love of our parents for us - God loved us before we existed and before we had existing value, but He also loves us when we exist as existing. The two loves (loving independent from existence, and loving what has existence) are not contradictory, but complementary - God loves us with both types of love - the first, pre-existential love primarily, the second, post-existential love secondarily, but with both nonetheless. In fact, we might say that God’s loving us with the second love is an expression of His first love, because He loved us enough to give us real existing goodness and value that He could love with the secondary love - which means the secondary love is supported by or grounded on the first.

So God died for us both because we have existing value and worth that is worth dying for and saving, and we are valuable because God decided to love us and give us a lovable value in the first place.
So what do you think of the above explanations? Are they a good way of explaining and understanding what unworthiness means? What do you think?
 
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I think these are good explanations. We are loved by God immensely even though we are sinners. He does not change His love for us, because He IS love. We have great worth in His eyes because He made us in His image and likeness, and He died for us. However, we are not deserving (“worthy”)of any of this–His love, His redemption, life itself–because it is all a gratuitous gift of God. We cannot earn it. We can only respond to it, in love.
 
Jesus went with them, but when he was only a short distance from the house, the centurion sent friends to tell him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof. Therefore, I did not consider myself worthy to come to you; but say the word and let my servant be healed. For I too am a person subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him and, turning, said to the crowd following him, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”
Luke 7:6-9
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Turning to scripture can be helpful sometimes.

The centurion who says “I am not worthy” also says: “ I too am a person subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes.”

He is not a powerless nobody, but a man with a place and authority. His unworthiness is because he is not a Jew but of course, Jesus sets that aside by recognizing his faith.
 
Let’s put it this way. What is the worth of a $100 bill? Objectively, not a lot. It’s just paper with some fancy printings and other things in it. According to some sources the new $100 bill costs 12 cents to manufacture. And yet a $100 bill gets its fiscal worth from our financial system: a 12 cent piece of paper costs $100.

Similarly, objectively we are not worth much. We were made from nothing, and of course nothing costs nothing. And yet Jesus Christ died for us. He redeemed us with His life: the life of God. And that makes each of us worthless yet worth more than anything else in this universe bar God Himself.

I like how G. K. Chesterton puts it: “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”
 
NormalBeliever said:
Depending on how you understand it, to say we are valuable because God died for us seems ungrounded - why exactly did God die for us if it’s not because we were valuable and worth dying for, or because God didn’t value us? It would mean God loves us for no reason, and basically just decided to love us without much of a motivation. You could also understand in the sense that we are valuable because God valued us first, which is true, but only partially so.
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I really have no problem with God loving us for no reason at all aside from because He wants to. In fact I am disturbed of the thought that God has any other reason to love us other than out of sheer love for us because that means God is beholden to something above Himself, and thus He becomes less than God.
 
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God’s love for us says more about him than about us. He loves us because it is his nature, he is love. Yet, he sees our potential, our possibility for holiness — consider the loveliness and lovability of Our Lady – and loves us for that, Perhaps he loves us into lovability?
 
  1. Money has indirect, symbolic wealth - it’s not the object of wealth itself, but instead points to concrete things like food or gold that are objects of wealth in themselves. Unlike money, things like gold and food for example have value in a direct or non-symbolic way. To say created beings are like money would mean they have only symbolic or externally imputed value, that their value is not real but a result of a mutually agreed pretense, and is outside of creation - which is nominalism
But the difference between God and humans is that what God says actually goes! What God says, really does become reality - He commands the universe to exist, and it really does exist. So if God gives value to something, that thing HAS value; to say it only has imputed external value would be akin to Protestantism where we only have imputed justification and aren’t actually concretely justified. It would be like saying things don’t have existence as a property of themselves, but that their existence is something outside of them, depriving them of their reality.
  1. What Chesterton is saying there is contrasting two meanings of worth - the worth that’s based on being proud of one’s greatness and merits and what one deserves, and the value that’s based on being valuable and worthwhile. One can have the latter without having the former; a child is made happy by the fact it is lovable and valuable, without needing to have ever accomplished anything or being great in the proud sense of the word.
  2. In a sense, parents decide to have and love children because they personally want to, but personal want isn’t the full reason why the children are loved because it would mean the love is groundless.
If God loved us for literally no reason other than because He wanted to love us, this would make God irrational since He did something for no reason at all other than a whim to do it. This would be an extreme form of voluntarism where God does something for absolutely no reason at all and only because He somehow managed to want to do it.

But the very nature of love is to will someone’s good for their own sake. And it’s hard to see how one would be desiring that if one didn’t find the good of another worth desiring and striving for in the first place. For example, parents decide to have children because they believe they are worth having and would be wonderful to have - they value the children even before they exist.

And I don’t see how saying that God has a reason to love us other than just wanting it in any way degrades God or makes Him beholden to something above Himself, anymore than God having a good reason for doing something instead of just doing it because He wants to degrades God by making Him beholden to reasoning.
 
Chesterton once said that something must be loved before it is lovable. I referred to this in my second comment with the primary and secondary loves. In short, just like parents love children even before they exist and thus before they are lovable, considering them to be worth having and loving, so too does God consider us from eternity. But God also enjoys the created value we do have after we exist, and values our real value as well - just like parents love children after they exist and when they are lovable. God’s pre-existential love for us is primary since it is the reason why we have real existing value and it is constantly present, while the post-existential love is secondary since it comes after the pre-existential love logically, but is nevertheless still a real and true love God has for us on the basis of the value He gave us that we really do have.

In other words, God’s love really does say something about us in the end, even though He loved us before we even were - that we are worth loving, having, creating and even enjoying, just like children. In fact, precisely because God valued us before we were valuable, do we have love.
 
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God does not love us because we are good, God loves us because God is good.
This idea reminds me that our need for humility extends to each other. When we project a lack of worthiness on others the result is that we become uncharitable and destructive towards neighbor, and fail in loving him. We must be mindful that God’s rain falls on the just and unjust, and that his Grace is given according to his will not a projection of our own. OR WORSE, OUR PROJECTION OF HIS WILL when in fact it is just our own. Humility, because without humility we invariably seek to percieve our own worthiness enhanced via projection of UNWORTHINESS on others. And we often injure in that exercise.
He pays his “wages” as he sees fit. He makes it rain as he sees fit and the " good" son must always be mindful that God loves him always which is everything. . He welcomes the wayward son as he sees fit. He tells the sinner go and sin no more as he sees fit.
" Thy will be done," is the most fortunate blessing because God is good and God loves us because God is good. Heaven help any of us if worthiness fell to our own will. Humility serves each other and ultimately ourselves as a reminder of our good fortune and to remind each other of it as well.
 
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There is Divinization. Divine Indwelling. The " spark" as Meister E put it.
Think about them from the perspective of " worthiness."
All sense of “earthly” worthiness is derived externally. ALL! If we are honest, we spend our time driven by pursuits of badges of earthly worthiness. The esteem of trappings. Esteem via praise of others. Of Fame. Of accolades. Of percieved wealth and success.
At the same time we toil to avoid earthly badges of shame, dishonor. Without our faith, we are controlled by and live in persuit of earthly worthiness and avoidance of earthly shame and unworthiness. It is a fickle, random, arbitrary existence. You can’t, " take it with you."
Our faith offers the only true intrinsic value. That Divine Indwelling gives us INTRINSIC VALUE apart from the illusory and temporary constructs of this world. It is all that is lasting and thus is all that has value. Unlike worldly esteem/ shame, worthiness/ UNWORTHINESS which comes externally via the world, the Divine Indwelling is internal and projects outwardly.
 
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People who focus on their own unworthiness, often see others as even less worthy

Again, God loves you regardless of your worth
 
I am not sure what you mean. People who are capable of recognising, and keeping at the forefront, that they are unworthy, require a sense of humility.
Do they see others less worthy? I suppose they could, but such thinking exhibits an absence of humility. And one would imagine such a person misjudging or loosing track of their own UNWORTHINESS in the first instance.
I think the humility to recognise UNWORTHINESS in yourself would correspond to a recognition that such UNWORTHINESS is a state we share with fellow unworthy. Does it matter if an unworthy person is a shade more or less unworthy than another?
If you get an F on an exam, I am not sure we track some Fs worse than other Fs.
 
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It’s good; we must understand that God values us immensely- but while also understanding that He opposes pride and sin in us, those things that cause us to fail to live up to the potential He’s created us for, those things that oppose Him by their nature. And this is why we finish with, “Only say the word and my soul shall be healed”. Our unworthiness is related to our sin, and yet only our Creator can heal us of our sin! Meanwhile we must consider just how must God values and loves us in spite of our sin; that’s what the cross is all about, in fact. Anyway, it’s profitable to ponder the Church’s teachings on man’s basic goodness as a created being. From the catechism:

27 The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for:

The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.1

355 "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them."218 Man occupies a unique place in creation: (I) he is “in the image of God”; (II) in his own nature he unites the spiritual and material worlds; (III) he is created “male and female”; (IV) God established him in his friendship.

Continued:
 
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I. "IN THE IMAGE OF GOD"

356 Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator”.219 He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake”,220 and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity:

What made you establish man in so great a dignity? Certainly the incalculable love by which you have looked on your creature in yourself! You are taken with love for her; for by love indeed you created her, by love you have given her a being capable of tasting your eternal Good.221

357 Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons. And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his stead.

358 God created everything for man,222 but man in turn was created to serve and love God and to offer all creation back to him:

What is it that is about to be created, that enjoys such honor? It is man that great and wonderful living creature, more precious in the eyes of God than all other creatures! For him the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the rest of creation exist. God attached so much importance to his salvation that he did not spare his own Son for the sake of man. Nor does he ever cease to work, trying every possible means, until he has raised man up to himself and made him sit at his right hand.223
 
God doesn’t love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.
What is ironic is that this statement is difficult for many to accept.
God’s plan is succinctly stated in Ephesians 1:3-4. Billions of years before Christmas day. No act of man’s will was capable of affecting God’s will.
 
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