How to Overcome Bitterness — Murray on the Root That Defiles
⏱ 13 min read
How to Overcome Bitterness — Murray on the Root That Defiles
You did not choose the bitterness. That is the first thing worth saying — out loud, to yourself, before anything else in this essay reaches you. The bitterness arrived. It came after something that should not have happened, or after something that should have happened and did not, or after the slow accumulation of a hundred small wounds that nobody named at the time. It moved in quietly. It set up house. And now, years on, it is sitting in your chest like a low fire that will not go out, and you are tired of carrying it, and you are also tired of being told to just forgive by people who have not been hurt the way you were hurt.
This essay is not that voice. The question of how to overcome bitterness is not a question to be answered by anyone who has not first sat with the wound underneath it. Andrew Murray — the nineteenth-century pastor whose small books on the inner life have lived on the shelves of contemplatives for over a century — does not skip the wound. He does not scold the bitterness. He treats it as something the soul will only let go of when the soul has found a different place to rest. That different place is the slow practice this essay is about. The longer 140-day version of the same practice has its form in the Devotionals on Anxiety, built for the woman whose heart has been holding something heavy for longer than she meant to.
What follows is the slow contemplative version of how to overcome bitterness — not the bumper-sticker let it go, but the older thing Murray meant. The thing the writer of Hebrews called the root — lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled — and that Murray spent his life writing the soft cure for.
What bitterness actually is, before we try to do anything with it
Bitterness, in the Christian tradition that Murray writes from, is not a character defect. It is the soul’s slow response to a hurt that was real and was not made right. It is forgiveness postponed — sometimes for good reasons, sometimes because there was no safety in which the forgiveness could be done, sometimes because the person who did the hurting never came back to acknowledge it, sometimes because the wound was so layered that the soul could not find the bottom of it.
The bitterness is the soul keeping the account open. It is not stupidity. It is not weakness. It is the soul saying, this mattered, and someone has to keep remembering that it mattered, and if nobody else is going to keep that record I will keep it myself. The bitterness is the keeper of the record.
The problem with the keeper of the record is not that the record is false. The record is true. The problem is that the keeping costs the keeper everything — her sleep, her chest, her capacity to be in the room with people she still loves, her ability to read scripture without it tasting like dust, her slow contraction inward over years until the woman she used to be has been replaced by the woman who is still proving the case. (What does the Bible say about anger? is the sister essay for the louder cousin of bitterness, and why you can’t let go until you name it walks the naming that has to come before any laying-down.)
The writer of Hebrews calls it a root, and the root metaphor is exact. The hurt happened above ground. The bitterness is what grew underground in the years after. The above-ground event may have been ten minutes long. The underground root is now twenty years old, and it is the root, not the original event, that the soul is exhausted by. How to overcome bitterness, in Murray’s reading, is the question of how the root gets slowly loosened — not yanked, not denied, not papered over — but replaced by another rooting, in another place, that the soul finds it can rest in instead.
The first line — Murray on the soul as a resting place
Here is the first of the three passages worth keeping near the page. Murray is writing — in Holy in Christ — about what the indwelling of God in the soul actually feels like, and about what changes when the soul stops trying to make itself holy by its own effort and instead lets itself become a place where God enters to rest:
It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read what he is naming. The heart, in Murray’s image, is meant to be a resting-place — a place where God Himself enters to rest. Where Thou enterest to rest. That is the original design. The bitter heart is not designed wrong. It is occupied wrong. It has, over years, become the resting-place of an old story, told and re-told to itself in the small hours, in the shower, in the long drive home — and the resting-place that was meant for the indwelling of love has become the resting-place of the unfinished business with the person who hurt you.
The cure, in Murray’s reading, is not to evict the old story by force. The cure is to let the other guest come in — the slow indwelling of the One the heart was actually built to house — until the old story finds it has been quietly displaced rather than dramatically expelled.
This is the difference between trying to overcome bitterness and being slowly overcome in the other direction by something gentler. The trying does not work. The trying is one more effort the bitter heart is exhausted by. The slow letting of God into the room — into the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, as Murray puts it — is what eventually does the work the trying could not do.
The bitter woman does not need a sermon on forgiveness. She needs, first, the experience of being a resting-place for Someone who is not asking her to fix herself before He sits down with her in the room.
A pause for the body
Set the screen down for a breath. Bring one hand to the place in the chest where the bitterness has been sitting — most often a low band across the upper chest, sometimes lower, sometimes a held knot just below the ribs. Stay with the hand for one slow inhale and one slow exhale. Do not try to move what is there. Do not try to forgive anyone in this moment. The body has been carrying the keeping-of-the-record for years, and the chest muscles that have been holding it have grown tired in their own quiet way. Let the hand rest. Let the breath come a little lower than it has been coming. The body has been the keeper as much as the mind has, and the body is allowed, in this minute, to be relieved of some of the holding — even before the heart knows what to do with the rest of it. You are not asked to feel forgiveness here. You are asked only to let the body know that the holding is not its job alone.
The second line — Murray on the silence the bitterness cannot survive
The second passage is from Waiting on God, where Murray gives the bitter, occupied, exhausted soul the older Christian instruction the modern self-help world has lost the language for. Not do more, not try harder, not forgive faster — but be quiet:
If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.’
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait.
These are the three sentences Murray gathers from Isaiah and Lamentations and lays gently in front of the bitter heart, not as a rebuke, but as an instruction in the only practice the root cannot survive. The root that defiles grows in noise. It grows in the inner monologue that runs through the day rehearsing the wrong. It grows in the imagined conversation with the person who hurt you, repeated three hundred times, in which you finally say the thing. It grows in the soundtrack of grievance that the mind plays low under everything else.
The quiet Murray prescribes is not a forced positivity. It is not a polite covering-over of the hurt. It is the slow removing of the noise the root needs to keep growing. In quietness shall be your strength is not poetry. It is, in Murray’s reading, a practical instruction about which conditions the bitterness can and cannot survive in.
How to overcome bitterness, on this reading, is in large part the slow practice of being quiet about it — not before God, where the lament is welcome and the honest naming is the beginning of the cure, but in the inner monologue, where the re-telling of the wrong has become the soundtrack the root is feeding on. The mind is not asked to forget. The mind is asked, slowly, to stop re-running. The keeping of the record can be handed to God. The re-running is the part that is killing you.
This is the slow form of the practice the Devotionals on Anxiety was built to walk. Not as a script for instant forgiveness, but as a daily small structure for the inner quieting — the kind of quieting Murray is naming — so that the bitter heart has a daily room in which the noise can be lowered a notch, and the resting-place can begin, slowly, to be re-occupied. What is true humility looks like in the same author’s writing is the sister practice for the soul that has done this work long enough to find a different posture available; you can find Andrew Murray’s twelve marks of true humility walked at the same slow pace.
The third line — Murray on the rest that holds when the case is laid down
The third passage is from Abide in Christ, and it is the one that names — more precisely than almost any other passage in the Christian devotional tradition — what forgiveness postponed finally becomes when the soul is ready to let it move:
“At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee.” Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, “Child, abide in me.” That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted. And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind.
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.
The bitter heart has been ruling itself. It has had to. Nobody else came in to rule it — to set the record down, to hold the wrong, to keep the account in a safer pair of hands. So the bitter heart has been doing all of that itself for years, and the cost of the self-ruling has been the slow occupation of the resting-place by an exhausting tenant.
Murray’s image — resting in the arms of Everlasting Love — is the alternative he is offering. Not the denial of the hurt. Not the magical disappearance of the wrong. The slow handing-over of the ruling to Someone whose arms can hold the case more reliably than yours can. The peace that follows is not the peace of forgetting. It is the peace of having finally laid the rule of the record down, in arms that are not going to drop it. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding.
How to overcome bitterness is, on this reading, the slow re-rooting of the heart’s resting-place from the case against the person to the arms of Everlasting Love — not because the case has been dropped, but because the case has been moved. It is still being held. It is just no longer being held by you. (What to do when you’re doubting God walks the sister practice for the bitter season’s quieter cousin, the long doubt; and the waiting on God for marriage reading is the sister practice for the woman whose root sits in a long unfulfilled longing rather than a sharp wrong.)
So — how does one actually overcome bitterness?
You start by giving up the project of overcoming it by yourself. The trying-harder is what has worn you out. The keeping-of-the-record is what has worn the resting-place out. You lay both down — not because the wrong was small, but because the wrong was real enough that your soul is not the place where it should be living any more.
You let the heart be quiet. Not silenced about the hurt — quiet about the re-running. The lament is welcome before God. The inner re-telling, three hundred times in a season, is the noise the root feeds on. The quieting of the re-running, by small daily practice, is the slow undoing of the root.
You let the resting-place be re-occupied. Not by an effort to feel love for the person who hurt you. By the slow indwelling of the One who actually has the strength to hold the case in His own hands — the arms of Everlasting Love Murray names, the great calm of the eternal world. The forgiveness, when it comes, will come as a fruit of the re-occupation, not as the price of admission.
You walk it daily. Five minutes, in the chair, in the quiet, with the hand on the chest, with the name of the One who is rest spoken slowly. Father of mercies. Sweet Lord. Rest of my heart. The bitterness will not be gone tomorrow. The re-running will be quieter by the third week. The case will still be true; you will simply no longer be the one carrying it alone.
That is the slow Murray cure. It is not the fast one. The fast ones do not work on the root that defiles, because the root is older than the speed of the cure. The slow cure works because it is the same age as the root — and slower, in the end, than the root can keep up with.
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