Is it all about me? – 5 October 2012

Am I the only one who has to try not to wince when some shining-faced young athlete or other achiever, entirely admirable, tells us about realizing their dreams…?  Dreams are what you’ve got to have.  People without dreams don’t get anywhere.  A young couple dream of their dream-home – or else watch their dream receding as financial realities take over, or some other disaster intervenes.  A few dreams have evaporated in Christchurch.  People are now conditioned by consumerism from their earliest years.   And the consumer world is all about me.  Father Laurence Freeman observes that the bookshops, for those who still read, are full of the latest advice on self-help. The bestsellers are about handling self-criticism, expressing your feelings, developing balance, asserting yourself, eating well and doing exercise – most of it, I would think, very worthy.  Of course there are extremes, and there are many exceptions.  But only a total egoist could take seriously the recent complaint of some Christchurch women that the rough state of the city’s footpaths and roads since the earthquakes had made it impossible for them to wear their expensive and very high heels. 

So it’s all about me, when the great open secret is that life and death are not all about me – certainly not in the sense that my comfort and happiness and success are what it’s all for.  Contemplative prayer is not only about setting our various burdens aside and being peaceful and receptive.  It is also about the process of setting ourselves aside – that is to say, our public selves, the self we know much of the time isn’t completely true.  The gentle but persistent ministries of the Spirit of God help us, day by day and year by year, to resign what is false and unreal, and to greet the emergence of the self God created and always knew and recognised and loved. 

The earliest mystics began to understand that this process begins once we are still and silent and consenting.  They also knew very well, from their own painful experience, that it is not a process we can do ourselves.  He must increase, I must decrease, said John the Baptist – and he added, for this reason my joy is fulfilled.  Perhaps the turning point for some of us is when we realise that we are looking for happiness in the wrong places, that our deepest joy lies deeper than the ego, the facade – when we also realise that we have no need to be afraid.  We can trust, and as Lady Julian of Norwich memorably put it, All will be well, and every manner of thing will be well.