Getting to the Point: egoism

Showing posts with label egoism. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Despicable Me

I have been going through the chapters of my book Idol Thoughts on Wednesdays, on the eight thoughts that lead us away from God, that are in simple fact ‘other gods’, other ways of seeking happiness in this world.

We have come to the eighth thought, the granddaddy of them all, that is pride. In the book I liken pride to the ‘big bad’ in the modern crime movie—the villain who is at work directing all the lesser villains who are merely his minions (Despicable Me! But these minions aren't quite so cute and loveable...).

Pride is like that with the other seven thoughts—all of them essentially tend towards pride or spring from pride, and are strengthened in us by the amount of pride we have. As the Eucharist is the source and summit of divine life in us, so pride is the source and summit of all that is death in us.

Pride, fundamentally, consists in exalting ourselves above our true place. The Latin word for it, superbia, communicates that well—basically, ‘over-ness.’ When we consider ourselves to be more than we are, that is the simple form of pride.

Simple, but what complex forms it takes in all of us. There are the crude forms of pride, easy enough to recognize—dominance, arrogance, bombastic crude power trips. But it can be, and usually is, much more subtle in us.

There is the quiet steady assumption that we are always right, that our judgments, our way, our take on things are simply reality. God is the One whose word fashions the universe, who spoke and it came to be. It is a terrible arrogation of the divine prerogative when we believe our own ‘words’, spoken or interior, actually are the first and last word of what is.

There is self-centredness, which has a hundred faces. There is the steady consistent reference of all things in our lives back to ourselves—everything in this world considered and evaluated on the sole basis of ‘how it affects me’. In properly spiritual matters, I see this when people say they ‘like’ this Scripture passage or they ‘don’t like’ that one, for whatever reason. But the Bible is the Word of God—it is verging on, if not outright, blasphemy to speak of it that way – this Word of God is great, that one not so much, and so forth…

Pride is a tricky, subtle thing, and none of us should ever imagine we are free of it. It is a shape-shifter in the soul, but always singing the same tune: I-me-mine-I-me-mine… always putting ourselves at the center of all things.

And of course it is then the secret source of the strength and persistence of the other seven thoughts. God has laid out for us a way of happiness and blessed life in this world. The path of love received and given, life received and given, the human person made to be a receptacle of divine life, and in that receiving becoming a lover of all creation as God is the Lover of all.

Pride looks at all that outpouring of divine life and love and says, “Yeah, no thanks. I have a better idea! Seven better ideas, in fact.” And off we go on the paths of gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, despondency, acedia, vainglory. All the alternative plans for happiness that don’t involve all this silly God business (does He even exist, anyhow?).

Pride seems very alluring and compelling. Well of course we are the center of our own life—what else is possible? It’s only human to put yourself first in the order of things! What else can we do, and why would we? Isn’t it pathological to efface oneself and put anything else ahead of one’s own being?

Such is pride’s story when it is hauled out into the clear light of day and forced to defend itself. And it is a load of hooey. The truth is, we are made by God, made for God, made essentially for a life of communion with God, receiving and giving, giving and receiving. And out of that, loving, loving, loving our neighbors as the duties of our state of life direct us. The ‘self’ is simply that which exists to be this place of reception and seat of action, the necessary ‘I’ which can enter into communion with the divine ‘Thou’, and thence with all other ‘thous’ we encounter.

And in this, we are truly exalted, truly elevated above our station, but by God, not by our own efforts. We enter into and become sharers in the life of the Trinity, the very life of God made accessible to us in Jesus Christ. Pride, which is all about self-exaltation, actually closes us up in ourselves and dooms us to a small, narrow, constricted little life bounded by our own limitations and ambit… and we really are very small little creatures, it turns out.

The only way to actually climb the ladder of being and become a ‘Great Person’ is to embrace the radical humility of the gift, to paradoxically accept that we are nothing, can do nothing, have nothing of our own… and in that find ourselves mysteriously opened to the one who is Everything and gives us everything He is. And our lives become in that humility and that openness an entry into the Dance of Love which is the very inner life of the Trinity—radical exaltation following upon radical abasement and self-emptying.

As I always say at the end of these Wednesday posts, I actually have quite a bit more to say about all this, but then you wouldn’t buy my book if I said it all here, would you? So you can read the rest of my thoughts here. Have a great day!

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

It's Been The Ruin Of Many A Poor Boy

On Wednesdays we have been going through the chapters of my new book Idol Thoughts, exploring the eight traditional logismoi, or thoughts, that take us away from God. The list came down to us in the West as the seven deadly sins, but I prefer to talk about the older list and the language of thoughts. Before we actually launch into sinful actions, it is our prior thought patterns that get us into trouble, right?

One reason I like the older list is because of today’s thought, which doesn’t appear on the list of seven. This is the thought of vainglory. Gregory the Great, who gave us the list as we know it, collapsed vainglory into pride, but the two actually are different things, and the difference is instructive.

Vainglory is the idea that happiness lies in the good opinion of other people. Pride couldn’t care less about other people and what they think, since they are inferior beings, but vainglory cares intensely about such matters. What matters with vainglory is not what you are or what you do, but what people think about what you are and do.

Vainglory has many manifestations. There is the more obvious form of it—attention seeking, spotlight hogging, the person who needs to be ‘the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral’. There is the desperate hunger to be popular, to be liked, to be well thought of—in my own country of Canada this is a major factor in the pressure to either not hold or at the very least not express unpopular political opinions. Indeed, much evil goes unchecked in the world because of this form of vainglory—we just want everyone to like us.

In personal relationships, there is the inordinate desire to be loved, to have that special person look at us in that special way—again, the important thing is not our being or our deeds, but the good regard of the other. How many women, in particular (and sometimes men, too) sacrifice their true selves, their beliefs, their principles, because of that need for love?

And then there is the burning desire to have one’s contributions acknowledged, one’s gifts appreciated, one’s work valued. The need to be thanked. The need to not just do what is right but to have someone notice that we are doing what is right and say ‘Hey, good job, you! You are doing what is right! Kudos to you!’

And then, when that thanks, that little bit of attention or appreciation is not there—rage. Bitterness of spirit (those bastards didn’t even say thank you, after all I did for them!), withdrawing into self-pity, and so forth.

Or, if we are given that appreciation, we begin to crave it more than we want to simply do what is right and good. And we start to tailor our good deeds towards that end. Playing to the crowd, pandering. One of the most serious manifestations of this is the popular preacher, teacher, or writer who may at first have been successful because he was writing and delivering a message he believed in, that meant something to him, and strove to do it well for the sake of the message.

But the applause of the crowd is a heady drug, and it has, in the words of the song, been the ruin of many a poor boy—the message starts to get distorted, the focus shifts from the content to the one delivering the content, the ego waxes strong. Success is more spiritually dangerous than failure, and it has ruined many.

Vainglory has a thousand faces, from the gross seeking of fame and honor to the quiet wish that somebody would just say thank you once in a while. And it is a tenacious weed in the soul, one that takes a very long time to eradicate. It’s roots go deep and are tangled with many things that are good and righteous in us.

Vainglory is so powerful because it has a core truth to it. Truly, we are meant to receive the valuation of our life from another. We are not meant to be our own judges—in fact, we cannot be. And it is the core of pride, subject of next Wednesday’s blog post, that we make ourselves that.

We are meant to stand under judgment, and some part of us hungers for that. Something in us wants, indeed needs to be told by another what good our life is. But vainglory goes badly awry when it locates that other in flesh and blood, in the crowd or in that one person whose opinion matters to us. It is not the other whose good opinion will make us happy, the rather The Other.

Strictly speaking, our eternal happiness lies in holding the good opinion of that Other, of God. Vainglory is ‘vain’, that is empty and pointless, because it leads us nowhere and cannot secure us the happiness we seek. True glory—the glory of God, the eternal light of heaven which already is vouchsafed to us in the gift of sanctifiying grace and which will be ours after death in consequence of God’s particular judgment of us, is the real thing, the real happiness of the soul.

As I always say around here, I have much more to say on the subject, but I do want you to buy my book, so I will leave it there for now. May we spend today concerned not for the good opinion of man but with pleasing God who alone can make us happy.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Just The Way We Like It

Wednesdays on the blog I am going through the ‘eight thoughts’, the subject of my new book Idol Thoughts. These are the typical patterns of interior dialogue that the desert fathers identified as the principal opponents to the work of the Holy Spirit in us—hence idols we worship in lieu of God insofar as we give our allegiance to them. My book shows what each of these thoughts are, and how to pray with the Gospels as one way of being liberated from their tyranny in our lives.

This list of eight thoughts was adapted to the familiar ‘seven deadly sins’ in later Roman Catholic teaching. We have already looked at the first four thoughts, and so far they have corresponded to the list of seven—gluttony, lust, avarice, anger.

But with thought number five we depart from the rest of that list—sloth, envy, pride—somewhat. Pride is still there, but vainglory takes the place of envy, and sloth is broken up into acedia (more on that next week) and today’s thought, despondency.

So what’s that about? How is ‘sadness’ a thought that blocks the work of the Holy Spirit in us? Isn’t it just a normal emotion, one of the spectrum? Isn’t it healthy to be sad when sad things happen? What could the desert fathers mean by characterizing it as a moral problem?

We have to distinguish the simple emotion of sadness from the thought of sadness. Still more do we have to strongly state that the disease of clinical depression is something quite other than those. The desert fathers knew all about depression, although of course they didn’t have the name for it. They speak of a causeless sorrow that engulfs the human person, against his or her will, and which they are powerless to overcome. They are quite clear in their writings that this is not the thought of despondency.

Nor is the simple emotion that thought, either. Emotions come and go and we have little immediate control over them—they are not in themselves morally significant. The thought of despondency is something quite different. It is, essentially, the fixed conviction that I cannot be happy unless I have things my own way. Happiness is getting what I want, and so when I don’t get what I want (which, not being God, happens to me fairly often), I will be sad.

Pouting, in other words. Sulking. We may do it in adult ways (the spectacle of a grown man weeping openly or throwing himself on the floor if he doesn’t get his favourite coffee cup is fairly rare), but nonetheless there is little to separate us from the toddler on this point. I want what I want, when I want it, as I want it. And I will be miserable, and make everyone else miserable, until I get it. Such is the driving force of the despondent soul.

Now of course all of this is sheer and utter nonsense, and a moment’ clear thinking is sufficient to show it. For one thing, if it is truly necessary for happiness that one gets exactly what one wants, then in any normal living situation we must end up in a state of practically mortal combat. What I want will only coincidentally be what you want, and quite often be quite different. So only one of us can be happy at any given moment, if the above notion of happiness prevails. Despondency thus links arms with anger and life becomes a pitched battle for dominance, and nobody ends up especially happy.

There are people whose lives are ruined by the thought of despondency—people who end up so bitter over the hand they were dealt, constantly complaining, never satisfied, always finding something wrong in any day, any situation, and focusing on that with laser precision. And we all know other people who, in spite of fairly serious afflictions and tragedies in their lives, someone come through to a place of joy and peace, hard-won perhaps, but all the more real for that.

Most of us fall somewhere in between, with little flashes of despondency, large or small veins of self-centredness and childish self-will lacing through our person. But the truth all of us need to return to is that happiness has nothing—nothing at all!—with getting one’s own way. Happiness lies in coming to love God’s way, in growing to see that our life, our real life, is to live in a communion of love with God in which ‘what we want’ is more and more purified and simplified to wanting what God wants.

And the great surprise twist ending of not just our life, but the life of the whole cosmos, is that what God wants is, in fact, to fulfill every desire of our hearts in the right way, a true and good way, and that the path He sets for us of obedience and surrender, trust and abandonment, is in fact the path to perfect self-fulfillment, to having everything just the way (uh huh uh huh) we like it, forever.

As the Bible ends ‘every tear will be wiped away’ (Rev 21:4) – sadness ultimately is done away with in the kingdom, but the path to that kingdom is to forget about ourselves and our own ideas and follow the Lamb wherever he goes (Rev 14:4).

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

A Mess of Pottage

Well, we finally made it to the end – disease number fifteen of the Pope’s examination of conscience to the Roman Curia. For those late to the party, I was bemused and rather dismayed by the social media reception of that speech he made just before Christmas, which consisted of much ill-natured finger pointing and judging of the Curia officials involved (most of whom those doing the judging would not be able to name or pick out from a police line up, and yet somehow felt capable of judging their souls).

No, the papal examen is for all of us, and so I’ve been going through the fifteen spiritual ailments and talking about how they apply to all of us, too, at least potentially. So here it is, at long last, number fifteen:

Lastly: the disease of worldly profit, of forms of self-exhibition. When an apostle turns his service into power, and his power into a commodity in order to gain worldly profit or even greater power. This is the disease of persons who insatiably try to accumulate power and to this end are ready to slander, defame and discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines. Naturally, so as to put themselves on display and to show that they are more capable than others.

This disease does great harm to the Body because it leads persons to justify the use of any means whatsoever to attain their goal, often in the name of justice and transparency! Here I remember a priest who used to call journalists to tell – and invent – private and confidential matters involving his confrères and parishioners. The only thing he was concerned about was being able to see himself on the front page, since this made him feel “powerful and glamorous”, while causing great harm to others and to the Church. Poor sad soul!

Now there is no doubt here that the Pope is referring to some very specific situations in the Vatican where power struggles have spilled over into precisely the use of the media that he describes here. There does seem to be a lot of gossip and whisper campaigns over there, and the Italian media seems quite happy to amplify those whispers in a way that is quite unedifying.

I doubt seriously if anyone in the Roman Curia reads my blog, but good fathers, if any of you are reading this, may I simply say that this kind of thing is deeply embarrassing to the Church at large, and a huge scandal to the cause of Christ in the world. And so, perhaps, you should cut it out? Do you have any idea how bad you look, and how bad you make the Church look with this puerile nonsense?

Of course that specific type of media power play is not something most of us are tempted to or indeed capable of. Nonetheless, underneath that specific thing which is only a temptation for people actually in positions of some power already, there is a terrible spiritual struggle that can afflict any of us at any time.

Namely, there is always a tendency in our lives to make it ‘all about me’. The Denis Lemieux Show, now in continuous airplay and available in HD and Blue Ray! The constant gravitational tug of the soul that wants to refer everything, everything, everything back to the self, the self, the self.

This is really what ‘pride’ is, and I don’t think anyone is entirely free of its influence, save some rare and precious saints among us. It is difficult for us to grasp just how utterly our lives are to be, not exactly other-directed, but Other-directed. How much our whole life is to be Christ-centred, Christ-oriented, Christ-guided, Christ-glorifying. That the ‘self’, the individual person, only enters into his or her full identity and weight, full purpose and meaning and wholeness and happiness, when he or she is utterly ordered towards the glory of God and the mission of Christ in the world to make that glory complete.

Pride—even for those who may have very little personal prestige or power—continually works to shift the spotlight, the focus back onto the individual. In ways subtle and blatant, we all have a tendency to make it ‘all about me’. And it is tragic, because what God offers us is so much more—a very entry into the life and communion of the Trinity, a sharing in God’s own being and love in an eternal outpouring of all God is to all we are.

How pathetic and paltry it is to trade all of that for some puny bit of worldly glory or attention or some passing gratification of the ego. Talk about trading our birthright for a mess of pottage! Pride: it is the disease of humanity, but fortunately we have a sure and certain remedy. Namely, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” and picking up our towel and water to go forth to serve our brothers and sisters as best we can, today.