I tend to be a very introspective individual. My spiritual life consists largely in self-examination, and used to be even more so. I would look at myself, find myself wanting, and come up with a plan to fix that deficiency. I saw growing in holiness as getting better and better at this introspective, never-ending internal home improvement project.
Recently, though, over the last few months, I have begun to reshape that notion. Walker Percy’s “Lost in the Cosmos” may have first triggered it, and it has been reinforced by many other books, blogs and life events. You know how it is, when you find a new idea, and then for a while, (days, weeks, months, years?) it seems like everything relates to this new idea.
In his book, Walker Percy describes humans as the sort of creatures that were never meant to look at themselves. Since the fall we have been burdened with the necessity of looking at ourselves, either for pleasure, egoism, discipline, honour, unselfishness or whatever the reason, we now must look at ourselves. I must sometimes sit back and make a complete check of myself. More sinisterly, most of us spend most of our time looking at ourselves.
What if there were a way out of that? What if Walker Percy was right, we were never meant to be looking at ourselves. Instead we were meant to be looking at other things, at other people, at the wonders of creation, and of course, at God Himself. We were meant to be ecstatic, literally outside ourselves, lost in love. In the same way were not created to avoid evil, though we have to spend most of our time doing that because of Original Sin. We were created to do good, to be good, to love good. We were created to love.
There is the problem with my constant, never-ending self assessments, that I am still looking at myself. I need to do the opposite. I need to look outside, I need to look at anything outside myself, the higher the better. Nature, art, music, literature, people, God, whatever is at hand. I need to lose myself in love of the other, and forget about continually checking back to see if I have made any progress.
Because that, of course, is the irony, that such a product is impossible. Remember to forget myself? Please! I try it sometimes, practicing self forgetfulness and I am literally always looking aback at myself to see if I am, in fact, forgetting myself. It is like trying to rock a baby to sleep by poking it ever couple of minutes just to make sure that it is actually going to sleeve.
So instead of working at it, I am simply going to ask God to do it for me. He wants me to become holy, far more fervently than I do, and he has the power to make that happen. Turn my eyes outward and look at someone else, and trust in God’s saving work. As long as I keep my eyes fixed on Him, everything else will be all right. All will be well and all manner of things will be well.
The answer
