What we call our higher level of consciousness is but an instance of our calling evil good, of our priding ourselves on the consequences of a catastrophe that is our fall from the knowledge of the good. True knowledge of the good is a way of knowing that is, in the words of Jesus, loving the Lord our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. The reflexive mind, the divided soul, the conflicted heart - these many take to be the marks of maturity and growth. To know the good simply to love the good and do the good because it is self-evidently to be loved and to be done - that is taken to be the mark of those we condescendingly call simple. So it is that sin's injury is declared a benefit, our weakness a strength, and the fall of that dread afternoon a fall up rather than down. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
Ahh, here we arrive at one of my most persistent ongoing challenges. On the one hand, I say I envy those possessed of simplicity, yet when I encounter someone with this virtue I insist on thinking it quaint. Yet I must also reject the tendency to mistake any particular personality trait or even any exterior practice for godliness. For instance, it is certainly just as possible to be simply worldly as sophisticatedly worldly. So, some reflection related to this particular tendency in me (in us), then some more general observations about what holiness really means and what it doesn't.
I can't help but think of how this sophisticated pride fits in with Fr. Robert Spitzer's concepts of comparative identity versus contributive identity. He observes that many - perhaps most - of us tend to evaluate ourselves by comparison to others. "I'm better at my job than Mike." "I wish I could play the guitar as well as Jimmy." "I'm so glad I'm a better husband than Steve." "My talent isn't as valuable as George's." (Only one of those is a real person.) Likewise, when I become enamored of my complexity, my intelligence, my sophistication, my inner conflict, etc., it is usually by comparison against those whom I consider simple-minded, unintelligent, or not to have been as challenged as I have been. I tell myself that I think or feel or experience life more fully than they do, and what it comes down to is that I'm glad - thankful, even! - that I'm better than them.
The Pharisee's prayer, God, I thank you that I am not like other people (Luke 18, 11a) takes many forms. It's by no means limited to hypocritical religious leaders, intelligentsia, the famous or any other category of successful people you might think of. "Ordinary folk" can be just as disdainful of others, both above and beneath them in any category of social standing, as can the upper crust of society. But I don't want to go too far down that road, lest I find myself thinking that I'm better off by being free from such an approach to life, when I am clearly as enmeshed in it as anyone.
The point is just supposed to be this: if I'm to be less enamored of my own strengths, whatever they might be, I've got to stop finding my identity in terms of whether I am better than some people and, conversely, worse than others. If I'm to be the follower of Christ that I'm called to be, I need to simply follow wherever he leads me and encounter him in whomever I meet along the way. And I am to leave aside any consideration of whether I'm following better or worse than Joe or Sue, or how utterly depraved and horrific others' sins are. I don't need to bother myself with whether Fred or Mary is worth sharing him with, with evaluations of whether someone else's mind is already made up about him or if they're in the right place just now to hear about his love for us. We're called to simply scatter seed and let God worry about the condition of the soil, to cast our nets and let him haul in whatever fish are ready for catching. I find that I'm a whole lot more useful in that when I'm operating in the contributive mindset, allowing God's love for me to define my worth, rather than the comparative.
(Wow, is this one going to wander!)
I've spent way too much of my life evaluating and judging instead of loving. In my insecurity, I used my imagined superiority to others to prop up myself. I say that without self-condemnation; I understand this is a natural tendency of our fallen human condition. But when I stop thinking in terms of what a complex, conflicted, misunderstood person I am, I find a freedom to simply be who God is calling me to be. When I stop needing an image of superiority as a poor excuse for a real self-concept, I find within me a precious child of God, and suddenly discover all around me other wounded, wonderful sons and daughters of his.
When that happens, I find that I no longer need to dispute with God, to stubbornly define for myself what good and evil are in a way that lets me evaluate myself as good and my shortcomings as more tolerable than those of others. Refusing to gorge myself on the fruit of the forbidden tree - to define for myself what good and evil are - I find myself free to share love more simply, and to receive the love of God more fully, both directly and through those around me.
So how is all of this related to living in holiness? And for that matter, what is holiness, and what isn't it? It must be something beyond simply living according to the contributive identity and stopping all the confounded judging. And we've already decided that it is more than mere simplicity, while leaving in place an underlying assumption that simplicity may be an important element of living in holiness.
I come back to Fr. Satish's chief point about prayer in our recent parish mission (rooted in Jesus' teaching about the most important commandment), along with Jesus' example as illustrated in Phil 2. As I consider these together, I see why prideful self-determinism is such an impediment to my walk with God. Prayer must first and foremost grow out of a love relationship with God. Yet this relationship cannot be completely like love between human beings. At first glance it would seem as if there'd be no conflict between embracing our own ideas about right and wrong and the greatest commandment to love God with all we are. After all, in every other relationship, we are responsible to decide for ourselves what is right. But we're not talking about a give-and-take love with an equal, because we are not God's equal. We are made in God's image, but not in equality with God. The chief thing about Jesus' example was that, being God, he didn't cling to that equality. So in the garden of Gethsemani, as he agonizes over the central decision of his human life, he doesn't seem to grapple with the question whether it was right to lay down his life. Setting aside any issue of his own idea of right and wrong, Jesus' knows the Father's will, and simply struggles to submit to it.
And I suppose this gets to the root of what it means to be holy. I need to love God above all else, to trust that doing God's will is always going to make both my life and this world better, and to be willing to do God's will even when it's a struggle to set aside my own. Given that, my personal devotion to prayer and the service of my neighbor that grows out of it fall naturally into place.
I'm feeling pretty frustrated with my ability to articulate my thoughts to represent the arc that was in my head when I started writing this. At the same time, I feel peaceful about this: it's way more important to spend time with the One who has inspired these musings than it is to get every nuance expressed precisely as I wish. Perhaps that starts to get me back to the simplicity that this meandering post purports to seek. As Jesus said: God alone is good.
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