A head on encounter with my own self in the past several weeks has led me into what seems like a paradoxical locus, a place where once again two apparently opposing ideas must be embraced at the same time.
The one side is where I find myself in practicum, the side that continually looks into the heart of my own self, the part of me that is truly me. I thought I knew who that was. But as my facilitator breaks down the paradigms that have clouded my own perception of me, I have begun to see the very raw parts of who I am.
Over the years of people pleasing and worrying about what others think and say, by conforming to what I ‘should’ do instead of what I desire to do, I have forfeited my own voice and lost my own self. This loss of self has often been compounded in the Christian realm, where I am even more susceptible to be led into areas of conformity and comparison. Even more than that, Christ calls us to ‘die to ourselves,’ and this phrase can be used to create a context where there is so much ‘God’ that there is no real place for a person. God’s will can become so infused in our thinking that we believe that this transcendent, mysterious God is all we are, yet forget that getting to our true, personal sense of volition and desire is exactly where God is.
Sitting in my counseling session last week, I was asked how I felt, and I responded in all honesty that I really did not know. For the life of me I couldn’t put a name to my feelings, because I wasn’t feeling anything. The next question was why I was not feeling anything, and then I realized again that I had been so conscientious to follow the lead of the instructor, so careful to please him and do what he would think is ‘right,’ my own self was lost and all of my feelings with it. I was lost. I was caught in the idea that a good Christian is kind and makes sure that no one gets upset. My own version of dying to my self often leaves others trying to communicate to a robot.
What do I do with the fact that I am to continually die to my self as Christ calls me to do, and at the same time fight for my own volition, my desire, my wants and my needs? This seems to be the locus, the place where dying and living are fused together in contradiction.
How do I carry both of these at the same time? I think the first step is to deconstruct my own paradigms of what dying to my self and what it really means to live. It is not a weak, self-pitying, indifferent disposition that forfeits my side. And at the same time, truly living is not a pompous, selfish greed that takes whenever it wants. It is so easy to polarize, to end up on one side, and so testing to sit in the tension of both living and dying. But knowing where we have formed our conceptions of each side is a place to start, and that seems to be where I am sitting right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment