Day: May 18, 2012

We live in a self-absorbed age. Self-absorption has always been endemic in fallen humankind, but some eras have been more congenial to it than others. Of all the ages in our race’s tragic history the one we live in today is perhaps the most agreeable to excessive inwardness. Decades of material affluence and spiritual secularism in the West have probably done more to re-enforce our “natural” tendency to deify the self than anything else in our collective past.

Christians are, of course, in no way immune to the temptation towards self-centeredness. Even a cursory glance at the Western Church today reveals compromises with the cult of human personality that is the unspoken religion of the world around it. Our culture often seems to be having more influence on us than we on it. The simplicity, sacrifice and “Godwardness” of the early church at its best are seldom found in many congregations in these early years of the Twenty-First Century. The kind of practical everyday holiness that came from God being bigger in our eyes than ourselves has become scarce. Such holiness once made Christians stand starkly in contrast with the world. That contrast is harder than ever to see today.

Lest the reader come away with a sense that I put myself outside this drift towards self-absorption in the Church let me put your mind at ease. I see it as much in myself as in my spiritual fellow-travelers. I was raised the only child of a marriage between wealthy American non-believers. While nearly half my life has been spent as a professing Christian the legacy of my upbringing, and the accepted influence of a “navel-gazing” society, have left their mark on my soul. I think about myself and my problems all too often. I magnify myself far more than I magnify the Lord. I pray endlessly for God to be truly first in my life but this has not, thus far, changed the unsettling truth of the matter. I am a typical Post-Modern Western Christian, circa 2011.

Yet, by the grace of God the answer has not been wholly lost on me. In fact it came to me quite clearly and simply in a recent time of journaling. I found myself writing the following:

“It is Who You are that matters. So much more than who I am.”

This is, I believe, the truth and it is a truth that sets forth the antidote to the presiding spirit of this time in human history. I need desperately to have God loom larger in my heart than myself, to have Him become the greatest “thing” in my consciousness. I think this is universally true for the true believer, and always has been. The question, really, is do I want this to happen as badly as I need it to happen?

Knowing God more means making the choice to know myself less. I know this statement is anathema to this therapeutic age, and I do concede that self-knowledge is not inherently a bad thing, but true self-knowledge comes from the encounter with our Maker and Redeemer, not our ego. I can look for myself through my ego, and my earthly resources, and find nothing but the despair that C.S. Lewis spoke of in one of his apologetic volumes. “Aim at Heaven”, he once said “and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither.” Lewis knew that self-absorption was both deadly and the sickness of his own time. If he were alive today he would recognize how much worse that sickness onto death has become in our own time. We who look first to God will get our selves thrown in. We who look only to our selves will get neither in the end.

I hope and trust that, in the end, I will choose to let Who God is become greater than who I am, who I perceive myself to be. I do not presume to know exactly how to make this happen, but I also trust in the grace of God towards those who have called sincerely on the Name of His Son. That grace is part of Who He is and is therefore, by definition, a yet more powerful a force than my self-absorption….that is if I want it to be.

I continue to pray that I will want it to be, and I pray the same for you.

Because it is only the true dawn, and continuing light, of God-absorption, that will save both our souls.