It fell to another speaker, towards the end of the retreat, to nail this point down in practical terms. Believing we have something good enough to offer God is pride. Holding our own ideas is pride. "Not to submit your thoughts, beliefs, and your opinions to the pastoral leaders for correction is the capital sin of pride."
Denying Your Self - A False Humility
Jesus called us all to self-denial. At the point in his public ministry when he be-gan talking about his own pas-sion and death, he also started calling his disciples to the cross. "Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self, take up his cross each day, and follow in my steps. Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will gain it." (Lk. 9: 23-24) The dis-ciple of Jesus must be prepared to be treated as Jesus was, to suffer as he did - to lay down his own life, if need be. He warned his apostles not to seek high places and titles. Following our Lord, St. Peter exhorts us to humble ourselves under God's mighty hand (1 Pet. 5: 6). The very intelli-gent and commanding St. Paul called himself the least of the apostles and the greatest of sinners (1 Cor. 15:9). In his Sermon on the Mount, Our Lord said, "Blessed are the meek, the lowly." In the ancient world, only the Jews and the Christians thought humility was a virtue. And one of the constant signs of authentic spiritual renewal in the Church is this sense of humility, of self-denial.
By contrast, the consumerist culture of the United States and Western Europe has fostered a cult of self. The most important goal in life is to be self-fulfilled. The highest moral value is to be true to self. When Frank Sina-tra sang, "I did it my way," the point was not that he was skilled or successful, that he achieved something of value or beauty - but that he expressed his own self. We read in popular publications of people who suddenly abandon all their responsibilities to adopt a new life-style and "find themselves". The goal of serious art any more is not to create something of grace and beauty, but to break conven-tion and express the artist's inner self. This attitude carries over into education, where many professional educa-tors believe that anything a student writes, paints, or draws is good, because it flows from his real self. The result of such "selfism" is selfishness. Quite rightly, many Christians have rejected it.
If humility is a real virtue and 'selfism' is so wrong, why do we call "Denying Your Self" (D.Y.S.) a sanc-tity trap? As with most of these traps, the problem is with a one-sided application of the truth.
Evelyn had belonged to her religious group for almost ten years, but she never felt she fit in. An avid newspaper reader, she jumped with relish into political discus-sions. Her father was a "rugged individualist": "If you don't watch out for you, no one will." She obediently tried the long skirts, veils at meetings, downcast eyes, and 'wom-anly thoughts' - and she felt she was in a cage going crazy. Evelyn wanted to be a good community woman. So she sought help and guidance of the group's pastoral team. A 'handmaid was assigned her. "You have to be peeled," the handmaid said. "Layer by layer - like an onion - you need to be peeled. With prayer and deliverance and counseling, we'll strip away everything you have learned from your parents, schools, religion teach-ers, and friends. We'll strip away your attachments and attitudes, your interests and worldly beliefs. Then when your core is laid bare, we'll build you back up into the Evelyn that Christ wants and sees."
What was Evelyn's problem? Some people might say she was in the wrong kind of group for someone with her inter-ests and personality. But the pastoral team's position was that her interests and personality were themselves the prob-lem. The group was for every committed Christian; if she didn't fit in, the problem was with her. Living out the Christian life, then, was not a matter of knowing herself or finding her place. Evelyn herself didn't matter. All she needed to know was the community’s way of life. Every-thing personal and individual, whatever comes from inside her, must be rooted in sin. So her duty was to repent of it all and learn to do what is rooted in Christ (as that community understood it).
I have had some personal experience of this sort of thing. For a while I belonged to a tightly-knit charismatic community that eventually tried to foster a certain vision of 'manliness' among its men. Men were to take command, to do battle, and to relate to each other in authentically mas-culine brotherhood. From childhood I have been a shy, book-ish person. It is nothing pathological; my shyness does not cripple me. On the other hand, I am not a take-charge team leader or a natural salesman. I don't dance or join into activities at large parties very well; I'd rather talk with a few friends. I'm the sort of guy Garrison Keillor makes his "Powder Milk Biscuits" for. However, this shyness did not fit in with our community's vision of what a man should be, and pastoral leaders began urging me to become more out-spoken, talkative, and even boisterous. In my life I have had to repent of my share of sins - to be sorry for them and try to avoid them in the future. But the hardest thing I even tried to repent of was being quiet and shy. I can repent of immorality and sin, but not of who I am.
We can take a lesson from "the greatest basketball player on the planet". In 1993 Michael Jordan 'repented' of basketball and became a minor-league baseball player. When we saw him on TV, he was no longer feinting and faking, spinning and leaping impossibly high, changing hands and slamming the ball through the hoop; he was in left field dropping routine fly balls. Jordan has always been moral - a good sportsman and role model - whether in bas-ketball or baseball. But when he tried to become a baseball player, he was only mediocre.
On a social or communal level, the Amish push this to extreme. Anything new, fancy, or original is a sign of 'Hochmut' - pride. But other, more conventional Christians adopt the same attitude by seeing their jobs or careers as not being their 'real' work. "I teach school/repair cars/balance account books to earn money. My real work is what I do for God at home or in the prayer community." According to this view, a Christian should be a good employee, because the Bible commands servants (slaves) to obey their masters and serve them well. The work they feel they want to do is not important. Building the better mousetrap does not build up the Kingdom of God. And artistic or ath-letic excel-lence is often considered just a way of showing off; better to add your beautiful soprano voice to the cho-rus than to display it in a solo. In other words, natural desires and gifts have nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with pride. They are nothing before God.
Some Lessons from the Military
In 1968 I was invited (under pain of $10,000 fine and five years in prison) to join an organization that sup-pressed all individuality. They gave us each a number. They took away our own clothes and made us all dress alike. They shaved our heads, marched us in straight lines and let us speak only when spoken to. All our activi-ties were regulated - going to bed and getting up, meal times, cigarette breaks. The organization was the U.S. Army, and the place was a Basic Training battalion at Ft. Campbell. For those eight weeks, everything about us belonged to the Army. "You miss your wife? If the Army wanted you to have a wife, we would have issued you a wife!" "You want to call your mother? Around here, I'm your Mama - and your Papa!" And it really did not matter if you were a mas-ter woodcarver, a violinist, a breeder of champion live-stock, or the funniest kid in your class. You had to fit the Army mold.
The Army had good reasons for this. A war was going on, and they needed sol-diers to fight it. The goal of basic training was to train healthy young men to fill well-defined slots in combat units. The Army's concern is not for the individual as such but for the unit and its military mis-sion. Under the peculiar circumstances that the military faces, this makes sense. Armies are regimented because they come in regiments. Al-though we all grumbled (soldiers always grumble), we understood the point.
In fact, however, the military learned the hard way that being a good soldier is more than just being a good soldier. During the Korean War several American POWs stunned the country by publicly accusing our country of ter-rible crimes. By torture, intense psychological pressure, and manipulation of their environments, their Chinese cap-tors had induced these men to condemn their own country. This phenomenon of brainwashing raised a host of serious questions. Granted that POWs were under extreme stress and that the Chinese techniques were uncommonly sophisticated; it was still troubling that so many men fell so completely to their machinations. Somehow these men had lost their grip on their identity as Americans. Having been captured and stripped of external supports, they had no inner resources with which they could resist their Communist tor-mentors. Being proficient soldiers was obviously not enough. We were reminded that the good soldier must also bring spiritual resources - especially love of his country and loyalty to it - to the war. We expected American soldiers to be more than mere mercenaries or conscripts. Even a soldier needs a strong sense of self - some-thing these men seemed to lack.
Now the Body of Christ is not an army. In the eyes of God none of us is simply another soldier, assigned a serial number and put into a unit. If it is important in the army to have a strong sense of self, how much more important it is in the Church, under the Lord who fashioned and called each of us before we were even born.
What Is a Self?
Hardship and suffering reveal who we really are. A couple of incidents from the life of Karol Wojtyla (now Pope John Paul II) show us clearly what kind of man he is. They help us find the keys to the self.
Wojtyla was a 19 year old student when the Nazis over-ran Poland. They held that country in an iron grip, exploiting its resources and people. Hitler's goal was not only "Lebensraum" - "living space" - for the German Reich, but also the elimination of "inferior" peoples and their cultures. To his mind, the Slavic peoples were especially inferior. Some young Poles took up arms, secretly joining the Polish resistance. Others organized underground cells to keep Polish culture alive. Young Wojtyla helped to form one of these cells, a secret theater company. No longer allowed to attend the university, he worked days in a stone quarry. Then at night he and his friends would rehearse their plays and present them to small audiences in secret. Had they been caught they would have been arrested and sent to the concentration camps. But they risked this to keep the spirit of Poland alive.
During the war Wojtyla decided the become a priest. Since the Nazis had closed the seminary, the archbishop instructed his seminarians privately. At the end of the war, the archbishop returned to his palace and re-estab-lished his seminary there. Unfortunately, the Nazis had badly used the building. In one room they had dumped garbage and human waste. The stench was overpowering, and no one would enter the room for fear of being sick. No one except Karol Wojtyla. The brilliant student, play-wright, and future pope grabbed a shovel and went in alone to clean the room.
To know these stories is to know much about who Pope John Paul II is. We clearly see two important aspects of his self. The first aspect is his heritage - what he had received from nature, his parents, and his culture. He was bright, with a natural affinity for language, poetry, and the theater. When some took up arms in secret and others fled to England to form Free-Polish brigades, Wojtyla turned his gifts toward the preservation of the Polish soul. Know-ing his background, skills, gifts, physical traits, and native intelligence is one key to who this man is. These things are part of his heritage.
The second aspect is character, based on values. Faced with that stinking room, the young seminarian could easily have said, "Well, I'm a student, not a sanitation worker. My job should be to arrange the books in the library. Someone else can shovel ..." But he did not do this. He did what had to be done. He put his own interests aside - for no one has a natural inclination to spend an entire day wading in his enemies' excre-ment and shoveling it. We know that Karol Wojtyla loved God and his colleagues enough to undertake something truly disgusting for their sakes. This tells us who he is and what we can expect of him. This act reveals the character of his self.
Character is based on values, on a strong sense for good and evil. Several years ago the movie When She Says 'No' ran on television. This true story concerned a young woman attending a professional convention. After she spilled a drink on her dress during a reception, she went to her room to change - followed by three male colleagues. They urged her to change clothes in their presence. Despite her insistence that she wanted not to, they then pressured her into sex. Upon returning home, she filed rape charges against them, alleging that they had intimidated her, even after she had said 'no'. Several writers criticized the movie and the woman, because they found it incredible that she could have been so naive and compli-ant. Yet, it was a true story.
What is especially interesting about this movie was the profession of those in-volved. The meeting was a regional convention of the American Philosophical Associa-tion. These people were philosophers - lovers of wisdom and experts in the thoughts of the wisest and the smartest minds in history. Compare this woman's behavior with that of Maria Goretti, an 11 year old Italian peasant, whose First Communion was delayed almost until her twelfth birthday, because she could not read. Her life was one of field and household work, with almost no chance for schooling. When a neighbor, Alessandro Serenelli, attempted to force her at knife point into having sex, she steadfastly refused, telling him, "It is a sin." She died rather than to consent to the attempted rape. St. Maria Goretti knew who she was, because she knew clearly what was good and what was evil. The violated philosopher knew a lot, but she did not know where to draw the line for herself.
Who I am - my self - is ultimately determined by my character, by the virtuous use of my heritage in love.
Self-Denial and Denying Your Self
During a forum on abortion at Notre Dame right after Roe vs. Wade, an out-raged audience member charged one of the speakers, a doctor, with being selfish: "How can you deprive a desperate woman of needed medical treatment [meaning an abortion] just for the sake of your own conscience - so that you can sleep nights!" In a way, this outburst points to the difference between self-denial and denying your self. Suppose the doctor were loading his golf clubs into the car on a Wednesday afternoon. His elderly next-door neighbor is trimming the hedges, when he suddenly collapses, clutching his chest and hoarsely whispering, "Help me! My heart!" If that doctor were to jump into his car and drive to the coun-try club, we would reproach him. Obviously, he should deny himself by giving up his tee-off time to save a man's life. But the questioner at the abortion forum was saying some-thing different. She was challenging him to turn his back on his conscience, on his belief in the value of unborn life. In effect, she put his dislike of abortion on the same level as his annoyance at being late for tee-off. What she was ask-ing him, however, was to deny his very self.
In his play A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt presents this same point in the contrast between St. Thomas More and Richard Rich. Rich knew whom he admired and what was the right thing. But for the sake of wealth, position, and reputation, he chose to perjure himself. He refused to deny himself these advantages and so became whatever Cromwell and the King wanted him to be. By contrast, More eventually lost everything on earth - books, friends, family, freedom, and finally his life - because he would not deny the truth and do what he knew to be wrong. He did not particu-larly want to deny himself, but he had to in order to avoid denying his self.
Your heritage is a good thing. It is a gift from God. In reality you are a gift from God. The fact that you are funny or musical or intelligent or good with your hands is God's gift to the world. He has made the world a happier place by putting you with your sunny disposition and sense of humor in it. If you are sober and cautious, it is because God wants you to help bring prudence and common sense into the world. It is not only the Mozarts, Shake-speares, and Michael Jordans who brighten up this world with creativity. Each of us brings creative human gifts to oth-ers. You really are God's gift to the human race - even if you are not the only one!
Love is a matter of self-giving. If I have no self to give, then I cannot really love. I have to love as the per-son I am. The old medieval tale tells of the poor juggler who had no gift for our Lady on her feast. So in the dead of night, long after the High Mass, he stood before her statue and juggled for her alone. Each of us must give of what he or she has.
Sometimes, of course, special talents and favorite things have to be put aside. A college-graduate, her mind energized by four years of studies, marries and soon has a baby. For the next ten years she can almost feel her brain stagnate; she worries that she will never us a three-syllable word again. She has to put some of her heart's desires aside. A scientist I know has seriously cramped her career opportunities in research by choosing to care for an elderly grandfather. It's an open secret in the corporate world that men who opt for the "daddy track" - 40 to 50 hours per week, most weekends free, vacations in the sum-mers, time off for childbirth - cripple their career prospects in most companies. To give up what you love and are good at, just for the sake of giving it up, is point-less. But sometimes love demands putting a higher good in its place.
The speakers quoted at the beginning of this chapter called their hearers to deny that they had any intrinsic, personal value, that they had any love of their own to give to God. The miracle of God's creative love is that what he has given us is really ours. Every good gift does come from our heavenly Father, but what he has given me is really mine. If I deny the self that he has created me to be, then I effectively deny his generous gift. Furthermore, because that self is founded upon the values I embrace, if I forfeit my love of those goods and - out of "humility" - let someone else make my decisions, then I have no 'self' at all. I have become someone else's creation. By denying my self in this way, I become something God never had in mind.
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