On his way
to the cross, Jesus said,
taught us to deny ourselves,
because anyone who wants to save his
life loses it,
but those who lose their lives for
(Jesus’) sake find them.”
Tricky
language.
How do we go
about denying ourselves?
Does that
mean depriving ourselves of happiness?
To those of
us who have read self-help books
that prescribe pampering ourselves,
standing up for ourselves,
and discovering
ourselves,
it doesn’t sound all that healthy to
deny ourselves.
So is Jesus
saying anything we can even consider? Maybe so.
The
expression “self-denial” has gotten a bit twisted.
A lot of
what passes for self-denial isn’t so healthy,
but it isn’t really self-denial
either.
When someone
goes around abstaining from this and abstaining from that,
it can have a bit of spiritual pride
in it.
That sort of
thing is to self-denial as iron pyrite is to gold.
It’s shiny,
but not the real deal.
Too much bad
religion amounts to denying myself a material pleasure
in the hope of getting a spiritual
reward.
A religion
driven by staying out of hell
or winning a ticket to heaven is
still self-centered.
That kind of
religion just replaces material self-centeredness
with spiritual self-centeredness.
A
spirituality that is all about achieving a placid state of mind
is still spiritual
self-centeredness.
It’s another
ego-project.
Frankly the
material self-centeredness was more honest.
So what is
this self-denial Jesus is talking about?
How can we
find our lives by losing our lives?
Let’s start
with the words Jesus used.
He didn’t
say to abstain from anything.
Abstaining
from things may be a good idea.
But that’s
not what self-denial means.
He said deny
yourself.
The word we
translate as “deny” means “renounce the claims.”
Renounce the
claims of your self-interest.
One of our
best New Testament scholars, Eduard Schweitzer,
translates this verse, “he must
forget himself.”//
In other
words, stop fretting over yourself.
Stop making
yourself so important.
Stop trying
to advance your self-interest,
because that is not your life.
That is not
living.
It’s a waste
of your precious years
and it will not make you happy.
St.
Augustine said, “I have become a great problem to myself.”
I know what
he means, and maybe you do too.
I have my
share of problems of course.
But even
when things are going better than par
by anyone’s standards,
my mind spins out complications.
I still
manage to tangle the lines of my relationships.
And the
harder I work at making myself happy,
the more frustrated and anxious I
become.
It is a
dreadful thing to be self-obsessed.
In my case,
I’m not even that interesting.
It’s like
being addicted to a bad sit-com
and watching re-runs.
Modern
culture promises freedom
but it has double crossed us.
It liberated
us from a lot of things.
It liberated
us from political tyranny, religious straightjackets,
obligations to extended families, and
duties to uphold tradition.
But all that
liberation did not set us free.
It delivered
us into hands of the harshest taskmaster of all
– the self: the constant demands of
our insatiable self-interest.
We work so
hard at making ourselves successful and secure,
we don’t see the sunrise, feel the
air on our face,
or even taste our food.
And so we
lose our lives by trying too hard to find them.
How do we
get out of this?
It is
tricky,
because if I set out to forget
myself for my own sake,
the contradiction ties
the knot even tighter.
Two stories
from my days as a parish priest
– one dramatic, one small.
The dramatic
one first.
My parishioner,
Carol, lost her 20-year-old daughter
in the crash of TWA 800.
Her purpose
for living was not at all clear after that.
She was
absorbed in her grief.
I don’t mean
this as a criticism.
Her response
was absolutely natural and to be expected.
But being
absorbed in one’s grief is a form of being absorbed in oneself.
It is the
most miserable self-trap.
Then,
Joanne, another woman in the congregation
became terminally ill,
and she had no family to care for
her.
So Carol and
a few others took charge of her care.
Carol had to
set her grief aside to care for a dying friend.
She says
today that Joanne saved her life.
“Those who
lose their life for my sake, find it.”
Carol lost
her life defined as grief to find a new life
defined as service.
Now the not
so dramatic story, the small one.
Norma,
another of my church members,
fell into a depression.
She was
weighed down by it, miserable,
obsessed with all that was missing
in her life.
Mired in
despondency, she still managed
to buy groceries for the week,
and as she was in the checkout line,
the
cahier gave her a rose.
And in that
instant, she forgot herself.
The beauty
of the rose
and the beauty of the act of giving
her the rose
filled her with delight.
That is the
essence of Christian spirituality.
Grace means
a stranger handing you a rose on a bad day.
These two
stories are examples of the two ways
of liberation from self.
The two ways
are compassion and delight.
We have all
had glimpses of them.
We encounter
something beautiful or holy,
or someone whose fragility or need
touches our hearts,
And we
forget ourselves.
The beauty
of nature or art or music captivates us
and for a moment, at least, we
forget ourselves.
That’s
delight.
Someone
needs us to visit them in the hospital,
bring them a meal
or just drop our plans
and listen to them.
So we put
our ego-projects on the shelf for awhile
and give a little piece of our lives
to someone else.
That’s
compassion.
Either way,
we come more fully alive.
We get these
glimpses of grace now and then.
To fully and
finally forget ourselves,
our attention will have to be
captured by something
powerfully – even ultimately –
engaging.
Something
awesome enough, beautiful enough,
fascinating and delightful enough,
to make us want to gaze
upon it forever.
That would
be God.
“How lovely
is thy dwelling place,” the Psalmist sang.
“How late I
came to love Thee O Beauty, so ancient and so new!”
St. Augustine prayed in the 5th
Century.
In the 6th
Century, Dionysius said that God is “infinitely beautiful,
the splendor that draws all things
into itself.”
We can lose
ourselves in the contemplation of that splendor.
Two
movements of the Spirit set us free.
They are
compassion and delight.
In
compassion and delight, we forget ourselves
and step into a larger reality.
Compassion
and delight are, of course,
the left and right hands of love.
Loving the
world, loving other people,
is how we forget ourselves and
follow Jesus.
There is a
cross in our path.
It is the
cross of self-forgetting, which is a kind of dying.
But it is also the way to
life itself.
