A Jailbreak For The Prison Of The Self

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

We hate in other people what we hate in ourselves. And I will confess: selfishness and self-centeredness is a pet-peeve of mine because I am one of the most self-centered people I know.

I use myself as a test-subject constantly, especially when it comes to writing. There are a couple reasons for this--one, I have plenty of material to work with. Two, I don't have to ask permission to use it. Three, I'm hyper-self aware, which is the other side of the double-edged sword that is self-centeredness, so I'm relatively confident in what I am writing about. Maybe it is the artist-temperament. Whatever it is, it comes with downsides and unique requirements for mortification.

Saint Louis Marie de Montfort spoke of mortification as "the deliberate restraint that one places on natural impulses in order to make them increasingly subject to sanctification through obedience to reason illumined by faith." With Lent arriving in less than two weeks (doesn't it always seem to come at just the right time?), we are afforded a great opportunity to practice what St. Louis de Montfort saw as an absolute necessity for acquiring true wisdom. "Beware of thinking that bodily mortification is not necessary to acquire Wisdom, for Wisdom is never found in those who live a life of ease and who gratify their senses" (RW 172)

We often deceive ourselves that we are being selfless when we set the conditions for how we will serve. "I'll wash the dishes," I say (because I don't mind washing dishes), when I really should be saying, "I'll change the diapers." I'll follow you...but let me say good bye to my family first, bury my father first.

And yet, what does Paul call himself but a slave of Christ. Slaves don't choose how they serve their master, because they are not their own, but owned, bought at a price. There is no self to speak of anymore, there is no subjectivism, only the call to obedience and duty. A disciple who chooses how he follows Christ of his own accord and on what terms is not a disciple, but a fan-boy. You have been bought at a price, and that price is your very life itself.

I had a professor in grad school who introduced himself as a "filthy Thomist." I'm not sure Aquinas was fully appreciated in the Theology dept at this particular school, so I can only assume the self-deprecating comment held a lonely air of ostracization. He was a great professor, but I had been taken with the writings of Kierkegaard and Christian existentialism prior to starting my program and as a post-modern subjectivist fan boy I couldn't appreciate Thomism for what it was. The Summa seemed tight, stiff, musty, overly-rational, and just beyond what I could comprehend.

But my experience of faith--that was a summa in itself. Like Descartes, I thought and I was. Or, as faith would have it, I believed and it was! I was the protagonist in this divine play, the principal actor. Without my assent, faith simply would not exist. I could not worship God for His own sake, but only in relation to myself and my experience. This has been difficult to extricate myself from, this extreme subjectivism. My self-centeredness is wiley--every time I try to pin it down to run an iron spike through it, it squirms out of my grasp, buyoed by this or that appetite that has for its whole life been satiated, or by emitting a piercing cry at the threat of it's demise. For if you lose your self, what do you have left? It's a terrifying prospect, and is not easily crucified.

Kierkegaard's radical Protestant subjectivism came with the price tag of anxiety and dread. The radical freedom and responsibility of our choices in 'leaping to faith' was the underlayment in his philosophy and it weighed on him in his life as well. Experience was everything. I clung to that in my conversion when I didn't know where to 'put' it, what vessel to use to guard it.

Although I do not attend the Latin Mass, it's attraction is starting to make sense to me. In essence, worship is not about you; it is about God. The external orientation matters; the prayers matter; the rubrics matter; beauty, in the objective sense, matters. In the rubble of post-modernism and anti-foundationalism, the liturgy stands as phoenix rising--though of course, that is not really an accurate description, for it has always been and through careful safeguarding and handing on has been preserved. I see the value now (and hope to see a renewal) in Thomistic philosophy as an antidote to a self-centered and subjective culture that has forgotten how to reason, how to worship, how to see beauty, and how to recognize objective truth.

The thing about the self is it gets wearisome. It gets wearisome to constantly serve it as a master, feed it as an appetite, pontificate about it as a subject, and groom it as a pet. Experience is powerful, but it is not a sovereign king. It rots on the vine if its not picked and pressed in service to a greater reality than the self and its finite tunnel vision of existence.

But there is an antidote, an Rx from the Church herself: prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. Sound familiar? These three pillars of Lent help us get out of ourselves, lift our eyes to Heaven and implore Heaven for others, practice mortification, and exercise charity. It always seems to come at just the right time when my self-absorption and obsession with experience has reached boiling point. It is an objective cure for a post-modern subjective disease.