"When you love, you should not say, 'God is in my heart,' but rather, 'I am in the heart of God.'"
-Kahlil Gibran
(The Prophet)
Often when making conversation in christian circles, I hear phrases that employ language that centers the Self in talk of faith. Curiosity drives me to question if our Self is truly the center of our understanding that leads to faith. Can there be any other?
I am led to wonder if the attitudes we accept that bear the offspring of our Self-absorbed language is contradictory of, or parallel to, the words of the Man.
What kind of self-absorbed language?
I wonder if language like "What God is doing in my life" is self-centered language, and is born of self-centered attitude regarding God and faith. Are we really centering the story around ourselves? How many proud souls has God torn down because they thought that our will supercedes God's? Can we fool or undermine our own creator? Why we are willing to be fooled in to thinking so?
Much of what I have heard in a community of University-students has to do with the attitudes of a very self-involved time. So much of time, energy, resource, and attitude revolves around societal betterment and fashionable success. As christians, many of us find contradiction between the shrewd and humbling words of Christ, and the relentless weight of primitive competitive spirit among man. As a privileged class, we understand our prosperity to be the best-case scenario of burdens. The American dream holds desire most sacred, and we will not be impeded nor impede any fellow American's desires. We are told from a very young age that we are an Army of One, a Unique Individual, we Deserve our Break Today, and so on and so forth. Eventually, when we learn more about what God did through Christ, and take a sincere approach to learning how to live in Christ's wake, we see that we have many strong but mixed messages and we make a terrible decision: we compromise.
We understand that the promises made by God through Christ demand, command, uphold, and humble. Our feeble minds can grasp some notion of that. But we find subtle ways to live lives of deception: lives that are not demanded, commanded, upheld, and humbled by Christ. We tell the story of our life like God didn't exist before we had our first sensational experience we attribute to him. We feel guilty that we don't read our bibles, but we don't understand why we read them in the first place. We talk freely and sometimes arrogantly about our personal adventures with Christ and Community, but we lack the humility to keep those stories to ourselves. We would rather posture than pray. We would rather admit guilty feelings than obey convictions. We would rather believe in a God that helps us write our stories rather than a God who holds sole authorship over all 6 billion lives at once. We would rather Santa Claus-ify God than Respect him. We are so self-involved, self-absorbed, self-reliant, self-centered, and self-idolizing, that most of us wouldn't recognize Christ if he punched us in the gut. We all have/do hold God in a far off place, waiting in the clouds for our glorious arrival, cheering when we make a baby smile, crying when we skin our knees, laughing when we mock his mockers. But we are wrong. And none of our hands are clean.
We don't have to forget what we know. But we can try to put to death what is Self-Worshipping in us and be a little newer each time we do. We can tear down existing mental and psychological walls of conditioning that lead us to believe that a story of a christian is more valuable than any else. We can work to know each individual we can without cheapening their Self in to a Self-based Story. Stories have formulas, an expected sequence of things--life simply does not. God does as God does.
We can put to death thinking that a personal relationship with God trumps all else in thinking in terms of Faith. We can forego our individual assurance of salvation for the sake of others welfare. The more time and energy we commit to assuring our individual salvation, the less we are concerned with the Least of These, the less we care about loving, respecting, and sacrificing.
If we can de-center our Self from the manners and matters of Faith, we will become different. Faith will no longer be "my faith," but simply, "faith." "My life" will become "life." "My personal relationship with Christ" will become whatever God makes it. We are not the center, we are not the creator, we are not the author.
I will end with one interpretation of Christ's words that inspired this post, along with the ones from Gibran. I remind myself and my friends that Christ instructed his followers to take up their crosses and follow him. He did not say that if they took up their crosses he would follow them. So if we bear our cross, as he bore his, he does not follow us. We follow him. And that must be a very Self-Less journey.
