I remember watching those early rounds of American Idol last season, when a young girl sang terribly, and the judges did what they do – they told her she sang terribly. Her response?
“You don’t even know me. Who are you to judge me?”
Um…what? What does knowing someone have to do with their singing talent?
But this is a mantra these days (and you hear it weekly in this season of American Idol). “You don’t know me.” “Be who you are.” “Be true to yourself.” What does that mean, exactly? What makes up the self? If you’re being true to some “who you are” notion, how does one know who one is, precisely…do we have to figure out some predestined identity deep in our hearts and be true to that? Or is it about choices we make? And if it’s about those, isn’t any choice you make true to “who you are,” since you made it? If one argues, “You can make choices against who you are because of peer pressure,” that doesn’t help much…because it just turns out that “who you are” is a coward. These are some random thoughts I’ve had for a while about the dominance of “self” and “identity” concepts in popular culture.
Then, today I came across this in Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and I think this sums things up nicely:
Most of what makes us human is God. When we say “soul” we are calling attention to the God-origins, God-intentions, God-operations that make us what we are. It is the most personal and most comprehensive term for what we are – man, woman, and child.
But in our culture, “soul” has given way to “self” as the term of choice to designate who and what we are. Self is the soul minus God. Self is what is left of soul with all the transcendence and intimacy squeezed out, the self with little or no reference to God (transcendence) or others (intimacy).
“Self” is a threadbare word, a scarecrow word. “Soul” is a word reverberated with relationships: God-relationships, human-relationships, earth-relationships.
“Self” in both common speech and scientific discourse is mostly an isolating term: the individual. “Soul” gets beneath the fragmented surface appearances and experiences and affirms and at-homeness, an affinity with whoever and whatever is at hand. (p. 37)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
A multiple choice question, I’ll give the answers first.
A. Love Yourself
B. Be true to Yourself
C. Find Yourself
D. Deny Yourself
Well, you may have already guessed the question, but here goes. Which of the following did the Son of God command His disciples to do?
If you guessed B or C you probably need to turn off Joel Osteen and read the New Testament.
If you guessed A, you are wrong but I can see why you might have guessed that. You know that Jesus quoted Leviticus 19:18 which says to love your neighbor as yourself. And you think that there is an implicit command there to love yourself. Or you have bought into the psychobaloney that says you have to love yourself before you can love others. I’ll get to that later.
If you guessed D, you are correct. Mark 8:34.
OK, enough of my condescension and sarcasm.
I like what this post had to say. It comes at an interesting time. I lead a Bible study on Wednesday nights going through the Gospel of Mark. We have just reached the point where Jesus is asked by the scribe what the greatest commandments are. Paraphrased, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. I recalled something that I heard years ago about Aleister Crowley. He was a British occultist/sorcerer. He wrote in one of his works “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” and also “There is no law beyond do what thou wilt.” What a contrast. According to one teacher the law is summed up as focusing first on one’s Creator and second on other people. According to the other teacher the law is summed up as focus on yourself. It continually occurs to me that a lot of what goes on in churches today is no more than “Christianized self-centeredness.”
Another thing happened today. Where I live at there really aren’t too many places to be alone and pray. Well, not at night time anyway. In the afternoon, I can get away in the outdoors, but night is another matter. Can’t go to church, it’s locked up. So where did I go? Our local hospital. There is a fairly nice prayer chapel there free to the public to use. Outside of the chapel there are some pamphlets to take and read. I picked up one entitled “Praying When You Feel Spiritually Empty.” Here is a quote from it. “The hard reality is that true conversion requires nothing short of dying to our self-centered worldview so that we can arise to become a person for others. We sometimes need to be stripped of the worldly yearnings, attachments, and dependencies that distract us from our relationship with God and cause us to veer off course on our spiritual journey.” I thought that was well said, and somewhat ironic since I had read your post before I went there to pray. Though beware, the person who wrote it was one of them (you know, those Pope lovers). That last sentence was intended to be dry humor in case anyone actually took it seriously.
Oh yes, back to the point of whether or not there is an implicit command to love yourself in Leviticus 19:18. I say no. I think what is implicit is the presumption that one already does love himself. No command is necessary. And to the idea that you have to love yourself before you can love others, I think is wrong also. First, as I said, I think there is the presumption that one already loves himself. But second, and more importantly, the command to love is a command to action, not psychological or emotional feelings. The example Jesus gives of this commandment being obeyed is the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). The Samaritan didn’t merely have good feeling or a high opinion of the man lying on the road waiting to die, if he had them at all. He sprang into action and saved the man’s life at personal expense to himself. That’s loving your neighbor as yourself.
Out.
Hi! I’ve been a Hog’s Head reader for awhile and just recently checked out this blog. Yay!
Travis, your thoughts on the self and the Peterson quote made me go scrambling to my bookshelf, remembering reading a L’Engle book where she talks at length about the self… I love her take on this:
“When we are SELF-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.
The Greeks had a work for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself at the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation.” (this is from _A Circle of Quiet_)
I love the idea that in God’s “Created Order,” we weren’t designed to constantly judge and evaluate ourselves; it was His job and we were to enjoy Him and His creation and obey Him and do the work He assigned for us. Oh, the trouble we get into by constantly trying to switch the roles, slide ourselves into the “God” position and be a source unto ourselves!
Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking idea.