In a world obsessed with success and progress, it is hard to live an authentic life. But we can choose to live the simple Way.
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:13-16
The World of Make-Believe …
In a world obsessed with success and progress and ‘development’, driven by ever-faster and ever more efficient technology, it is difficult to understand authenticity, or how to live an authentic life. Even within the Christian faith, it is all too easy to be faith-less; to believe that all there is to the world is what we see and what we engage in materially.
Think about how much of our world is manufactured, how much of it is driven by algorithms created to keep us under a kind of social political and technocratic control.
In 1964, social theorist and cultural critic Jacques Ellul came out with a book entitled The Technological Society. In that book he showed that techique (the energy, the movement that drives progress) was already built into society to such an extent that it pervaded every aspect of human life. That what we understand as ‘technological tools’ were nothing but, or reduced to, epiphenomena of ‘technique’ or progress. And Ellul concluded his study that already in the early nineteen-sixties technology had completely taken over and usurped human freedom.
Other thinkers come to mind—people who have been part of the development of the algorithms of technique: B.F. Skinner, Maslow, dictators like Mussolini. These people made similar claims: give them a child and they could, through conditioning, turn him or her into either a mass murderer or a priest, a teacher or a super athlete.
Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Edward Bernays’s Propaganda reveal the true role of the media within a ‘democratic’ society. Both authors claim that every good empire needs propaganda in order to shape the opinions and interests of its populace. Propaganda is repetition of message over a long period of time. It’s like the top 40 song you first hate, yet grow to love the more the radio plays it. The media is the engine that drives propaganda thus shaping public opinion. So what does that leave us with? A world of smoke and mirrors. A world of deception. A world in which what you hear and see through media may or may not be what is real.
It isn’t surprising that many people feel bound to a system of consumption and success and accomplishment—the drive to climb the ladder mixed with the terror of being torn from it. But the race to the top is really a free fall to the bottom. This manufactured world is a reductio ad absurdum. Some even claim that to work within this complex world of technique is to simply add more complexity!
So what do we do? …
Giving Thanks For All Things
The principalities and authorities of this world want nothing more than our downfall; to be depressed and deflated by this world. To see nothing good in it. To succumb to its mechanisms of power and control. To turn to the dark side—literally.
Here’s a quote from a little book I’ve enjoyed reading entitled That Man is You by Louis Evely
In every day’s Preface we repeat, “It is indeed fitting and right, proper and salutary, that we thank you always and everywhere …” Then we return to our “stupid life,” which seems empty; our “stupid job,” which seems meaningless; our “stupid home” and our “stupid family.” And yet is there a single place or a single moment when God doesn’t need to be adored and glorified? Isn’t it “fitting and right, proper and salutary” to give thanks right where we stand? Perhaps we’re here for the sole reason that no one’s ever yet offered thanks or adoration in this spot. We must sanctify everything and adore everywhere and at all times and in all places. That’s the sum total of what Christ did for thirty years.
Our life here on this earth is to enter into loving union with God, for this world does not belong to the fallen angels, but to Him and Him alone. By entering into loving union with God, we are given love for our fellow human being and creation itself. And everywhere we go, we give thanks to God, we offer the World Eucharistically back to Him. The mechanisms of power have no sway over us because we are part of a higher order, a greater Kingdom. We take our orders from the One who is, Christ Himself. And thus our life is not one of complexity upon complexity, but simplicity of heart and purpose and vision—to become like Christ.
Here’s Pope Shenouda III …
Train yourself in the life of spiritual simplicity. Do not let your mind work alone, in the complications of thoughts and arguments, but add to it the simplicity of your spirit. You will then have the simple luminous eye. Do not mix with sin, nor with its thoughts and stories, so that your mind is not defiled with the remembrance of evil that entails death. Be patient with purity, not matter how late its arrival. Ask for it as a gift from God to you. Let evil always be outside of you, even if its wars increase, and the Lord will be with you.
Seeking a Simplicity of Heart
To become simple, not more complex, is the answer. And be patient with God, knowing that He wants to work in you but only to the extent that you are open to Him and only in His timing. And never stop asking God to give you guidance and insight, for wisdom, for purity of heart.
I love this one quote from one of the saints—I can’t remember who it is …
Two lies the enemy will tempt you to believe: 1) You are a saint, and 2) You will never be saved. the key is not to accept these lies, but rather say, “I am a great sinner, but God’s mercy is greater than my sins.”
But the mechanisms of power and control have us constantly looking at ourselves: selfies, and Instagram reels, and Facebook posts are all ways we are obsessed with ourselves. Our trophies, our promotions, our books and podcasts, our homes and cars, our children, the craze of ‘intermittent fasting’ … all ways that we obsess and stare and worry about ourselves.
Merton on Becoming a Person
Merton writes,
In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and do whatever he wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.
Earlier in that passage, Merton writes about the false self, the self we create out of our own fantasies and illusions.
When a man constantly looks at himself in the mirror of his own acts, his spiritual double vision splits him into two people. And if he strains his eyes hard enough he forgets which one is real. In fact, reality is no longer found either in himself or in his shadow. The substance has gone out of itself into a shadow and he has become two shadows instead of one real person. Then the battle begins. Whereas one shadow was meant to praise the other, now one shadow accuses the other. The activity that was meant to exalt him, reproaches and condemns him. It is never real enough. Never active enough. The less he is able to be the more he has to do. He becomes his own slave driver—a shadow whipping a shadow to death because it cannot produce reality, infinitely substantial reality, out of his own nonentity.
The ultimate consequence, death under the burden of the despair of wanting to be oneself …
Self-contemplation leads to the most terrible despair: the despair of a god (the self, the ego) that hates itself to death. This is the ultimate perversion of man who was made in the image and likeness of the true God, who was made to love eternally and perfectly an infinite Good—a Good (note this well) which he was to find dwelling within himself!
The harder we look for ‘ourselves’ the further away we get from finding ourselves. For our true selves rest in the God whose image we bear. To find Him is to find ourselves.
Thus back to simplicity …
Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God have us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves.
The Art of Being Small
And here’s where we kick the teeth of the monsters of this world, the monsters that seek to grind us down by progress and success and ‘technique’ …
It is therefore a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.
Let us strive for this simplicity of heart before God and others. Let us lose all interest in being great, and instead ask to become “little pencils in the hand of God.” Let us approach our calling with grace and humility, opening ourselves to the Love of God, as His children, knowing that in our pursuit of a given work of art, it is God Himself who wants to make us that work of Art, to become that form that He has created us to become namely bearing His image to the world.
This is the simple Way …
