There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become. You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands. This is such a wonderful privilege and such an exciting adventure. To grow into the person that your deepest longing desires is a great blessing. If you can find a creative harmony between your soul and your life, you will have found something infinitely precious. You may not be able to do much about the great problems of the world or to change the situation you are in, but if you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul, you will bring light wherever you go. The gift of life is given to us for ourselves and also to bring peace, courage, and compassion to others.
The Fixed Image Atrophies Longing
We are no sooner out of the womb than we must begin this precarious unfolding and shaping of who we are. If we have bad or destructive times in childhood, we begin to fix on a survival identity to cover over and to compensate for what happens to us. If we were never encouraged to be ourselves, we begin to construct an identity that will gain us either attention or approval. When we set out to construct our lives according to a fixed image, we damage ourselves. The image becomes the desperate focus of all our longing. There are no frames for the soul. In truth, we are called, in so far as we can, to live without an image of ourselves, or at least to keep the images we have free and open. When you sense the immensity of the unknown within you, any image you have built of yourself gradually loses its promise. Your name, your face, your address only suggest the threshold of your identity. Somehow you are always secretly aware of this. Sometimes, you find yourself listening to someone telling you what you should do or describing what is going on inside you, and you whisper to yourself that they have not the foggiest idea who you actually are.
The Swiss writer Max Frisch describes something of the mystery of friendship in one of his diaries: “It is remarkable that in relation to the one we love we are least able to declare how he is. We simply love him. This is exactly what love is. The wonder of love is that it holds us in the flow of that which is alive; it maintains us in the readiness to follow this person in all his possible unfoldings. We know that every person feels transfigured and unfolded when we love him. And also for the one who loves, everything continues in the same unfolding, the things that are nearest and the things that are long familiar. We begin to see things as if for the first time. Love frees us from every image. That is the excitement and adventure and tension: we will never be finished with the one that we love as long as we love him and because we love him” (author’s translation). As it continues to unfold, a loving relationship fosters the adventure of belonging. It also becomes a mirror for our thoughts and emotions: we can look at life from another’s point of view and expand our horizons of imagination and perception; it rescues us from false limitation.
It may be more helpful to consider yourself in terms of symbol rather than image. A symbol is never completely in the light. It holds a vital line into the rootage in the dark. It has many faces. Paul Ricoeur says, “A symbol invites thought.” The symbol does not nail thought to half-truth. A symbol is alive; it constantly nudges thought towards new windows of seeing. Because it is alive, it mirrors most faithfully the subtle changes that are always happening in your soul. Though our outer lives retain a certain similarity—our faces, behaviour, friends, work, remain the same—there is an endless ebb and flow of newness inside you. This is the paradox of being a human. Looking at your body, thoughts, and feelings in a symbolic way enables you to inhabit more fully your presence and its freedoms. There is hospitality and space in a symbol for your depth and paradox. The self is not an object or a fixed point of reference. It is a diverse inner landscape too rich to be grasped in any one concept. There is a plurality of divine echoes within you. The Tao Te Ching says wryly, “The Great Symbol is out of shape.”
To Become Free Is Everything
Sometimes ideas hold us down; they become heavy anchors that hold the bark of identity fixated in shallow, dead water. In the Western tradition, the idea of the sinfulness and selfishness of the self has trapped many lovely people all their lives in a false, inner civil war. Fearful of valuing themselves in any way, they have shunned their own light and mystery. Their inner world remained permanently off limits. People were given to believe that they were naturally bad and sinful. They let this toxic idea into their minds and it gradually poisoned their whole way of seeing themselves. Sin was around every corner, and in any case, probable damnation waited at the end of the road. People were unwittingly drafted into blaspheming against their own nature. You could not let yourself go. Any longing to claim your nature or to pursue your wildness would lead to ruin. This corrupted the innocence of people’s sensual life and broke the fluency of their souls. Rather than walking the path with the encouraging companionship of your protecting angel beside you and the passionate creativity of the Holy Spirit at your deepest core, you were made to feel like a convict trapped between guilt and fear. It is one of the awful sins committed against people. So many good people were internally colonized with a poisonous ideology that had nothing to do with the kind gentleness and tender sympathy of God.
Despite our being subjugated by negative belief, there remains a deep longing in every person for self-discovery. No one can remain continually unmoved by the surprising things that rise to the surface of one’s life. It is a great moment when you break out of the prison of negative self-criticism and develop a sense of the inner adventure of the soul. Suddenly everything seems to become possible. You feel new and young. As you step through the dead threshold, you can hear the old structures of self-hate and self-torment collapsing behind you. Now you know that your life is yours and that good things are going to happen to you. At a Gospel Mass in New Orleans recently, the preacher invited each one of us to turn to our neighbour and say, “Something good is going to happen to you.” It made me realize that there are such beautiful bouquets of words that we never offer each other. For days afterwards, I could see the chubby face and hear the gravel voice of the little boy beside me saying, “Somethin’ good’s gonna happen to You.” His words became a kind of inner mantra that blessed me for days.
We were created to be free; within you there is deep freedom. This freedom will not intrude; it will not hammer at the door of your life and force you to embrace it. The greater presences within us do not act in this way. Their invitation is inevitably subtle and gracious. In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go towards it. You have to claim your own freedom before it becomes yours. This is neither arrogant nor selfish; it is simply moving towards the gift that was prepared for you from ancient times. As a German thinker said, “Frei sein ist nichts, / frei werden ist alles,” i.e., To be free is nothing, to become free is everything. Albert Camus’s story “The Adulterous Woman” is a fine portrait of a woman who has fled from herself into the prison of a relationship with a man who is vacillating, demanding, and lost. One night, during a listless and utterly frustrating business trip with him, she leaves the bedroom and goes out into the desert: “Then with unbearable gentleness the water of the night began to fill Janine, drowned the cold, rose gradually from the hidden core of her being and overflowed in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans. The next moment, the whole sky stretched over her, fallen on her back on the cold earth.” With sensuous and spiritual intimacy, Nature comes to find and free her by calling her suppressed nature alive.