I have spent a great heap of my life trying to be and become myself, guarding against those whose authority could diminish my selfhood and rob me of my strength, against a world that would do anything in its to change me and turn my unique voice into silence or complicity or cliché.
I have tried to endow myself with some backbone when confronting the powers that be. You know, the usual suspects that merit standing up against – the patriarchies and the orthodoxies and the ready-made boxes full of ready-made answers. Luckily, in all of that backbone-having and self-finding, I’ve managed to choose a path for my life that usually makes me pretty darn happy to be who I am. That feels like an accomplishment.
But these days I find myself growing weary of the excessive emphasis put on self-love and self-knowledge among liberal religious folks. It feels like the self-help pop-psychology jargon of Dr. Phil and Oprah sometimes becomes an end goal of our spiritual journeying rather than just one point along the way.
Find yourself. Go along your own path. Build your own theology. Be yet lamps unto yourselves. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams – blah blah blah. Our emphasis on self-empowerment and self-knowledge just gets a little jargon-y after awhile, like a slogan that ought to be printed on a cheesy inspirational poster on a doctor’s office wall.
I mean, is the whole point of religion really to know ourselves better? Are we really doing this church thing just so that we can be happier and more self-aware and at one with our deepest selves? I don’t think so. I think we do it so that we heal some of the things in this world that are broken. Self-knowledge is a tool that makes such work possible, but it’s not the end goal.
What good is being self actualized if I’m not able or willing to make a difference for others? What good is it to “know thyself” if all I come to know is that I’m selfish? What good is it to be a lamp to unto myself if I’m not a lamp for anyone else?
Sure, we should be proud of who we are. We should claim our voices and name the things we value and shout our truths from the rooftops if we really want to – but let’s remember the next step that comes after “know thyself.”
My gripe, I think, has something to do with the occasions when we sometimes fail to turn self-empowerment into service. Maybe my new slogan is, “Know thyself, and then get over thyself and do something for somebody else.”
Now, with the reminder of my Tuesday, I’ll take a hearty dose of my own medicine, stop griping, and go do something for somebody else. Isn’t that what liberal religion really challenges us to do?
January 24, 2008 at 9:32 am
What did you do for someone else?
January 24, 2008 at 2:32 pm
You know what – I just stopped griping and did my job. I called the person in the hospital that I hadn’t visited yet this week, planned a Covenant Group meeting, and arranged childcare for a church activity. It’s a lucky thing to have a job that entails actually DOING things that help others.
January 30, 2008 at 3:40 pm
[...] been mulling over Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd’s post from last week, “Know thyself, then get over thyself.” A Unitarian Universalist, Rev. Ladd argues that liberal religion places too great an emphasis on [...]
January 30, 2008 at 4:58 pm
The author of the previous comment has a very important point. Perhaps it’s a filure of the preacher’s mind, in which I get myself caught up in “making a point” along a linear train of thought that does it – but I do tend to lean toward more linear thinking in my writing than perhaps I actually hold in my spiritual life.
From me, to we, and back again – and then back again and again and again. Well said. Reminds me of Rob Hardies’ sermon a few GA’s ago that he called “Born Again and Again and Again.”