The story of our two selves

My blog for April centres on how we get in touch with our own story and “feast on it” as the poem below recommends. I have already used this poem in a previous blog about my brother as it captures how in his latter years he came home to that place where we are all called to, the place where our inner and outer selves befriend each other.

Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

 And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(Derek Walcott)

 Coming home to ourselves
The poem is about two aspects of ourselves, an outer and inner one that come home to one another, usually in the second half of life. In the first half we are preoccupied with the outer world of our career, of marriage and of rearing a family. In the second half of life when we have established ourselves and the pressure of making something of ourselves has eased there is a call to go on an inner journey on which we seek to realise our dream.

The opening to the top

The dream that will not go away
Ours is a dream of the intimacy and joy that love draws us into. According to Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it is this dream, and the journey we undertake to realise it, that all our stories are about. It is an innate dream or one built into us as human beings when we were made in God’s image and then recreated in the image of the Trinity at our baptism. As a result we are able to “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and realise our dream in the extraordinary way that Jesus ambitions for us. (Jn 15:1-15, 17:13, 22-23)

Why we become a stranger to ourselves
Getting in touch with our inner world is difficult, especially in the first half of life. This is because it is hard work becoming aware of our experience of our dream and it is not a journey our educational system has prepared us to embark on. What also deters us going on an inner journey is the fear of meeting the ghosts of the past or of being exposed to the painful experiences that are part of everybody’s story. Even though these negative experiences may only be 10% or so of what has happened to us they can fixate us and become 90% of what we see and so deter us from entering the 90% of our story that is enriching.

What do you see:
the 5% that is black or the 95% that is white?

What belittles the inner or spiritual side of us
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to ‘feasting on your life’ is an attitude to our inner world that is in the air we breathe. This is generated by a culture that is dominated by Science, Economics and Consumerism and by its belief that only what is material and measurable is real. As a result our inner or spiritual world is seen to be too subjective and personal to yield a knowledge that has much value. This atmosphere in which we live makes our human dream and that which Jesus has in mind for us appear unreal and even childish. As a result, the inner world of the spirit is seen as a private matter that we deal with in a world apart from our normal one. The following poem tunes in to the conflict there is between these two sides of us that compete for space in our life.

 The Choice
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark,
When all that story is finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark;
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
(W B Yeats)

Being faced with two ways

Living in two separate worlds
Consequently, we live in two worlds that have become separated: a very large outer one that centres on the material world of work and wealth and a small inner one that centres on the basic human quest to realise our dream. The object of this quest is to get our whole person involved in the way we love and relate. (Lk 10:25-28) Because our outer world of work and wealth has become so dominant our inner one of love and relationships has for many people today been pushed into a corner and become dormant or part of what we might term our underground stream of inner wisdom. We could think of this inner wisdom as the body of convictions we each accumulate during life that gives meaning and value to all else. It is a unique way we have learned to understand and evaluate the environment in which we live and that nobody besides ourselves can explore for us.

 We are that!
Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, babyboomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called “Getting All You Can out of Your Shell.” There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.

One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped “out of the blue” by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, “We…are…that!”

 Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: “So tell us, how would we become that tree?” “Well,” said he, pointing downward, “it has something to do with going into the ground…and cracking open the shell.” “Insane,” they responded. “Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore!”

“We … are … that!”

Going down to our inner wisdom
Becoming aware of the richness of our personal experience and learning how to appropriate or to believe in the wisdom we each have accumulated is not as difficult as it may initially appear. It involves digging our well to draw on the wisdom that is in our our underground stream. To arouse this dormant wisdom we must learn to notice and name it so that we can then savour and gradually appropriate it. This may sound complex but in practice what is involved is simple if we are prepared first of all to tell our story, noticing its significant events and what they are saying to us as well as how we feel as we do this.

 As we learn to tell our story, to notice and name the significant people in it and how they love and relate in a number of very distinctive ways we are all familiar with, our inner wisdom emerges. When it does we are then in a position to savour and appropriate the love we have received and given which is the core of our inner wisdom. This can then become the context in which we understand and evaluate all else in our daily experience. A way of feasting on our life is provided on this website in a course called What do you want? Click here to access it.

 You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
… Sit. Feast on your life.