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Most
commentators would agree that the road to authentic life begins
with an examination of the self. Being honest about our fear,
our anger, and our shortcomings is the beginning of maturity.
When we are open and trusting enough in our relationships to confide
in others about our shadow side, then we are on the road to authenticity
and peace.
It is important at least to tell from time to time the secret
of who we truly and fully are--even if we tell it only to ourselves--because
otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and
fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly
edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will
find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to
tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see
where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also
makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of
their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what
being a family is all about and what being human is all about.
Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside
us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than
we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not,
is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we
have to tell.
--Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1991) 2-3.
I
must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for
the truths and the values at the heart of my identity, not the
standards by which [I think] I must live--but the standards by
which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.
Behind
this understanding of [self] is a truth that the ego does not
want to hear because it threatens the ego’s turf: everyone
has a life that is different from the “I” of daily
consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the “I”
who is its vessel. This is what … every wisdom tradition
teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to
identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions,
and my true self.
It
takes time and hard experience to sense the difference between
the two--to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience
I call my life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be
acknowledged. That fact alone makes “listen to your life”
difficult counsel to follow. The difficulty is compounded by the
fact that from our first days in school, we are taught to listen
to everything and everyone else but ourselves, to take all our
clues about living from the peoples and powers around us. ...
But
if I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would
gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want
to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only
about my strength and virtues; it is also about my liabilities
and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable though
often ignored dimension of the quest for “wholeness”
is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about
ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of. …
Our
lives are “experiments with truth” (to borrow the
subtitle of Gandhi’s autobiography), and in an experiment
negative results are at least as important as successes. I have
no idea how I would have learned the truth about myself and my
calling without the mistakes I have made.
--Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, (Somerset,
NJ:Jossey-Bass, 1999) 4-7.
To
live well in this world, we must steep ourselves in the mind of
God. We must ask what God wants for the world, rather than simply
what we want for our private and personal, our public and national
and political selves. We have bartered the future for the sake
of the comfort of a few, but no peoples have the right to gobble
up the world for their own sakes. We must all come again to fear
God. We’ve made ourselves the gods of the 21st century to
whom the rest of the world pays tribute, from whom much is sacrificed
by those least able to sacrifice it, and because of whom both
blessing and chaos happen. …
No doubt about it, there’s great room for fear of God here.
The arrogance of those who make themselves the center of the universe
is destroying our world, and our technology has outstripped our
souls. No, superiority has not saved us. We need the wisdom of
humility now. We need that quality of life that makes it possible
for people to see beyond themselves to value the other, to touch
the world gently and peacefully and make the whole world better
as we go.
Peace
is a Benedictine value, and we need it now. Benedictine spirituality
is a spirituality consciously designed to disarm the heart, to
soften the soul, to quiet the turmoil within. It is a vision of
nonviolence in a world for which violence is the air we breathe,
the songs we sing, in our national anthems, the heroes we worship,
and the business we do. ... Be soft with others, the [Benedictine]
Rule teaches, and you will have peace. Be simple in your needs,
and you will have peace. Be humble in what you demand of life,
and you will have peace. Be giving in what you take to life, and
you will have peace. Refuse to make war on the innocent others
in order to vanquish your political enemies, and you will have
peace. And stop the wars within yourself, and you will have peace.
Peace comes from not allowing any part of us to control the better
rest of us. Peace depends on our being gentle with ourselves,
gentle with the earth, and gentle with the other.
--Joan Chittister
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