The Convenience of Playing Small
THE SIN OF WHAT WE HAVE FAILED TO DO
The word of the Lord came to Jonah: Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it; for their wickedness has come before me. But Jonah made ready to flee to Tarshish, away from the Lord. He found a ship, paid the fare, and went away from the Lord.
Jonah 1:1-3
In the first pages of the Bible, we are told that human
beings are created in the image and likeness of God. This mystery both triggers
fear and fascination causing us to attempt to be more than we are or less than
we are, but not fully who we are. As Abraham Maslow said, “We both crave and
fear becoming truly ourselves.”
This is a very old problem. It goes all the way back to the story
of Adam and Eve. According to that story, at the end of creation God, humans
and the animals lived in harmony. They were interconnected and interdependent.
As a colorful Baptist preacher said at one of my graduations, “In the
beginning, God was happy being God. The animals were happy being animals. Human
beings, however, have never been happy being human beings. They've wanted to be
God one day and animals the next!” Because we are created in the image and
likeness of God, we all have the chance to become our very best selves. We all
feel something inside, a quiet “maybe” that is often silenced as quickly as it
surfaces. We enjoy and even thrill before the godlike possibilities we see in
ourselves and simultaneously shiver with fear before these very same
possibilities. As a result, the overwhelming majority of people fail to achieve
a life even close to what they are capable of achieving. In face of their godlike possibilities, they
let their fear of possibilities overpower their thrill of
possibilities. Afraid of being different, afraid of being uncomfortable and
unsafe, afraid of failure and ridicule, they give into their innate tendency
towards mediocrity and conformity, even to the point of sabotaging their dreams
for the sake of comfort and safety. However, if they deliberately settle on
being less than they are capable of being, they will be deeply unhappy for the
rest of their lives.
“We both crave and fear becoming truly ourselves.” I
read recently that obesity is growing in our culture, but narcissism is grower
even faster.
Narcissism is the term used to describe excessive
vanity and self-centeredness. The condition was named after a mythological
Greek youth named Narcissus who became infatuated with his own reflection in a
lake. He did not realize at first that it was his own reflection, but when he
did, he died out of grief for having fallen in love with himself.
Narcissistic personalities are characterized by
unwarranted feelings of self-importance. They expect to be recognized as
superior and special, without necessarily demonstrating superior
accomplishments. They exhibit a sense of entitlement, demonstrate grandiosity
in their beliefs and behaviors and display a strong need for admiration which
might explain a rise in bullying among the young.
Some believe that our culture’s present narcissism
epidemic, the fixation on indulging and exalting oneself, can be traced to the
heyday of the self-esteem movement that baby boomer parents, teachers and media
gurus promoted several years ago. Rather than stoking healthy self-confidence,
as was their intent, such messages may be responsible for a decline in the work
ethic and a growth in feelings of entitlement and inflated egos.
When narcissistic people talk about church attendance,
they usually say things like “I don’t go because I don’t get anything out of
it!” “I, I, I!” When they say things like that, they put themselves in the
center of the picture. It’s all about them! Church attendance is really about
giving, not getting. We go to Church to give God worship and praise! We go to
learn to give and serve others!
When narcissistic people talk about marriage, they
talk about what it will do for them. They are like that woman in an old
Guinness Book of Records with the most marriages. When she was asked about it,
she said, “All I ever wanted was someone to love me!” No wonder she failed at
it so many times. People who marry successfully get married to be love-givers,
not love-getters! As Jesus said, “It is in giving that one receives!” Receiving
is not a goal, but a by-product, of the marriage or ordination commitment. As
the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “There are two sacraments directed
toward the salvation of others: Holy Orders and Matrimony. Just as priests are
not ordained for their own benefit, but for the benefit of those they serve,
married people marry for the benefit of their spouses and their children.”
When narcissistic diocesan priests talk, they tend to
focus on what the Church owes them, focus on the imagined privileges other
priests have that they don’t have and even act out to stand out. They demand to
be treated as special, even without demonstrating any special qualities.
When narcissistic young people talk about what to do
with their lives, they usually ask themselves “what do I want to do or what do
I want to be” that will make me happy? The real question is not what do we
want to do, but what is God calling us to do and be” that will lead us
to happiness? Jesus was right, “Those
who seek to save their lives will lose them, while those who seek to give their
lives away, will save them.” Albert
Schweitzer was right when he said, and narcissistic people will never get it, “The
only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and
found out how to serve.”
Pope Francis talks a lot about a “self-referential
church,” in other words a narcissistic church. He says that when the Church
does not look beyond itself, when it is always focused on itself, it gets sick.
The Church is the moon and Christ is the sun. The Church exists to reflect the
light of Christ to the world, not to live within herself, of herself and for
herself.
The other extreme to narcissism is self-deprecation or
the minimization and devaluation of oneself. Humility is about accepting the
truth about who we are, without exaggerating it or minimizing it. “Humility”
comes from the Latin “humus,” meaning “earth.” “Humility” means “grounded.” A
truly “humble” person, truly in touch with his strengths and weaknesses,
neither inflates his worth nor devalues it. Humility is ultimately about truth.
It is this truth that Jesus spent his ministry trying
to teach. He taught it to the religious leaders of his day who were so arrogant
and self-inflated that they started out talking about God and ended up thinking
they were gods. He taught it to the marginalized of his day who were so beaten
down that they did not recognize their own goodness and the image of God within
themselves. All this is summarized so
well in the Magnificat when Mary talked about the “mighty being pulled from
their thrones and the lowly being lifted up from their dunghills.”
God has entrusted gifts to us to be used! When we do
not use our gifts, even deny we have them, we neither serve God nor the people
we are called to serve. Jesus told us that we are the light of the world, our
light is not to be hidden, but shared with the world. When they are shared, the credit is not to be
absorbed by us as if we were the source of that light, but that credit is to be
reflected back to God. Seeing our light, people are to give God the glory and praise.
This is why
I love that little sawed-off guy in the gospels, named Zacchaeus! He wanted to
get a glimpse of Jesus coming down the road, but he was too short to see above
the crowd! He could have said, "Oh, well, maybe next time," but he
didn't. He found an alternative. We are told that he "ran ahead" and
"climbed a sycamore tree"
alongside the road where Jesus would be passing by. Because of his ingenuity and determination,
Zacchaeus not only got to see Jesus, but
because Jesus was able to see Zacchaeus in the tree and because Jesus admired
his determination, Jesus invited himself to Zacchaeus' house for dinner!
”Nothing stings like the realization of a missed
opportunity, but what stings even more is the realization of a refused calling.
In that arena, the prophet Jonah is a patron saint.
Jonah
was called to preach to the people of Ninevah.
He considered himself a poor preacher on one hand and the Ninevites not
worth saving on the other. To get away from his unwelcomed call, he went down
to the docks and bought a ticket on the next ship sailing in the opposite
direction from Ninevah. He thought he could outrun God!
In
his version of a get-away-car, Jonah is pictured going to sleep in the bottom
of his boat while a storm raged, a symbol today of “denial.” The psychologist
Abraham Maslow calls such spiritual and emotional truancy the Jonah Complex:
“The evasion of one’s own growth, the setting of low levels of aspiration, the
fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling,
pseudo-stupidity, mock humility.”
We
are afraid of failure and success. A
calling makes us wonder if we are good enough, smart enough, disciplined
enough, educated enough, patient enough, and inspired enough. We manage our
fear by “going to sleep,” “settling for too little” and “self-sabotage.”
The
truth is this: all of us have answered “yes” in some areas and “no” in others.
We both crave and fear becoming who we are called to be!
There
is also the underlying fear of being seen by others as self-centered, arrogant,
and living a life’s that extraordinary and hence unacceptable. Here we reserve
a special kind of ridicule and resentment against those who are more successful
or talented than the majority. We often punish our best talent and coddle
mediocrity. There is a lot of pressure to conform, as mediocrity is granted
more acceptance while giftedness often means being differentiated to the point
of isolation, and standing out can mean getting shot down more easily because
the target is clearer that way. It is understandable why many people would
prefer succumbing to a simple life meeting their basic needs, and actually
being rewarded by the institution for it, instead of battling it out in the
bloody road towards self-actualization.
Thomas
Merton was right, “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”
Sometimes, under mock humility, we set
low aims for ourselves and call it virtue. The possibility of becoming
remarkable shoots a thunderbolt of fear into many unremarkable people. As the Confiteor says, maybe our biggest sin
is not what we do, but what we fail to do! Michelangelo put it this way. “The
greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it,
but that it is too low and we reach it.”