Week 7 Sunday
Week 7 Sunday
When We Become God
Mark 8:34; Romans 15:1; 1 Corinthians 10:24; 2 Corinthians 5:15
We have looked at the first of the fifteen major enemies of healthy, rhythmical human living. We come now to the second: self-centeredness.
This follows from the first as fruit from root. When God is no longer the center, then we become the center; we become God. Deuteronomy 4:25 (Moffatt) has the phrase “if you lose your freshness in the land and deprave yourselves by carving an idol.” Note that when the freshness of God’s presence is gone and with it the freshness of life itself, then the result is that we “deprave ourselves” by carving an idol; and that idol is usually just ourselves. Aldous Huxley speaks of “an accelerating movement away from monotheism towards tribal idolatry.”* And when “tribal idolatry” is not state or race or class—which are the self writ large—then it is just the personal self. When we lose God, then we become God.
But this centering on ourselves works badly; in fact, it works havoc to the very self upon which we center. On the face of it, it would seem that if we turn to and center on ourselves, we should grow under that cultivation. The very opposite takes place. Every self-centered person is self-disrupted, even if one centers on self for religious motives. Whether you center on yourself for artistic, religious, financial, or purely selfish reasons, the result is the same; the self goes to pieces.
Those who center on themselves and have their way, don’t like their way; they do as they like, and then don’t like what they do; they express themselves, and then find the self that is expressed souring on their hands. And this disruption and souring doesn’t stop merely with the soul; it extends straight out into the nerves and tissues and poisons them with both functional and structural disease. Apparently, these people are running against a fundamental law of life, one deeply imbedded in the constitution of things. More people are being broken by that law than by any other single thing in life. Just what is it?
My Lord God, I would find adjustment to life. But when I am adjusted only to myself, I am not adjusted to life. Then teach me—oh, teach me this lesson; for if I miss it, I miss life itself. But I want to live fully, abundantly, overflowingly. Teach me how. Amen.
*An Encyclopaedia of Pacifism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937), 62.
Week 7 Monday
The Self-centered and the Self-disrupted
Romans 12:3, 10, 16; 13:9-10; James 2:8-9
The law upon which individuals and groups and nations break themselves when they become egocentric is this: “All who want to save their lives will lose them” (Matt. 16:25 CEB). Concentrate yourself on yourself, and that self will go to pieces, not only spiritually but also mentally and physically.
The reason for this is obvious. The three driving urges or instincts within us are self, sex, and the herd, or social instincts. The self instinct is obviously self-regarding; the herd instinct is other-regarding; the sex instinct is partly self-regarding and partly other-regarding. So there are just two driving instincts: the egoistic and the altruistic, the self-regarding and the other-regarding. Both of these must be fulfilled, and in the proper proportion, or life will be frustrated and unhappy.
There are those who think that Christianity teaches that they must love others but not themselves. This is a mistake. On the one hand, Christianity teaches self-love: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). If you do not love yourself, you will not develop yourself. So all attempts to eliminate the self end in hypocrisy and disaster. If you put yourself out of the door, it will come back through the window, probably in disguise. Frankly and honestly, you must love yourself—not as a master, but as a servant—for the self is a glorious servant, but a gruesome master. Those who love others and not themselves, allowing others to sap the life out of them, end in disaster.
On the other hand, if one organizes life around self and becomes self-centered, then, as sure as fate, disaster overtakes that self. Does God pronounce judgment from heaven upon that life? No; by the very inherent laws within one the judgment takes place. The person is at war within. Altruistic instinct is frustrated and undeveloped; hence the person is dissatisfied and unhappy, and probably doesn’t know what is the matter. The malady is simple; the person is a house divided against itself, and hence cannot stand. Every self-centered person is trying the impossible: to live against the self.
O God, my Lord, I see that you have wrought your laws into the texture of my being. How foolish for me to run against those laws and think I can get away with my folly! For I cannot get away with myself. Forgive me the folly of warring within myself, and hence with you. Amen.
Week 7 Tuesday
Living in a State of Self-reference
Matthew 25:24-25; 1 Timothy 6:6-10; 2 Timothy 4:10
All self-centered persons, when self-frustration begins to set in, will probably turn toward themselves in self-pity. They will feel that life is hard on them. They will blame everything except themselves. A case in point: A brilliant woman who had a nervous breakdown for no other reason than that she lived in a state of constant self-reference, mulled over herself in self-pity. Those who tried to change her attitudes were persecuting her. Her life was all jammed up, and the one key log in the jam was self-centeredness. Had she pulled that log out—had she changed her center from herself to God—the whole inner clogged-up condition would have broken loose, and she would have been cleansed and released. She could not say the words “I am sorry.” It was all self-defense. The nearest she came to saying “I am sorry” was when she said, “Yes, I am sorry, sorry that I did not take better care of my health.” The repentance still had a self-reference to it. She is clogged up still, and will be until that key log is pulled out. She has tied the hands of both God and other people; they are powerless to help her.
Such a self-centered person usually draws disease to the self as a magnet draws iron filings to itself. The underprivileged person has my sympathy and will have my endeavor to gain equality of opportunity. But the overprivileged person in our civilization is in far greater danger than the underprivileged. They are the disrupted souls and bodies of our civilization. I know a girl who has had thrown into her lap everything that civilization can offer: money, opportunity, etc. But since she is self-centered, she can enjoy none of them. Every sickness that comes into her neighborhood visits her. She draws sickness and melancholy to herself like a magnet; for that is the end of the egocentric. They start out to draw life to themselves—its joys, its thrills—and all they succeed in drawing to themselves are sadness and disillusionment and sickness: spiritual, mental, and physical.
O God, I see I cannot center on myself without that self going to rack and ruin. I would present this self of mine to you. Lift me out of myself into yourself, that there I may find my freedom and myself. For your will is my home. Amen.
Week 7 Wednesday
Punishment of Egocentricity Is Inherent
Luke 1:37; Ephesians 3:16-20; Colossians 1:29
Egocentrics are their own punishment. Budd Schulberg’s narrator in What Makes Sammy Run? after tracing Sammy’s egocentric but apparently successful life, sums up this: Unconsciously, I had been . . . hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him. And now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off, but a process, a disease . . . ; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. . . .You can’t have your brothers and eat them too. You’re alone, pal, all alone. That’s the way you wanted it, that’s the way you learned it. . . . All alone in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, . . . till death parts you from your only friend, your worst enemy, yourself.”*
In the play Peer Gynt, the hero, committed to the faith that he would “be myself,” visits the asylum where, he assumes, one is “outside oneself.” The director corrects him:
It’s here, sir, that one is oneself with a vengeance; / Oneself, and nothing whatever besides. / We go, full sail, as our very selfs.
Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self, / In the self-fermentation he dives to the bottom,— / With the self-bung he seals it hermetically, and seasons the staves in the well of self.
No one has tears for the other’s woes; / No one has mind for the other’s ideas.**
There is one way out of that hell of egocentricity. Dr. Fritz Kunkel says, “All mistakes, weaknesses and aberrations can be traced back to man’s egocentricity. Accordingly, the fundamental problem of self-education may be described as the problem of overcoming one’s own egocentricity.”*** How do you overcome your egocentricity? By a deliberate act of self-surrender, a willingness to die to this petty self in order that a larger self might live. An able woman, speaking before a group of club women, wept. Afterward, she was so chagrined that she could do such a thing, she wrote to each one asking her not to mention it. But that breakdown of self was the best thing that ever happened to her. It led to her consciously offering that petty self to God—to her conversion. Tears did it!
Dear Lord, you are leading me out of my petty self to your ample self. I thank you that I have a door out of myself into you. I would die into you—and thus live now and forever. Amen.
* Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (New York: Random House, 1941), 275.
** Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), act 4, scene 13.
*** Fritz Kunkel, God Helps Those . . . (New York: Ives Washburn, 1931), 135.
Week 7 Thursday
Out of Sorts with Ourselves and Others
Isaiah 65:6-7; James 4:2-3; Revelation 22:11
Egocentrics cannot get along with themselves or with other people. They shut themselves up within themselves, and, by that very fact, shut themselves off from others—except in blame. Egocentrics usually lay all their troubles on other people or the surroundings. If only other people or the surroundings were all right, the egocentric would be all right. They will do everything except face the source of trouble: themselves. The source of bad temper with others is the fact that they are out of sorts with themselves.
During the Civil War, a young man from the South, visiting a hospital in Washington where his brother lay wounded, came out of his brother’s room in a hurry and ran straight into Lincoln. Not knowing who he was, he said bitterly, “Can’t you get out of the way of a young gentleman?”
To which Lincoln, without disclosing his identity, replied, “Young man, what’s troubling you on the inside?” He knew by a swift insight that something was troubling him on the inside or he would not be so out of sorts with everybody else.
Someone put it this way: “Do you want to find out a man’s weak points? Note the failings he has the quickest eye for in others.” Usually he will point out what’s wrong in others, or in his surroundings, as mental compensation for what is wrong in himself.
That vicious circle must be broken. How? Either through a deliberate breaking by self-surrender into a larger center of life or by an act of love sweeping one off center to another. Dr. William Sadler, an outstanding psychiatrist, tells of a child of eight who was incorrigible; nothing was right. She had heard her mother say that she was “an unwanted child.”
“Nobody loves me,” the child said bitterly. And soon nobody did!
Dr. Sadler heard her complaint and said: “Why, it isn’t true. I love you. I really do like you.” The child came over and sat on his knee and kissed him, with tears streaming down her cheeks. She went back to her mother, made up, and was a different girl in school. Someone broke the vicious circle of egocentricity by a love that swept her to a new center.
O God, you will have to do something like that act of love. Where my deliberate, calculated self—dedication to another center—will not break the vicious cycle of my egocentricity, sweep me to a new center by your invading love. For I must be loosed, be free. Amen.
Week 7 Friday
The Steps Down
Matthew 7:1-5; 1 John 3:17-21
The most penetrating story of the results of egocentricity is seen in Judas. Judas began high, a loyal disciple. But . . .
First: He thought one could give too much to Jesus (see John 12:5). He objected to the woman’s lavish gift. His objection was a sign of an inward holding back.
Second: “What will you give me?” (Matt. 26:15). Note, he was the center: “give me.” That request was the first step down for the prodigal son: “Give me.” When anyone begins to say, “Give me,” he or she is on the way down.
Third: “He sought opportunity to betray him” (Matt. 26:16). He tried to arrange his world so that it would not fall to pieces.
Fourth: But that world did fall to pieces. Said Jesus, “ ‘One who has dipped his hand into the same dish as myself is going to betray me.” . . . Then Judas . . . said, “Surely it is not me, rabbi?’ . . . [Jesus] said to him ‘Is it not?’ ” (Matt. 26:23-25 Moffatt). The heart of things began to be revealed; his world collapsed.
Fifth (Matt. 27:3-5 Moffatt): “Then Judas . . . saw”—saw his world beginning to tumble to pieces—and (a) he “repented,” but in the wrong direction. In useless regret, he turned to the high priest and elders, to them instead of to Jesus. “He brought back”—he tried to steady his tottering world by a halfway restitution. He brought back the money, but retained himself. The authorities respond, “What does that matter to us?” Judas finds his world, built up so securely, untrustworthy. His companions let him down. Sin has no cohesion in it. Sin doesn’t care. He “flung down”—the money, the thing that seemed to matter so much in the beginning. The precious thing turned to ashes. Judas “went off”—off from opportunity, from life, from Christ. Sin is centrifugal. He “hanged himself”—the self that was so demanding and so central in the beginning, saying “give me,” became impossible to live with. So he hanged the self that started him down.
Complete collapse will be the end of an egocentric self.
My Lord, I see that this imperious, demanding self, like the camel’s nose inside the tent, will soon put me out of this earthly habitation. I shall soon not be able to live with it—unless I give it back to you for cleansing, for adjustment, for a new basis of living. I do. Amen.
Week 7 Saturday
Egocentricity in Religion
Matthew 16:15; 26:16, 23, 25; 27:3, 5; John 12:5
Egocentricity may be very religious, occupied with an attempt to save one’s soul or the souls of others. But it will still be egocentric, and, as such, destructive.
A very religious woman was suffering from arthritis. It was discovered that her anxiety to dominate her family, even for their own good, was at the basis of this arthritis. She surrendered this anxiety to God, ceased to desire to dominate the family (even though it was for their supposed good), and both her spiritual life and her physical life cleared up—the arthritis disappeared.
A businessman was in the hands of a psychoanalyst. Over a period of five years he spent sixty thousand dollars having himself picked to pieces. He submitted to the psychoanalyst over a thousand dreams for deciphering—often five or six a night. He kept a pad and paper handy to note them down when these dreams awakened him. At the end of five years, the man was thoroughly disrupted and picked to pieces. The psychoanalyst didn’t know how to put him together again on a new basis. Self-knowledge was not healing. It straightened him out here and there, but could not heal the central hurt: a disrupted self. He saw all this self-probing was ending in futility, so he gave up the last prop upon which he leaned: the analyst. As he left the office, a sense of infinite sadness and loneliness came over him; his last prop gone and nowhere to turn.
Suddenly, a Voice seemed to say, “Look this way.” It was the Voice of Christ saying, “Look away from yourself, your misery, your fear, and your failures! Look to Me.” The Voice came like a breath of health into the fetid atmosphere of self-concentration. He looked away from himself to Christ. That look was followed by a lift that took him out of himself, freed him from himself. Today, with an entirely new lease on life, he is healthy, harmonious, and useful.
You, Living Christ, I look to you. To whom else can I go? For you have the words of eternal life, not only in the hereafter but in the here and now. And so I look to you with eyes of faith; and I take from you the power, the release, the victory I so deeply need. And I take it now. Amen.