The Shock of Self-Recognition
THE SHOCK OF SELF-RECOGNITION
Most of us are rather pleased when we catch sight of ourselves (provided the sight is sufficiently dim or distant) in the reflection of a store window. It is always amusing to watch people’s expressions and postures change, perhaps ever so slightly, for the better as they look at their images. We all want the reflected image to match the image we hold in our minds (e.g., a rugged, casual slouch goes well with a Marlboro Country type; an erect distinguished carriage befits a man of command and responsibility). We glimpse ourselves in a moment of lapse, and quickly try to correct the discrepancies.
A close-up is something else altogether. Sometimes it’s more than we can stand. The shock of recognition makes us recoil. “Don’t tell me that’s my voice!” (on the tape recorder); “Do I really look that old?” (as this photograph cruelly shows). For me it is a horrifyingly painful experience to have to stand before a three-way mirror, in strong light, in a department store fitting room. (“These lights—these mirrors—they distort, surely!” I tell myself.) I have seen Latin American Indians whoop with laughter upon first seeing themselves on a movie screen, but I have never seen them indignant, as “civilized” people often seem to be. Perhaps it is that an Indian has not occupied himself very much with trying to be what he is not.
What is it that makes us preen, recoil, laugh? It must be the degree of incongruity between what we thought we were and what we actually saw.
People’s standards, of course, differ. Usually, in things that do not matter, we set them impossibly high and thus guarantee for ourselves a life of discontent. In things that matter we set them too low and are easily pleased with ourselves. (My daughter came home from the seventh grade one day elated. “Missed the honor roll by two C’s!” she cried, waving her report card happily.) Frequently we judge by standards that are irrelevant to the thing in question. You have to know what a thing is for, first of all, before you can judge it. Take a can opener—how can I know whether it’s any good unless I know that it was made for opening cans?
Or a church. What is it for? Recently the one I belong to held a series of neighborhood coffee meetings for the purpose of finding out what the parishioners thought about what the church was doing, was not doing, and ought to be doing. The results were mailed to us last week. Eighty people participated and came up with 105 “concerns and recommendations.” These revealed considerable confusion as to what the church is meant to be about. “Should have hockey and basketball teams.” “There is too much reference to the Bible in sermons.” “The ushers should stop hunching at the doors of the church and seek out unfamiliar faces.” “The rear parking lot is messy.” “A reexamination of spiritual goals should be carried out.” I was glad there were a few like that last one. The range of our congregational sins was pretty well covered (we didn’t get into the mire of our personal ones), and as I read them over I thought, “If we just managed to straighten out these one hundred and five things we’d have—what? Well, something, I suppose. But not a perfect church. Not by a long shot. If by our poor standards [some of them obviously applicable to things other than churches] we picked out over a hundred flaws, how many were visible to God, ‘to whose all-searching sight the darkness shineth as the light’?”
There are times when it is with a kind of relief that we come upon the truth. A man passing a church one day paused to see if he could catch what it was the people were mumbling in unison. He moved inside and heard these words: “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.”
Hmm, thought the man, they sound like my kind of people.
“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”
This is the church for me, he decided. (I don’t suppose a basketball team or a blacktopped parking lot would have persuaded him.)
“Put up a complaint box and you’ll get complaints,” my husband used to say. There is something to be said for airing one’s grievances, and there is a great deal to be said for not airing them, but one thing at least seems good to me—that we be overwhelmed, now and then, with our sins and failures.
We need to sit down and take stock. We need mirrors and neighborhood coffees and complaint boxes, but our first reaction may be despair. Our second, “Just who does so-and-so think he is, criticizing the church when he never even comes to church?” And we find ourselves back where we started, setting our own standards, judging irrelevantly and falsely, excusing ourselves, condemning an institution for not being what it was never meant to be, and so on.
The church, thank God, has provided for us. There is Lent. It is a time to stop and remember. All year we have had the chance in the regular communion service to remember the death and passion of the Lord Jesus, and this once during the year we are asked, for a period of six weeks, to recall ourselves, to repent, to submit to special disciplines in order that we may understand the meaning of the Resurrection.
We are indeed “miserable offenders.” We have done and left undone. We are foolish and weak and blind and self-willed and men of little faith. We run here, we run there, we form committees and attend meetings and attack the Church and its organization and its isolation and its useless machinery and its irrelevance and ineffectiveness. But all the time it stands there, holding the cross, telling us that there is forgiveness, that we have not been left to ourselves, that no matter how shocking the image that we finally see of ourselves in the light of God’s truth, God himself has done something about it all.
“He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities.” For the very things we’ve been discussing. For the things that make us moan and groan and ask, “What’s the use?”
And so Lent, simply because it is another reminder of him who calls us to forgiveness and refreshment, makes me glad.