Daily Reflection Friday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Today we conclude the very eventful eighth chapter of Mark’s gospel account. Our passage today follows immediately on the heels of Peter’s profession of faith we heard yesterday. There, for the first time in Mark, Jesus plainly tells his Apostles what awaits him in Jerusalem, much to the horror of Simon Peter (“God forbid this!” he tells Jesus in the much fuller account of these things found in Matthew 16) who Jesus must then rebuke (“Get behind me Satan!”). Then the Lord turns to the crowd and the rest of his disciples and delivers his great teaching of the cross, telling all that if they desire to follow him, “Let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” This is then followed by the famous teaching, that “those who lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will save it.” Finally, Jesus asks, “What does it prophet a person to gain the whole world and lose their life?” (Luke tells this as “lose your soul.” Tradition has it that St. Ignatius Loyola quoted this passage to the young Francis Xavier when they were in school together, which led to Francis’ conversion.)
 
Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me, and lose yourself and you will find yourself. What do these teachings of Jesus, found in all three Synoptic gospel accounts, mean for us? Many hear these as somewhat dire. Is Jesus asking us to be willing to undergo the fate he did, many ask. And what does it mean to lose one’s self? First of all, it is not his cross that Jesus urges us to take up, but our own. More on that later, for the operative word here is “self.” Deny your self; lose your self. There is the central mystery here, the “self.”
 
The concept of the self is a very ancient one but also a very mysterious one. Socrates in ancient Greece famously declared, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Sigmund Freud hypothesized that the self is actually three interacting areas of the psyche (the mind) that he called the ego (the self we think we know), the super-ego and the ID (which are basically completely hidden from our consciousness). The self has been the constant and continuing subject of philosophy, theology, and psychology. Throughout it all, there has never been agreement as to what the self actually is. One thing that can be agreed upon by many is that our self, our consciousness of ourselves as a living, thinking person, an individual if you will, is the one thing that we are absolutely sure of and the one thing we often feel we know best. As difficult as it may be to truly “know thyself,” it seems far more difficult to truly know another.
 
One idea, however, that I very much agree with is that the self is actually la grande illusion, the great illusion. We think we are lone beings forever sealed and separated within this thing called the self that no one else is privy to unless we allow it, which we find so difficult. We think we are autonomous and free and that our self-will is absolute. What Jesus is telling us here, I feel, is that that is merely an appearance, only a perception we use to deal with the world. The deep unseen reality is that we are all one.
 
It is this self, with all its fears and desires, its prejudices and pride, its folly in believing that it really knows anything, and finally its fierce efforts to protect itself and project itself, that causes all our woes and miseries. If we would abandon this self to God who would then reveal to us our true selves, our whole lives would be transformed. Then we would be enabled, empowered, to accept our cross, the one given in love to us by God that we so fear but that would set us free. It is to simply accept everything and everyone as somehow God’s great gift to us. To accept it without asking questions or demanding answers but in faith and trust that God is somehow deep within it all if we only had the eyes to see. That at the depth of everything is God’s infinite love for us. God will show us how if we but let him, if we but believe in and seek God’s love for us.
 
I hope you won’t mind, at the end of this long reflection, my throwing in a little poem I wrote last year that has these things as its theme.
 
                                     
 
 Opening a Box
 
You can open a locked box without detection
But only if it is a human box with a human lock,
A simple clasp held in place by three small screws of human culpability,
Fear, pride and the will to power
That held it in place throughout many a calamity,
Many a storm of such turbulence
As to blow everything else but it away.
Yet only three small screws hold it there
Weathering the calls from safer harbors,
Enduring the allure of promise and testimony.
You simply remove those screws,
Look fully inside and replace them exactly as they were.
The owner, your self, will never know;
It’s best to leave that one in ignorance.
But you will, and you will remember what you found
In that box secured by those three very human screws.
For in that box you will find the person you never knew,
The one you have been denying all this time,
The one you have always so resisted meeting
Like some lost brother you fear will disappoint you;
Your true self lost so long ago among the brambles
You once put there for protection.
The only self that God so loves and desires
And the only one who can truly, finally love back.