Comment Magazine recently published an essay titled A Spirituality of Privacy. You can find it here. Below are a few lines from the essay that I found particularly meaningful.
One of the great hindrances of love is found, as Merton observed, in our false self. If our true self is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3), our false self is a constructed identity that in some way tries to play God. One of the ways this happens is by locating the problems of the world “out there.”
It is possible to pray in such a way that we are never confronted with our false self, which is why contemplative prayer is so necessary. In contemplative prayer we entrust ourselves to God, giving the Holy Spirit space to reveal the inconsistencies within, the intense imaginary conversations stored in our minds, and sins we need forgiveness from—all important for loving well. It’s hard to love others well when the problems are always outside us.
But until we give ourselves to the hard, slow work of confronting our own demons, we will project our demons back into the world and fail to see that some demons in the world are reflections of ourselves. One of the reasons contemplative prayer is socially subversive is that it reveals our personal contradictions. And when we are able to reject illusions of ourselves, we can live with greater discernment as we engage the world.
I hope you’ll give the entire essay a read.
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