“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind.” (Buddha)
Recently I spent some time in New Orleans at a conference. I was presenting and didn’t feel much need to go more sessions than I was interested in. The conference isn’t in my particular field either so I didn’t have a lot of friends there to hang out there with. This gave me a lot of time to wander the streets of New Orleans. As I wandered the streets of New Orleans aimlessly enjoying the energetic culture while saddened by the underlying grief, I found myself enjoying the opportunity to roam the streets of a new city. I was able to take in its culture, eat its food, and listen to its music. However, I realized that despite the fact that over the past couple of years I have had the opportunity to visit cities across the country speaking as an expert in my field, hiking the mountains with Shannon for our anniversary last summer has been the best vacation I have had in years. This acceptance of my contemplative paradigm has intersected with personal readings of Thomas Merton, John Caputo, and Peter Rollins. In each of these books I am exploring the necessary rejection of the church (and even Christ himself) to truly embrace either. The argument being that it is in rejecting Christ that we are demonstrating deeper commitment to him. In fact, it is the rejection of the church and my faith that is the deep expression of my love for each. These two compelling reflections (my contemplative personality and my postmodern deconstruction of the institution and faith) have left me wondering who I am. The moving target of self actualization is grounded in specific certainties, but must be open to the evolving development and philosophical realities exasperated by particular life experiences.
Once home I contemplated my core values, aligned them with my basic strengths, explored my evolving theology, and balanced each of these with my undeniable personality. Yet I still didn’t know who I was. So I approached it a little more rationally by pulling out my vita and looked at how I have defined myself on paper and surveyed my education and professional experiences. Still not sure. So then I took a relational approach and looked at those in my life who I love and who love me. Even though these help shape me, I still have little understanding of who I am. It is then that I realized that the battle that rages within has little to do with who I actually am, but who I wish I was. There is incongruence between my real and my ideal self. Each of these things help shape the real me, but I have an ideal version of who I wish I were that causes so much frustration. The older I get the more I become frustrated. The more people in my life that I want to be that person for the more frustrated I become. The clearer idea I have about the things that I am passionate about the more frustrated I become. So as an analytical person I begin to map out this frustration and realize that not only does my real and ideal self not match, but both my real and ideal self are always changing.
Merton tells us that contemplatives are drawn into the darkness not to seek God, but by incongruence of this life. However, it is in the darkness that contemplatives find God, possibly knowing the whole time that it wouldn’t be until they get there, the depths of their own thoughts that they would find the only thing that they seek. The following posts will likely all sound incomplete and seem to have little direction. This is because I am inviting you into my darkness. Not a darkness of depression, but a darkness of unknowing: a darkness of not knowing how to merge my real and ideal, my past and present, my present and future, the ontological and the narrative.
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