Facing the enemy

Conversion, the movement toward the Lord, is a process of disenchantment with the ego, recognizing how truly afraid and poor it is. The only way people can ever be freed from their fears is to be freed from themselves. There is almost a complete correlation between the amount of fear in our lives and the amount of attachment we have to ourselves. The person who is beyond fear has given up the need to control or possess. That one says, I am who I am in God's eyes - nothing more, nothing less. I don't need to impress you because I am who I am, and not who you think I am - or who I think I am.

That's what the Pauline theology of Baptism is saying: You have died, you're dead (Romans 6:3-5). In Christ you don't need the false self. You have faced the enemy once and for all and, guess what? It's you!

Richard Rohr, from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

There is in solitude a kind of death, too. Our "attachment to ourselves" isn't usually so much that, as an attachment to our reflection in the eyes of others. We need to experience approval, affection, being needed. Even being feared or hated is better than nothing, as we see tragically in the lives of violent people.

And yet solitude is nothing. There is no reflection. No approval, no acceptance, from others or from ourselves. There is only God, and to begin with, he isn't playing. God will not give us what we want, what we are so sure we need. That would only distract us from what he does have to give us, which is the gift of ourselves as we truly are. Only when we have faced that face in the mirror, those shocking and naked needs that are so much of us, those entirely real demons that lurk unnoticed at our shoulders as we go about our daily lives, will we be in any fit state to meet God.

In the BBC2 mini-series 'Extreme Pilgrim' which I wrote about the other day, Father Lazarus is speaking to Peter Owen-Jones, the Anglican priest who is the eponymous pilgrim, before his solitary retreat in the mountain cave; he asks, "I hope you don't mind, but it is necessary to ask this: how conscious are you of your sin?" Peter replies, "Very!" Lazarus: "Good! Only so will you have any benefit from three weeks on the mountain."

God can do nothing with us till we see ourselves as we actually are; only then can we receive the mercy that is Christ.