***This is a series of posts based on writing I did on personal retreat in October 2009. Read earlier posts in the series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |Part 5|Part 6|Part 7***
Like every other uncomfortable experience, I was blind to the future benefits while I was going through it.
It was while I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago – or maybe I should call it “time off” instead. The word “vacation” fills the mind with thoughts of traveling somewhere (preferably exotic) to engage in hedonism restrained only by the morals we hold absolute. Vacation is when you go somewhere and do something away from home. I did neither. Instead, I stayed home and faced myself.
You see, on vacation you don’t really have a lot of time for self-examination. You don’t have time to look at who you are and decide whether or not you’re OK and if anything needs to change. On vacation you’re completely preoccupied with “This is who I would like to be and where I would like to be all the time.” And that person, the one living in the most fantastic of fantasy lands – you’re kissing his hindquarters, doing whatever pleases him, singing his praises, showing him with your love.
In reality, all of this just puts you further behind on developing the real self, the one you need to live with the other 51 weeks of the year. The you that has to get the kids off to school every day, the you that needs the strength to deal with the day, the you that has to put the kids to bed at night.
This real you, as you well know, is often impatient, tired, and raises his voice more frequently than he should. This is the you that suffers while on vacation, but the suffering is buried under pleasure.
We think that vacation is escaping this for a week or two of reprieve before we step back into the fray, but the book of that life remains exactly as you left it, bookmark in place.
This time of facing myself – this not taking a vacation – it was unplanned. I had responsibilities and no available funds to make them go away as I have so often done in the past.
We are so good at avoiding self-development, and our main strategy of avoidance is self-indulgence. We believe that we need “me time” – a day at the spa, a day at the movies, or a day of amusement – in order to relieve the self of its mundane existence. We should instead be tending to the real self rather than running off with the vacation self for a romantic getaway. But the real self is left behind, or at best is brought along as a spectator.
And so in the absence of the distractions to which I was accustomed during my time off, I began to look at the real self. More accurately, I spent some time looking at who I was and what I was on my way to becoming, and the rest of the time was spent on the aggressive confrontation that followed. My real self came knocking at the door, and when I answered, when I opened the door, I saw someone who was malnourished, underweight, and had obviously been homeless for a while.
“There is no greater disaster in spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality,” Merton says in Thoughts in Solitude, “for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must therefore die.”
Too dramatic a picture, you say? It seems so in the afterthought but the power of the present has its purpose.
Just like I know that my body needs exercise and my soul needs God, I know my spirit needs times of silence in order to maintain its health. It needs these times of silence for self-examination, and to allow the Holy Spirit to ask it questions about where it’s been lately and what kind of crazy things its had to do to survive.
More often than not, when it is asked these questions, my soul points the Holy Spirit my way and says “It’s his fault” – and he’s always right.
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