“Do or do not, there is no try, Young Skywalker.”
I love Yoda. I have a rather large rubber hand puppet of Yoda perched on the sill looking out of my office window at home. When you pull into my driveway you can look up and see Yoda peering down at you.
I see this “not trying” as essential to the spiritual life. The more we try to live the holy life, the more we live in the false self. In order to live into the true self and live in God, we have to let go of control. I’ve been in dialogue with a spiritual director friend of mine over my blog entries. In her last email she wrote, “But, as with most everything else, the more we focus on whether we are exhibiting the true or false self the more likely it may be that we end up in the false self – because we are still trying to control who we are, and so we are still inventing ourselves.”
We are not to reinvent ourselves. It is God who makes us a new creation. Our job is simply to die. Leave the resurrecting up to God. But dying is hard, both literally and spiritually. We cling to the old life with every ounce of strength we can muster. We do that even when the old life is sick and diseased.
In “Eat, Love, Pray” (the yoga part of the title of this entry) Gilbert reflects on how hard it was to die to the inner life going on in her head. She would beat herself up for being such a fiasco in life, “What’s wrong with me?” “How come I screw up all my relationships?” “Why am I such a failure?” What God showed her in the Ashram was that she had to stop “doing” and just drop her grip on the universe. “Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. ..Why don’t you let it be.” Do or not do – there is not try.
The last piece comes from Rohr’s talk on False Self/True Self. Merton teaches that before the abiding Presence of God made possible through contemplative prayer can be apparent to us, God addresses the self-seeking ego or “false” self. I n dealing with the false self, God transforms us. The “ego” is all about me. In letting go of “me” I can fully embrace God.
I find myself drawing closer and closer to God by simply dropping my grip on the Universe. Its an interesting journey and not without discomfort. But I’m also finding a deeper and more abiding peace that comes with letting God be God.
The author, Rev. Richard “Rick” Kautz, is an Episcopal priest and rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond Indiana
This strikes me as being related to the recent post about discernment. How do I know what is real and true? Can good be bad and bad be good? For example, we become more spiritually-aware and then fall into the trap of noting how spiritual we are and how maybe we think we are more spiritual than the next guy. This is ego, of course — not the Holy Spirit.
There is a common thread among all the great religions about the false self. The Buddhists say that you find your true essence not through doing, but by being more and more and more. St. Paul talks about how we have to die to live in Christ. St. Francis’ prayer includes:
“It is by self-forgetting that we find.
“It is by dying that we awaken to eternal life.”
I agree, one cannot say to another, “My enlightenment is better than your enlightenment.” We have been placed on the Oblates path by God and it is not by accident that any of us come to the abbey. God has a design and we must all trust in that. The more we let go of the ego and trust that design, the easier things become for us, and the closer we are to the Lord. This is of course, a hard thing.