By Fr Greg Morgan
Recently, I preached a day of retreat for those who work for the Sydney Archdiocese, specifically in mission and evangelisation.
I decided to build my talks around something that a person who works close to the chancery once told me. This person said that “when you work for the church, your sense of ‘value’ isn’t really measured by how much you earn, but whether or not you feel noticed by the people in power.” In other words, are you deemed useful enough for those with influence or authority to give you time and attention?
I dare say that this insight would find equal expression in nearly any profession, or institution, or circle of influence.
This inclination carries a serious temptation – the temptation to present an idealised version of ourselves that we think will give us the best chance of being seen, valued, and approved. So, the question I put to those on retreat, and one that we might ask of ourselves is, “Where are you?” Or, more specifically, “Where have you placed – where have you hidden – your true self?”
To answer such questions honestly requires real soul-searching and a great deal of self-knowledge. This is not an easy undertaking. One important reason for the difficulty is that we can become so accustomed to presenting ourselves in an idealised way that, after a while, we, ourselves, forget where we have hidden our true self. (I know, especially in my younger days of priesthood, I benefited immensely, and still do, from having close friends who had the honesty to help me see this.)
When you and I become too concerned on being “seen” in order to be “recognised”, we risk become spiritually unwell. For when we are no longer honest about ourselves, we begin to live like a salesman. We spend enormous energy managing appearances, protecting an image, sustaining a version of ourselves that we hope will lead to recognition and reward. In consequence, we are no longer free to be inspired to take risks for the Lord or to speak freely and transparently from our hearts.
This actually brings us to the source of the temptation. We believe that we will be loved more if we hold on to a false image of ourselves; if we just say what we think the (important) “other” wants to hear. In the process, we hide our identity underneath the beige neutrality of burial cloths and push our true self – the deeper self – further and further into something like a dark tomb.
The sad, albeit ironic, reality is that the more we allow ourselves to become bound-up in such wrappings, the less real we seem to those around us. To reiterate, the more carefully we manage the image, the more inauthentic we appear to others.
This doesn’t happen immediately and we can suffer a level of self-deception on this score. It is not hard to “perform” for a while, or for the few occasions that matter when, say, we are being “watched” by the “important people”. But, over time, as the bandages tighten, people begin to sense that there is something unreal about our character. In time, we struggle to form genuine, honest friendships – preferring, instead, to limit our personal exchanges to predictable (often superficial) and repetitive topics.
Furthermore, where there is unreality, there is rarely much enduring fruit — even if everything looks and sounds perfect on the surface, which is not hard to do. Pastoral experience proves this. However, I think there is an even deeper sadness to all this. As I said before, the reason why we hide is in order to be loved. But in hiding, we actually prevent ourselves from being loved as we truly are.
In the person of Lazarus from Sacred Scripture, we find a foil for our own lives and a witness to divine mercy — one that might help us invert this logic.
When Jesus arrives looking for his now deceased friend, he asks, “Where have you put him [Lazarus]?” It hearkens to the question I raised before: “Where have we put our true self?” “Where have we hidden the self that God wants to bring into the light?” And then Jesus weeps, to which the crowd says, “See how much he loved him!”
This, to my mind, is a fundamental point. Christ does not weep over a performer or a performance. He weeps over the one who is hidden, buried, bound, and lost to sight. He loves Lazarus enough to stand before the tomb, to grieve, and to call him out. But Christ calls that man out. Not an idealised version. Not a more presentable version. Just Lazarus himself.
We are no different. The Lord’s love and mercy is directed precisely toward the self we have buried. Sure, we might fear that if we brought our true self into the light, then we would not be loved or promoted as we want to be loved or promoted. But then we must remember that Lazarus is loved before he is unbound.
What we have here is a foreshadowing of the sacrament of confession. Sin, as we know, leads to a kind of death, a spiritual death. And the temptation following sin is concealment — to hide over (to bandage up) what is broken. When, however, we bring our true self into the light of the sacrament of reconciliation, Jesus meets us in, and loves us from, that place of honesty.
And as we leave the confessional, raised back to life by grace, we should walk into a community that, like the community in the Gospel, helps to “unbind” us of that inclination to pretend to be what we are not.
The Catholic faith challenges us to realise that to live seeking the approval of others is effectively to allow our security, our identify, and our peace to depend upon what is going on around you. When, in truth, they should arise from within, where God speaks to our true self in corde.
The more we learn to live from that place, the more we help to break down a culture of fear in which few have the courage to say what needs to be said. At a time of fascinating possibility, we should pray for the death of the salesman and the resurrection of authentic disciples. For only the latter can “go free” to speak the truth and witness to the divine mercy that bears much fruit.
Fr Greg Morgan is the parish priest of St Catherine Labouré.
