Unreflective Lives
Can any of us blessed with the gift of sight imagine going through our entire lives without looking in a mirror? Most of us make sure to catch sight of ourselves before we would ever even conceive of venturing out where others can see us. We want to make sure we’ve addressed the horrors of a “bad hair day” or that we don’t go off to a meeting or interview with something green stuck between our teeth. Chances are we check ourselves out in the mirror several times a day, at least every time we venture into the rest room. Some of us have a mirror hanging in our offices or keep a compact mirror in our desk or purse. And yet many people go through life without ever stopping to reflect on who they are, why they are here, what their relationship is to God or the universe. They live unreflective lives.
In his book Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton wrote that “there is no greater tragedy in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relationship with realities outside and above us.” (p. 17) In other words, we need to reflect on our lives, our relationships with God and others, and how we spend our time, in order to be sure that we don’t live lives devoid of meaning spent focusing our attention on things that are of no real consequence.
Spirituality, then, is that process by which we converse with God and seek to discern God’s presence and God’s intentions for us so that we don’t spend a lifetime in empty pursuits that are not grounded in God’s purpose for creating us in the first place. To fail to look in the mirror and, worse yet, to fail to regard the life of Christ and to see what it means to live a life that is both fully human and fully divine, is to doom ourselves to spend a lifetime marooned, adrift on a sea of emptiness, and to never truly be grounded in the One who is the ground of all being.
Let us live lives of reflection, not spent endlessly admiring our own image like Narcissus, but rather seeking through Christ to begin to discern the image of God in which we were created.
In his book Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton wrote that “there is no greater tragedy in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relationship with realities outside and above us.” (p. 17) In other words, we need to reflect on our lives, our relationships with God and others, and how we spend our time, in order to be sure that we don’t live lives devoid of meaning spent focusing our attention on things that are of no real consequence.
Spirituality, then, is that process by which we converse with God and seek to discern God’s presence and God’s intentions for us so that we don’t spend a lifetime in empty pursuits that are not grounded in God’s purpose for creating us in the first place. To fail to look in the mirror and, worse yet, to fail to regard the life of Christ and to see what it means to live a life that is both fully human and fully divine, is to doom ourselves to spend a lifetime marooned, adrift on a sea of emptiness, and to never truly be grounded in the One who is the ground of all being.
Let us live lives of reflection, not spent endlessly admiring our own image like Narcissus, but rather seeking through Christ to begin to discern the image of God in which we were created.
posted by Frank at 4:05 PM
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