Self-castigation is out of the question because God's presence lies at the very root of our ability to circle back on ourselves in self-reflection.

While on retreat, I made it a point to work on a solution to my inveterate tendency toward self-castigation. I mention this not because it's a trait I like to share in public - it isn't! - but because a lot of other people have the same tendency, and I think it's helpful to talk about it as a means of realizing that we are not alone in our attempts at dealing with the issue.

I began by pondering an insight I find quite amazing; namely, that God - the Great Mystery - possesses no experience of "I." Through blissful self-sacrifice, he empties out all sense of "I" and instead becomes known only in the second-person, as a "Thou." This occurs through us, when we have an awareness that we are held in the loving gaze of God even though the "One" standing behind that gaze is forever emptied out in blissful love. Here, since God has no sense of "I," his gaze occurs completely through OUR knowledge that we are gazed-upon. In other words, God's gaze only appears within OUR knowledge - in the second-person - that we are viewed with love. In short, God is only a Thou.

I then began contemplating the fact that each human being - like God - exists only as a "thou" spoken by God. Like God, we too have no "I," at least not in our native psychological structure. However, a bit of sacred trickster magic arises at this point, for it generally appears that we do indeed have an "I," even though we actually don't. This "I" is in reality the "thou" which we are, circling back on itself in the act of self-reflection. Here, our sense of "I" is actually a trick played on us by God as a means of facilitating our own self-awareness, which in turn provides God with a knowledge of himself, through us. Without this illusory sense of "I," no awareness of the Divine beauty or perfection could ever occur, on account of the fact that God's "I" is completely self-emptied in love. In any case, this circling back on ourselves happens precisely because God's ecstatic self-emptying floods us with love, in the process catching up our own "thou-ness" in his gushing "river of living water"and turning it back on itself in loving self-reflection. Thus, I came to understand that our very self-awareness is rooted in God. Here, grace is not merely a gift given to us after-the-fact. Instead, it is a constitutive element of our own self-awareness. It is for this reason that Augustine could say: "God is closer to me than I am to myself."

In any case, when I feel tempted to practice self-castigation because of one of my supposed imperfections, I now realize that the capacity to circle back on myself in self-awareness is actually a participation in the self-emptying God. Thus, it would constitute blasphemy to involve God in any act of self-deprecation, for it is actually HE who lives at the root of my own self-awareness.
 
Photo: View from the "pass" at the top of Big Spring Canyon; Canyonlands National Park, UT; November 30, 2013

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