This definition of prayer highlights the encounter with God’s word and will and our response to embrace them in our life. This prayer is an invitation to use God’s word and will to refocus our lives. Prayer is always about making love direct our lives in a new manner. The light of the Scriptures often opens up new horizons in our normal awareness. This leads to deeper self-knowledge.
The unreality of our life keeps us from where God resides in our deepest center. This mission from the unreal to the real is the stuff of an authentic spiritual life. Self-knowledge is crucial to this development.
Giving such importance to self-knowledge may seem strange to you. To make this more understandable, I would like to offer this example. Compare your life today to five or ten or fifteen years ago. If you have worked at living your faith minimally, I am sure you can see a lot of changes. Self-knowledge was an important part of that maturing process. More patience, more tolerance and more reconciliation are all woven into the larger progression of knowing ourselves with growing clarity. This new wisdom leads to an expanding awareness of our dependence on God.
In our time, psychological self-knowledge is a major industry that contributes to our well-being. Likewise, AA and all other twelve step programs and their affiliates are rooted in self-knowledge. Both of these major initiatives are ultimately part of our spiritual journey.
Most of the gospel mandates flow from this practice of refocusing that puts God at the center:
“If anyone wants to be first, he must make himself last of all.” (Mk: 35-36)
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” (Mt 16:24)
“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (Jn 12:24)
The journey of self-knowledge is often described as moving from the false self to the true self. It is a new way of looking at ourselves, at others, and the world. It is a transformation of consciousness.
The Popes often echo the message of Teresa of Avila in addressing society’s values. These values are most often false and destructive and insidious in their ability to blind us to their influence. The journey of prayer leading to self-knowledge has an enormous capacity to set us free from the essential message of the consumer society. Jesus offers us, in the light of the Gospels, the passage out of darkness and bondage. We have a deeply ingrained ability to deceive ourselves and to accept uncritically the values and the norms of the world around us. The path of self-knowledge in prayer can confront what is false in us and ultimately allow God to uproot it completely.
The false self is also entrenched in an exaggerated sense of self-importance, illusions of grandiosity, the blindness of addictions and, most of all, the unreality of idols. Our heart creates many false centers in our attachments. This is how we distort the use of God’s creatures. The heart becomes fragmented and flawed.
We tend to become blinded to our faults and failures. We emphasize the shortcomings of others. Jesus put it ever so clearly when he pointed out our blindness to the log in our eye rather than our stress on the splinter in our neighbor’s eye. (Mt 7:5) Self-righteousness rises to the front and center. As we become aware of the false values flowing from our fragmented heart, we come to a fork in the road.
We have a choice of life or death. We choose death when we double down on the clamoring of the false self. We choose life when we open ourselves to the mercy of God which engulfs the true self. At the heart of this encounter is the perennial challenge of knowing ourselves.
