This is the tenth of eleven reflections on Thomas Merton’s teaching on the True Self/False Self dynamic. This conflictual but enlightening relationship permeates Merton’s huge quantity of writing on the spiritual life. The basic point of the conflict is the individual’s pull toward and away from God, one’ true and ultimate destiny. Merton’s exposure of the consequences of original sin is ruthless in its intensity. This is the task of the False Self. At the same time, the pull of the True Self, the ever-present call of God’s personal and passionate love, is even more powerful. The human heart is the battlefield of this seemingly endless confrontation.
Teresa of Avila tells us prayer is the key to this journey. Teresa offers a program to help us to pray. For her, prayer is always an encounter with God who transforms and purifies us in contemplation. This is the only way to unity. To strengthen this prayer, Teresa insists on an agenda based on humility, detachment, and charity. These virtues have a dynamic relation with prayer. They bring an order in our life. This order helps us to pray. At the same time, prayer helps us to grow in these life-giving virtues.
The Three Virtues
Humility
For Teresa, accepting the foundational reality that God is the Creator and we are the creature is the heart of humility. This truth shines on all of God’s creation in way that it necessitates humility as the way we experience God. This is why Teresa says humility is the truth. Humility lets us see ourselves and the world the way God sees it.
Thomas Merton adds this supportive insight about humility in his book, Contemplative Prayer, “Our knowledge of God is paradoxically a knowledge not of God as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on God’s saving and merciful knowledge of us.”
To know and embrace the humble truth about ourselves is the source of our freedom. We slowly begin to see more clearly who God is. This is the fundamental source of our humility. We see the truth about ourselves with the gift of this virtue. Humility opens us up to the necessary personal conversion in our self-understanding. It lets us grasp the wonder of God calling us into the Mystery of Love even in our broken state. This is the movement into the True Self.
Detachment
By detachment Teresa means that we must put all things in their proper perspective. Detachment lets us be free from desiring that certain things happen and open to what is happening. This attitude will lead us to a peaceful reconciliation with reality. We need to relate to all things in a way that they bring us closer to God. This particular relationship, this hobby, our cell phone, and all of our other possessions and relationships will either bring us closer to God or be an obstacle in this search. The effects of Original Sin drive us to make creatures our idols, most often in our image and under our control. Detachment attacks this distortion. This virtue brings clarity to our deceiving hearts.
Only when things are seen in the right light, with a detached heart, do they open the way to God. Otherwise, things are used only to prop up our selfish agenda. They are, then, contrary to our goal: to seek God. This is the result of the False Self.
Teresa had no problem with the world. Its richness and beauty only have meaning, however, as they help us in our search for God. She had arrived at this vision of detachment as part of her long spiritual journey. Detachment allowed her to possess herself in a way that made her free of all things in the pursuit of God. John of the Cross shared her enthusiasm for detachment. “Peace comes for a heart free for God since cares do not molest the detached.” (A.3.20.3)
Charity
Charity is the proper acceptance of others. Love for our sisters and brothers is the index of our spiritual growth. For Teresa, the authenticity of our spiritual journey is measured by the quality of our interpersonal relations with others. This neighborly love moves us towards the center where God awaits.
This call for communal love is the most difficult obstacle on our pilgrimage to God. Our selfishness has incredible powers to twist things in justifying our judgmental self-righteousness. Teresa understood this well. She said, “Beg our Lord to give you this perfect love of neighbor. Let his Majesty have a free hand, for He will give you more than you know how to desire because you are striving and making every effort to do what you can about this love, and force your will to do the will of your Sister in everything even though you lose your rights; forget your own good for their sakes no matter how much resistance your nature puts up; and, when the occasion arises, strive to accept work yourself so as to relieve your neighbor of it.” (IC.5.3.12)
The journey to God is an interaction between the three virtues and prayer. To be humble, detached, and loving we need to pray. There is a mutual support of both prayer and the virtues in the movement towards God. This process is the work of a lifetime. This is what it means to walk with Jesus.
Teresa has a simple example of how profound this practice is in ordinary life. She says if there is a person that we find difficult, we should go out of our way to support and help that person. If that individual receives praise, we ought to rejoice as if the praise is for us.
There is no way I could be able to do that for many of my brothers and sisters whom I know I do not love as I should, to put it charitably. This is the same for most of us. We have a long way to go. There is a lot of ego that has to go out the window. The problem is that the ego likes to stay at home. Very few of us will ever imitate Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive them for they do not know what they do.” (Lk 23:34)
This is where prayer and Teresa’s program of the virtues unite. They support each other leading to contemplation. This is the action of God that roots out the final remnants of egoism and self-centeredness that are beyond our power to eliminate. This is the purification that precedes transformation. The embedded forces of self-righteousness and being consistently judgmental only give way to the purifying love of God in the fifth and sixth dwelling places of Teresa’s Interior Castle. We can go just so far by ourselves. God alone can close the deal on the love that unveils the fullness of the original unity in seventh and final dwelling places of the Interior Castle.
In Merton’ description of the original unity, as he experienced it in his famous Louisville experience, human frailty and human faults become totally inconsequential. They disappear from view. One sees God in the individual. The pull into the unity is irresistible. “For all of you were baptized in Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28) Someday, hopefully, we will be gifted to encounter this precious reality. We will be enlivened to see the beauty and wonder in all our brothers and sisters and as well as within ourselves.
The True Self/False Self Dynamic in Prayer
On the road to that day, we need to recognize two things. First, it is essential to continue to grow in awareness of how far we are from truly sharing God’s love for our neighbor. Secondly, we need to stay in the struggle to be more humble, more detached, and more loving by our faithfulness to prayer. This will prepare us for God’s purifying and transforming gift of contemplation. This is the true and final victory of the True Self.
