Fifth Pathway - Persistently Looking Inward - Part III

Fifth Pathway – Persistently Looking Inward – Part III

Your honesty and humility generate an open mind which equates with a blank canvass upon which God can paint a new story for your life.  A genuinely open mind affords an opportunity to reconsider old and erroneous assumptions.  Perhaps, your time in the intuitive wilderness will resemble a Damascus Road experience.  Like Paul, you may have held unrelenting conviction that you were doing the will of God as you misguidedly persecuted people of good faith.  Alone without any distractions and interruptions, you see clearly that your self-righteous actions conflict with God’s love, grace and mercy.  You discard your previous concept of God.  You exchange your idolatrous paradigm for a relationship with a holy personality.  This new insight upon God produces even greater insight into your unique identity.  If you are willing to let go of old ideas and misconceptions, you will be born again.  You will discover your exact mission and purpose.  God needs the solitude of the intuitive wilderness to deposit this revelation within you.  Resist the arrogance and fear of my driving lessons.  Be teachable and let God assist you in editing the script of your life in accordance with His divinely designed journey for your life.

Alan Alda completes his powerful quote with an equally formidable promise.  “What you'll discover will be wonderful: yourself.”  God gives life to each of us as a unique gift.  We are equally unique as recipients of this incomparable and incalculable gift.  What a waste of life when we spend it trying to be someone whom we are not.  It is also regrettable when we squander time, talent and other resources preoccupying ourselves in activities that conflict with our mission and purpose.  To avoid these pitfalls in life, we must know who we are.  The intuitive wilderness graces us with a clear and unequivocal picture of who we are as children of God.  In adherence to cultural norms within faith communities, we indirectly conspire to deprive ourselves of God’s gift of a unique existence.  Carl Jung’s epoch-making book, The Undiscovered Self, posits a unique character created by God exists within each person.  Discovery of our inimitable and authentic self occurs when we differentiate from parents, siblings, extended relatives, neighbors, friends and coworkers.  We find ourselves when we no longer seek external validation.  In a sense, who we really are remains veiled from us until we embark upon the inward journey.  Until we begin that process, we live as public personae projecting an image and veneer to others.  We linger in aimlessness about mission and purpose in life.  We live on autopilot as we think, feel, act and react to the unconscious messages that people in our formative communities deposited within us.  Our genuine talents, abilities, interests and endowments are held within a vault of conformity and monotony.  When God graciously leads us to the intuitive wilderness, He blesses us with the incredible and inexpressible gift of discerning who we are! 

The recovery community offers practical means of self-discernment.  They prioritize the necessary of completing an inventory of one’s self.  Modelled after standard business operations, a person looks inwardly to determine assets and liabilities.  Any business that fails to examine periodically its credits and debits risks bankruptcy.  Does spending exceed receipt of revenues?  If yes, what accounts for their imbalance?  What corrections are necessary?  Likewise, a person evaluates his or her attributes to see if weaknesses outnumber strengths?  Are there unhealthy patterns?  What are their origins?  Why do they continue?  Can a person eliminate character defects?  Can he or she strengthen assets?  As an individual engages this arduous process of looking intently within himself or herself, he or she finds the contours of his or her authentic and unique character. 

A personal inventory is a treasure hunt.  It is not merely a matter of internal housecleaning.  That imagery connotes the weekly task of vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, washing and polishing.  It ends with discarding trash, dust and dirt.  Looking intently inward exposes past trauma.  Assuredly, you need to resolve the lingering effects of childhood and formative pain; otherwise it unconsciously dictates your thinking, feeling and choices.  I recall a fellow graduate student whose father left her family when she was sixteen years old.  A self-absorbed adolescent at the time, she was unable to separate her father’s love and consideration for her from the dissolution of his relationship with his wife, her mother.  This former classmate personalized her father’s departure.  She concluded he abandoned her.  Regrettably, she failed to analyze the facts and feelings of her experience and pain.  As a physical adult, she remains an emotionally immature and underdeveloped adolescent who believes the world owes her special allowances.  She has been unable to establish an emotionally healthy relationship with either of her parents.  More regrettably, she has been equally incapable of remaining in any relationships beyond two or three years.  When circumstantially forced to examine herself and make changes to improve any relationship, she bolts and begins another one.  Her incapacities have left emotional damage and relational wreckage in five failed marriages.  Had this woman looked further into her pain and sought holistic healing, she would have found internal treasures to assist her in acquiring self-love, self-acceptance and the ability to love someone else.  She would have found riches in the rubble.  Her most painful experience held underneath the surface the inner treasure to heal from her pain and progress toward a life filled with love, health, wealth and perfect self-expression.  This woman lamentably made fear larger than life and recoiled from searching within herself.

Beyond talents and gifts that yield financial and material acquisition, this inventory discloses latent spiritual attributes.  A personal inventory reveals characteristics that enables a person to give and receive eternal and enduring riches of life: love, truth, justice, mercy and peace.  This process of self-evaluation unearths your mission and purpose.  There are tasks God assigns to you that you and you alone must accomplish.  No one else can fulfill your unique assignment.  In contrast with the negative messages you heard in your formative years, you have divinely given gifts within you.  A component of knowing who you are and achieving unconditional self-acceptance is recognizing these gifts.  They reflect your incalculable and inherent worth as a child of God and member of the human family.  If you embrace the painstaking process of looking into the mirror, you find this wonderful person.  Once you accept yourself and steadily begin to extricate yourself from the thoughts and assessments of other people who wrongly assumed the right to tell you who you are; you increasingly enjoy your unique life.  Persistently looking inward is a pathway to healing because it reliably reveals your character instead of focusing upon your childhood trauma.

An inventory seeks balance in accounting.  Readily, we glance at positive attributes and assets.  We, however, must grapple with liabilities.  Self-righteousness cloaks defects of character that impede spiritual progress and personal development.  Recall the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son.  He stays home and seethes silently with righteous indignation and resentment as he detests his father’s indifference to his hard work, duty, obedience and religiosity.  The elder brother expresses contempt for his father and younger brother.  Their father loves both sons equally and unconditionally.  Upon the return of his wayward younger son, the father joyously and spontaneously holds a feast to express his heart’s oceanic gratitude.  He celebrates his son’s resurrection from spiritual death.  In stark contrast, the elder brother derides his father for rewarding a son who squandered the family wealth with “prostitutes and riotous living.”  The specificity of the older brother’s condemnation possibly hints toward hidden sinful desires that he suppresses with religion and self-righteousness.  He remained on the family farm and did not enjoy any of the excesses of which he accuses his younger brother.  The elder brother describes himself as a slave whom the father did not deem worthy of a delicious meal of curry goat yet alone filet mignon or veal.  We suppose the elder brother held bitter contempt in his heart for his father and brother.  The elder brother symbolizes the danger of ignoring liabilities of character.  To respect his father and extend mercy and forgiveness to his younger brother, the elder brother would need to recognize and resolve any prodigality that lingers within his mind, heart and soul.