Good Friday

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the person that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about them.

My false self exists outside the reach of God...outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. For most people in the world, there is no greater reality than this false self of theirs.

- Thomas Merton, New Seeds Of Contemplation

In spite of its investment in politics, all of humanity's problems are in truth psychological in origin and psychological in nature. If the problems were political, then it would be relatively easy to find political solutions. But political solutions do not work because the problems of the world are not political. They are overwhelming psychological.

There are, of course, a lot of people who would point to a broad range of political activity throughout the Bible. Politics here must be understood in its broadest sense and includes the politics of nations, institutions, causes, and ideologies. Politics bespeaks the negotiations necessary to carry on the necessities of human life lived in various societies, consummated in the here and now in the world. And there is, of course, a lot of political activity in the Bible.

The stories in Jewish and Christian scripture may be viewed through that lens, but that is not its essence. In this regard a certain Sadducean sophistry has been employed by the church that distorts the most basic reality of the experience of the risen Christ, which is where we meet God and others with a lightness of loving and trustfulness, and is one without afterthought of concern or compulsivity. But while the political desire and will to negotiate may be a part of human life, it is the psychology of false selves that simultaneously produces the hidden, ponderous, obsessive, and neurotic appetite for power that derails all political activity, including the application of theology in order to organize human activity.

Without adequately accepting the impacts of the illusions that we consider to be integral to our wellbeing we only further withdraw into these darker subterranean levels of our exterior selves, where we remain alienated and subject to powers from outside, coloured and perverted by compulsivity. Even in religious spheres this unmasking of our false self has become suspect, the letting go of the problems of the world to their own unsatisfactory ends is condemned, and true spirituality has been perverted into spectacle and sensationalism. These are political solutions without psychological honesty.

It is only in coming to terms with ourselves psychologically that we will ever understand why each one of us is, in our own way, complicit to the point where we can stand by and cheer on the continued torture of the poor and dispossessed today, who according to scripture are today's incarnated representatives of the passion of the Christ alive in the world today.

We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it...

- Thomas Merton, New Seeds Of Contemplation