Marie Morgan offers a brief reflection on Mark 9: 2-9. I was particularly struck by, and in agreement with the following extract as I reflected on my own journey, personal change, and growth:
“…How do we extract ourselves from these polarities that much of our daily reality consists of, to begin to grasp and integrate into the oneness? How does the Christ get us from points A vs. B to all being one in the One?
The polarities all around us are easy to spot …and too easy to speculate about. But let’s talk about the polarities within each of us, in the realm where we might actually have some sway in the matter.
The “vs.” often comes from fear, or lack of understanding of the other. We must become one with ourselves before we can become one with anything outside ourselves, because if we skip this step, fear will always find a way to dictate the terms of our understanding. We rarely can recognize the parts of ourselves that we like least…so we project those characteristics on other people, indeed onto “other” people. What being in Christ offers us—through this one Jesus who practices unconditional love and acceptance– is the safe place to begin to befriend these less acknowledged parts of ourselves. Even our worst fears have something to teach us; often they are voices from the past that really only want to protect us. And just as Jesus (in last week’s reading / Mark 9:1-15) reaches out and touches the most rejected member of the community—in fact the one forced to live ‘outside the camp’—we can learn to reach out and touch our own inner characters most feared and avoided. And as we heal these parts, we free ourselves to be more open to other people who once represented enemy…”
You can read the whole reflection here.
We all have to struggle to contend with and face into our interior realities. We all need grace, and from a Christian point of view, we need God, so the challenge, as David Benner, Thomas Keating and others rightly note, is to find ways of becoming increasingly open to God, allowing God to do the deep work of inner healing and transformation. So, for example, think of a person with strong narcissitic tendencies. For them, psychiatrist Alexander Lowen notes, "the denial of feelings characterstic of all narcissists [whereever they are on the scale] is most manifest in their behaviour toward others. They can be ruthless, exploitative, manipulative, controlling, sadistic, or destructive to another person because they are insensitive to the other's suffering, feelings, or experience. They are unable to engage and work with the other's perspective. The insensitivity derives from an insensitivity to their own feelings, an inability to face into and work with their own inner and behavioural realities..." And this is a huge challenge on so many levels, particularly as we change and grow only in relation to others, only as we see ourselves as other's see us, hence the critical importance of healthy relationships as the contexts within which and out of which we grow.
So, you get a sense of the challenge we all have to face into, whether narcisissim is our thing, or its something else. We all have to become increasingly open to ourselves, if we are going to be able to be genuinely open to others, and to God. The three, self, others, and God are profoundly interrelated.
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