HOMILY WEEK 23 05 – Year II
Journeying into Greater Self-Awareness:
Memorial of St. John Chrysostom
(1 Cor 9:16-27; Ps 83; Lk 6:39-42)
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“You are, who you are, who you are – what are you afraid of?”
Franciscan Father Richard Rohr started a retreat for our Oblate community years ago with the startling statement, which along with the gospel today, invites us all to be on a life-long healing journey towards greater self-awareness, wholeness, even holiness.
In that gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples the importance of self-awareness and the reality most human beings struggle with – being able to see, admit and deal with our own faults, instead of so easily focusing on the faults of others.
This is an important issue, as it can have devastating effects on relationships and situations when we are unable to do precisely what Jesus is asking of his disciples – to take the log out of our own eye before we try to remove a splinter from the eye of another.
There is such a thing as cognitive dissonance – which happens when someone gives us feedback that we don’t want to hear or are unable to face. I remember a brother Oblate once telling me, “Sylvain, I’m watching you burn out” but that feedback went in one ear and out the other. I did not take it seriously, ignored it, kept up my pace of life, and in the end, did burn out, leading to a resignation in my life.
A helpful tool that fits this gospel is the Johari Window, which presents us with four different areas of our personality we can work on: Public Arena (what we know about ourselves and what everybody else knows); Private Self (what I alone know about myself); Blind Spot (What others know about us that we either deny or are unaware – the log in our eye), and the Black Hole (what only God knows about us, our True Self, our preciousness in God’s eyes, what Rohr calls the Immortal Diamond).
How can this schema help us? The Private Self is fine – we all have certain things we need to keep to ourselves, and the Public Arena is fine – we function out of this all the time. The Black Hole is the area inviting us into contemplative prayer, during which the Spirit of God can bring about healing in silence and solitude. It is the Blind Spot that is most challenging, calling us to grow into greater self-awareness. We cannot heal what we cannot feel or will not face. Painful as it may be, we need to make that journey into our blind spot, usually with the help of others who are willing to give us genuine feedback.
This is a life-long journey. One of the participants at a retreat I gave once on my new book Still Green and Growing, was 92-years old – a university professor with two doctorates. She shared after the retreat that during her prayer time, she became aware that she had been emotionally shutdown by her late husband, who just could not handle emotions. With some excitement in her voice, she declared that she still had some growing to do towards greater wholeness and freedom. She booked herself in for a three-day retreat, and later came to celebrate a lifetime confession. She was still green and growing!
At the age of 77, I am still learning things about myself of which I was not aware. One apparently is having a sense of entitlement that has affected some of those around me, a tendency to take advantage of others. Recently, that has been painfully pointed out to me, so the gospel today is right on the money. I have to take a log out of my own eye, before I can try to take a splinter out of the eyes of others. I guess I also am still green and growing, and on this life-long healing journey towards greater self-awareness, wholeness and hopefully holiness.
It may be that my latest book emerged out of this whole scenario of growing and healing at this deeper level. It is all about loving ourselves and self-awareness! I wanted to entitle it “Loving Awareness” because being more self-aware is one way of loving ourselves and living out the commandment Jesus gave us to ‘Love others as we love ourselves.” In the end, the publisher, Novalis, decided on the title Claiming God’s Love. Someone recently shared with me that she was reading it and finding the exercises at the end of each chapter challenging but very helpful.
St. John Chrysostom, whom we honor today, is an example of someone who took the teachings of St. Paul and Jesus to heart and lived them. St. John Chrysostom was born in Antioch in 347 and was trained as an orator. He became a hermit in 374 but left due to poor health. He was ordained in 386 and became papal preacher, famous for his eloquent preaching. In 398 he became Patriarch archbishop of Constantinople and began reforms for clergy and laity alike. He was firm in political and ecclesial affairs and thus created enemies, including the emperor. He was twice forced into exile to Armenia. After three years it was decided to send him further away, but he died enroute, worn out by his hardships. His sermons and writing did much to explain the Catholic faith and to encourage the living of Christian life. He was given the name “golden mouth” after his death and is honoured as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox, Coptic and Catholic churches, as well as in some others.
The Eucharist begins with the Penitential Rite, an exercise in self-awareness, and moves on to the experience of the unconditional love of God that hopefully will empower us all to set out on life-long journeys towards greater self-awareness, wholeness and even holiness.
