Ron Rolheiser; 30/3/08
Only if we adore something beyond ourselves will we stop adoring ourselves. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said as much when we wrote that we reach moral maturity on the day that we realize that we really only have one choice in life: Genuflect before something higher or begin to self-destruct. Simone Weil agreed: Despite being a fierce defendant of independence and private conscience, she makes it clear that the deepest need within the human soul is the need to be obedient to something beyond ourselves. Without this, she states, we inflate and grow silly, even to ourselves. We know the truth of this through experience. We feel within ourselves a constant, congenital press towards a healthy self-abnegation and the adoration of something higher than ourselves. We only feel good about ourselves when we don’t put ourselves at the centre of the world and we only feel right about what we are doing when we are giving our lives away, when, as Richard Rohr says, our lives are not about ourselves.
