Author: teridaily

For those of us who study the Enneagram, those of us who have awakened to a script we didn’t write, and those of us who know the sting of the apostle Paul’s words: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).

 

Act III, Scene ii

Someone has altered the script.
My lines have been changed.
The other actors are shifting roles.
They don’t come on when they’re expected to,
and they don’t say the lines I’ve written
and I’m being upstaged.
I thought I was writing this play
with a rather nice role for myself,
small, but juicy
and some excellent lines.
But nobody gives me my cues
and the scenery has been replaced.
I don’t recognize the new sets.
This isn’t the script I was writing.
I don’t understand this plot at all.

To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in this extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.

–Madeleine L’Engle

 

Have you ever asked yourself in absolute disbelief: “How did I get here?” Was it one drastic step off the path, or the divergence of a few micrometers with every step – all adding up over the course of a mile? Nothing is as it was supposed to be.

I had never written down the script. I hadn’t needed to. I knew my character inside and out – the sweet southern woman with a pure heart and self-sacrificing ways. But at some point I began to mistakenly believe that the role and the woman playing it were one and the same; I thought that the character in my script was the real me. That is, until the real me tore off the mask and erupted, exposing my carefully constructed ego as the false self that it is – a mixture of compulsions and illusions and misguided thinking. And now there’s no going back to the old script.

Sometimes it takes the destruction of a whole way of life or a friendship or a job for us to see the distance between our true and false selves, but usually glimpses of that distance bubble up from time to time with a punch in the gut or a flash of anger. If we push these clues back down quickly enough, we can go on deceiving ourselves for a long time, but not forever.

Sooner or later we look around and see that no one is following our script, not even ourselves. The scenery is unrecognizable, and none of the lines we have memorized seem to fit. It’s disorienting, perhaps in the same way that Good Friday all the way through Easter morning was totally disorienting for Mary Magdalene and the disciples.

And this is where I find hope – disorientation, pain, and (yes) even death are part of the birth process, part of the scales falling from our eyes. It is PAINFUL; it is SCARY; and sometimes it is HUMILIATING. This is where Jesus meets us, but it’s not where Jesus leaves us. We know that – it’s the story of Easter playing out in our own lives.

But here’s my question: What do we do during this time of disorientation? Where do we find our true north, the master script, our real selves? Where do we even begin to look? When who we thought we were has evaporated into thin air, how do begin to see ourselves clearly?

According to Karl Barth (Swiss theologian who lived from 1896 to 1968), we see ourselves as we most truly are not by looking at ourselves, but by looking at God. In other words, it’s by knowing ourselves as God’s beloved, as creatures in fellowship with God, that we see ourselves as we were created to be – ourselves in the master script. And when we see ourselves in that way, as those loved with a love that knows no limits, then we have the courage to see how far our own life has strayed from that master script – we have the courage to see the distance between our false and true selves. We can see our illusions, compulsions, and misguided ideas without being crushed, without letting them have the last word; for as we begin to see clearly, the gap between the character we play in our own script and the person we are in God begins to close.

This idea – that we become who we most truly are, who we were created to be, by looking at God and not ourselves – has always been part of traditional theology. According to Augustine, “to think the best of God is the basis of all piety.” In other words, as we contemplate the holiness of God, we become holy ourselves in a way that is somewhat accidental. We become holy (our truest selves) not by any act of our own ego, but by forgetting ourselves in God.

Perhaps this is, at least in part, what the bible means by saying that to find our lives we must lose them. Perhaps this is what Madeleine L’Engle means by “growing up.” For me, it’s simply rest, reorientation, and resurrection.

So if you seem to have lost your way and no longer know who you are or the script being played out, find your true north in God. Instead of trying harder to be you, simply rest in God. Grace will take you home.