From the Rev. Brandon Filbert, rector of St. Timothy, Salem.

The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for your self, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. -C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.

We are living in an era engaged in one of the most stunningly hopeless projects in all human history: the project of trying to find our meaning in life by focusing exclusively on the self. America is convinced that if only we “could be ourselves,” we would be happy and at peace. Gigantic amounts of money are spent each year to do this.

The search for “self” alone when coupled with consumerism means we labor under a heavy burden of isolating, demanding individualism: “I am what I make myself to be, with reference to nothing except what I purchase or the ideology with which I identify.” For homo americanus, each day brings with it the labor of defining the self vis-a-vis the “other” – and, increasingly, seeing the “other” as an enemy who must be converted to one’s own point of view or removed from view, so that the autonomous self may reign supreme. This leads to a state of continual struggle, conflict, and antagonism between rival “selves,” resulting in the current, embittered state of affairs in our nation.

Catholic Christianity, of which we are part, has a completely different understanding of “self.” That basis is found in our understanding of God-in-Trinity.