Someone told me last year that the God I seek (a God Who has sometimes felt agonizingly elusive) is to be found living among other people. The idea isn’t unfamiliar: Jesus makes it a point to emphasize that you must “love your neighbor as yourself,” and He says that “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did for Me.” It’s a fundamental Gospel truth.
But sometimes, the search for God can become very abstract and highly internal. This isn’t bad in itself, for God transcends all our ideas about Him, and a turning inward – to the heart and the soul – is a natural part of the spiritual journey. However, if you’re anything like me, you have to be vigilant not to lose your grounding in the order of the world. For to be lost continually in examination of the self keeps a person from experiencing the freedom of communion with someone outside the self, and keeps her from seeing the dimension of Christ that’s expressed in the humanity of other people.
Granted, when a person is suffering intensely and – especially – chronically (whether in body, mind, or spirit), it can be very hard to turn the attention away from the self. This may be a simple fact of evolution – an instinct toward self-preservation and energy conservation. So we have to be gentle with someone who is suffering, and take care not to add to her sufferings by making her feel like she has failed to be a good and moral person. There is an important difference between a selfish person who cares little for others and a person who cares a great deal for others but who, because of her trials, finds herself entrenched more deeply in a state of self-absorption than she would like.
That said, whenever it is possible for us to turn our attention more toward others – toward loving them – it would be good to do so. It may, in fact, be a balm to the soul. If we remain trapped inside ourselves, we experience a kind of personal hell. As I wrote a few years ago: “Without communion, we are imprisoned in our own reality – and to suffocate by self-smothering is perhaps the worst kind of death.”
We have always heard that it is not good for man to be alone, and indeed love, by its nature, is an outpouring of self. So let us focus a little less on ourselves (insofar as we are able) and a little more on seeing Christ in the people we encounter today. As we do, we may find our faith, once prone to fits of disbelief, returning to us in a new and more supple way.
