Fr. Don's Daily Reflection
When you think of the tantrums we can throw over an offense or a slight or someone else's mistake, it is easy to see how many a religion has taught that our self-centeredness is the primary wrong in our world. Not only tantrums but terrors of greater magnitude seem so often to originate in me and my importance. Several world religious systems teach that overcoming all sense of self is the key to happiness and salvation. As long as I think of me, myself, mine, I am doomed to unhappiness, lost, says Buddhism. Jesus teaches that we find true happiness in losing or denying self.
Another way of looking at the obsession with self, selfishness, self-centeredness, whatever we call it, is to see it as an offense against the first commandment which forbids us having any other God but God. In practice, over-concentration on self can become a form of idolatry: I am all that really matters to me. No wonder a great Irish wit and playwright, Oscar Wilde, could say that taking oneself seriously is really the original sin. One must feel at times that there are two forces in combat in this universe: God and we humans. We must resent our creatureliness, the fact that we come from and owe all to Another. Insofar as we let ourselves believe and act as if we were the center of the universe we're competing with God. More of a sense of humor about our importance would be one way to keep us off those pedestals and, literally, down to earth.
