Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

I am a married man, and it will sound strange that I am pursuing a holy life communing with God, grounded in solitude. Perhaps it is the intimacy of marriages that inspires my viewpoint. But we ought not to underestimate the power of the ideal of self-isolation. The ideal is often held up by bootstrapping individualists and so-called self-made successes. When push comes to shove, the sublated hermetic caricature of their way of life emerges. Can we understand a strong individual as something other than the 21^st century hermit dressed in brand name clothing? 

A holy life grounded in solitude will often be mistaken for the life of the hermit. At one time, people have perhaps become hermits with the thought that holiness was only possible by escape from other people. However, a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but also other people. If you go into the desert or jungle merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself surrounded by people who torment you – in other words, demons. And this is the exact opposite of holiness, of life in communion with God.

A person seeks unity because each one is the image of the One God. Unity implies solitude, and hence the need to be physically alone. But unity and solitude are not meta­physical isolation – as has so often been envisioned by the philosophers of modernity. One who self-isolates in order to enjoy a kind of independence in his egotistic and external self does not find unity at all, for he disintegrates into a multiplicity of conflicting passions and finally ends in confusion and total unreality. This is the deep awareness that a life lived entirely behind computer screens is empty. Solitude is not and can never be a narcissistic dialogue of the ego with itself. Such self-contemplation is a futile attempt to establish the finite self as infinite, to make it perma­nently independent of all other beings. And this is madness. Note, however, that it is not a madness peculiar to solitaries – it is much more common to those who try to assert their own unique excellence by dominating others. This is the more usual sin. 

The need for true solitude is a complex and dangerous thing, but it is a real need. It is all-the-more real today when the collectivity tends more and more to swallow up the person in its shapeless and faceless mass. The temptation of our day is to equate “love” and “con­formity” – passive subservience to the mass-mind or to the organization. This temptation is only strengthened by futile rebellion on the part of eccentrics who want to be madly and notably different and who thereby create for themselves only a new kind of dullness – a dullness that is erratic instead of predictable. The rogue university academic is a perfect example. 

True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist. The person is constituted by a uniquely subsisting capacity to love-by a radical ability to care for all beings made by God and loved by Him. Such a capacity is destroyed by the loss of per­spective, which is gained in solitude but not in isolation. Without a certain element of solitude there can be no compassion because when one is lost in the wheels of a social machine, one is no longer aware of human needs as a matter of personal responsibility. One can escape from men by plunging into the midst of a crowd! 

Go into the jungle not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.

Physical solitude has its dangers, but we must not exaggerate them. The great temptation of the modern individual is not physical solitude but immersion in the mass of other men, not escape to the mountains or the desert (would that more men were so tempted!) but escape into the great formless sea of irresponsibility which is the crowd. Actually, there is no more dangerous soli­tude than that of the man who is lost in a crowd, who does not know he is alone and who does not function as a person in a community either. He does not face the risks of true solitude or its responsibilities, and at the same time the multitude has taken all other responsi­bilities off his shoulders. Yet he is by no means free of care; he is burdened by the diffuse, anonymous anxiety, the nameless fears, the petty itching lusts and the all-pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean. This is why I so often rail against mass society – it corrupts our calling to be persons.

Mere living amidst others does not guar­antee that we live in communion with them or even in communication with them. Who has less to communi­cate than the mass-man? Very often it is the solitary who has the most to say; not that they use many words, but what that person says is new, substantial, unique. It is his own. Even though they say very little, they have something to communicate, something personal to share with others. They have something real to give be­cause they are real.

Where people live huddled together without true com­munication, there seems to be greater sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of count­less slogans and cliches repeated over and over again, so that, in the end, one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true com­munion almost impossible. Everyone submersed in mass society is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. They don’t care; they don’t hear; they don’t think. Such an individual does not act; rather, he is prompted. He does not talk; he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes cliches. 

Mere living alone does not put one in solitude; mere living together does not bring people into communion. The com­mon life can either make one more of a person or less of a person, depending on whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is essential if one is to remain human. But to live amidst others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a person in the worst way. It separates one from reality in a way that is almost painless. It divides one off both from others and from his true self. Here the sin is not in the conviction that one is not like other people, but in the belief that being like them is sufficient to cover every other sin. 

The complacency of the individual who admires their own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of one who has no self-esteem because there is not even a superficial self which can be esteemed. Such a being is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, some­times it is called obedience, sometimes it is devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immedi­ately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of the flight into irresponsibility. 

There is no true solitude except interior solitude. And interior solitude is not possible for anyone who fails to accept a proper relation to others. There is no true peace possible for one who still imagines that some accident of talent or grace or virtue segregates him from others and places him above them. Soli­tude is not separation. 

God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body.

To appreciate our true character as children of God, our particular virtues ought to place us below (rather than above) others. In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities, and there is no joy in things that do not exist. 

As soon as you begin to take yourself seriously and imagine that your virtues are important because they are yours, you become the prisoner of your own vanity and even your best works will blind and deceive you. Then, in order to defend yourself, you will begin to see sins and faults everywhere in the actions of other men. And the more unreasonable importance you attach to yourself and to your own works, the more you will tend to build up your own idea of yourself by con­demning other people. Sometimes virtuous persons are also bitter and unhappy, because they have unconsciously come to believe that all their happiness depends on their being more virtuous than others. 

When humility delivers one from attachment to one’s own works and reputation (and I have only done this VERY inconsistently), one discovers that perfect joy is possible only when we have completely forgotten ourselves. And it is only when we pay no more attention to our own deeds and our own reputation and our own excellence that we are at last completely free to serve God in perfection for His own sake alone. 

One who is not stripped and poor and naked within his own soul will unconsciously tend to do the works he has to do for his own sake rather than for the glory of God. One will be virtuous not because one loves God’s will but to admire one’s own virtues. But every moment of the day will bring some frus­tration that will breed bitterness and impatience, and, in his impatience, he will be discovered. I know this all-too-well. 

He has planned to do spectacular things. He cannot conceive himself without a halo. And when the events of his daily life keep reminding him of his own insig­nificance and mediocrity, he is ashamed, and his pride refuses to swallow a truth at which no sane person should be surprised. Even the professionally pious, and sometimes the pious most of all, can waste their time in competition with one another, in which nothing is found but misery. 

More than once, Jesus had to rebuke His Apostles, who were wrangling among themselves and fighting for the first places in His Kingdom. Two of them, James and John, intrigued for the seats on His right and left hand in the Kingdom. It is not unusual, in the lives of the saints, to find that saints did not always agree with saints. Peter did not always agree with Paul. And sometimes very holy men have been very exasperating people and tiresome to live with. If you do not believe me, perhaps it is be­ cause you think that the saints were always perfect, and never had any faults to fight against. But God sometimes permits one to retain certain defects and imperfections, blind-spots and eccentricities, even after they have reached a high degree of holiness, and because of these things their Christ-like character remains hidden from them and from others. If the holiness of all the children of God had always been plainly evident to everybody, they would never have been polished and perfected by trial, criti­cism, humiliation and opposition from the people they lived with.

Be content that you are not yet holy, even though you realize that the only thing worth living for is holiness. Then you will be satisfied to let God lead you to holiness by paths that you cannot understand. You will travel in darkness in which you will no longer be concerned with yourself and no longer compare your­ self with others. Those who have gone by that way have finally found out that holiness is in everything, and that God is all around them. Having given up all de­sire to compete with others, they suddenly wake up and find that the joy of God is everywhere, and they are able to exult in the virtues and goodness of others more than ever they could have done in their own. They are so dazzled by the reflection of God in the souls of the men they live with that they no longer have any power to condemn anything they see in another. Even in the greatest sinners they can see virtues and good­ness that no one else can find. As for themselves, if they still consider themselves, they no longer dare to compare themselves with others. The idea has now become un­thinkable. But it is no longer a source of suffering and lamentation: they have finally reached the point where they take their own insignificance for granted. They are no longer interested in their external, objective selves. 

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. 

Love is my true character. Love is my name.

If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfill­ment, or joy. 

To find love I must enter the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God. And to enter His holiness I must become sacred as He is holy. 

How can I even dare to entertain such a thought? Is it not madness? It is certainly madness if I think I know what the holiness and perfection of God really are in themselves and if I think that there is some way in which I can apply myself to imitating them. I must begin, then, by realizing that the holiness of God is something that is to me, and to all people, utterly mysteri­ous, inscrutable, beyond any notion of of perfection, beyond any relevant human statement whatever. 

If I am to be “holy” I must therefore be something that I do not understand, something mysterious and hidden, something apparently self-contradictory; for God, in Christ, “emptied Himself.” He became a man and dwelt among sinners. He was considered a sinner. He was put to death as a blasphemer, as one who at least implicitly denied God, as one who revolted against the holiness of God. Indeed, the great question in the trial and condemnation of Christ was precisely the denial of God and the denial of His holiness. So God Himself was put to death on the cross because He did not measure up to man’s conception of His Holiness… He was not holy enough, He was not holy in the right way, He was not holy in the way they had been led to expect. Therefore, he was not God at all. And, indeed, He was abandoned and forsaken even by Himself. It was as if the Father had denied the Son, as if the divine power and mercy had utterly failed. 

In dying on the Cross, Christ manifested the holiness of God in apparent contradiction with itself. Yet, this manifestation was the complete denial and rejection of all human ideas of holiness and perfection. The wisdom of God became folly to men, His power manifested itself as weakness, and His holiness was, in their eyes, unholy. But Scripture says that “what is great in the eyes of men is an abomination in the sight of God,” and again, “my thoughts are not your thoughts,” says God to men. 

As Thomas Merton says, “If, then, we want to seek some way of being holy, we must first of all renounce our own way and our own wisdom. We must “empty ourselves” as He did. We must “deny ourselves” and in some sense make ourselves “nothing” in order that we may live not so much in our­ selves as in Him. We must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there. We must live by the strength of an apparent emptiness that is always truly empty and yet never fails to support us at every moment.” 

This is holiness. 

None of this can be achieved by any effort of my own, by any striving of my own, by any competition with other men. It means leaving all the ways that men can follow or understand. 

I who am without love cannot become love unless Love identifies me with Himself. But if He sends His own Love, Himself, to act and love in me and in all that I do, then I shall be transformed, I shall discover who I am and shall possess my true identity by losing myself in Him. 

And that is what is called holiness.