Becoming less self-conscious
A few years ago, I stumbled across a quote by Stanley Hauerwas that seemed to shift the way I thought about sin and guilt. He writes: ‘guilt is often just the name we give to our relentless narcissistic obsession with our own sinfulness.’ I remember thinking ‘but aren’t we sort of supposed to be obsessed with our own sinfulness.’
And this is what happens when we are developed in traditions that assume that God’s primary concern when it comes to our humanity is our sinfulness. If the God we worship is obsessed with our sins, shouldn’t we be? But of course, God is not obsessed with our sins - in fact, the cross is precisely the place in which God saves us from our obsession with our own sinfulness, because its power has been overcome. When we assume that sins power has not been overcome, and therefore deserves our devoted attention, we become formed by it, failing to see ourselves the way God does, beloved children made in the image of Christ.
Rowan Williams hints at this when talking about Teresa of Avila’s book The Way of Perfection:
“Teresa's concern is that the moral life should be lived without the deep corruptions of self-consciousness: the devil's work is to make us interested in our spiritual state in an obsessive way, whether this takes the form of self-satisfaction or of false humility, paralysing anxiety about one's condition (39.1-2). Real humility produces not anxiety or wretched self-distrust but calm reliance on God when we have discovered how little we can rely on ourselves. Let your prayer always begin and end with self-knowledge', She writes (39.4) - self-knowledge nurtured by contact with a wise spiritual director. Proper self-awareness is, for Teresa, the opposite of self-consciousness, not fascination with oneself but familiarity with oneself, candour about strengths and weaknesses, alertness to dangers.”
This feels to me a far more relaxed approach to self-knowledge. It is important to remember, your sinfulness and brokenness are ultimately uninteresting, because they are not the last word about who you are. While we seek righteousness, and justice, and goodness, we cannot do so in ways where our obsession with our sin actually eclipses the good we are trying to see. The problem is when our attention is fixed on our sinfulness, it isn’t fixed on Christ. But when our attention is fixed on Christ, we can have a proper familiarity with the self, as we are able to see ourselves more clearly as Christ sees us over time.