The core conviction to which I return again and again is the underlying, unerasable sacred worth or value of the person. This worth remains, though tragically we and others fail to see it in ourselves or one another. We then can readily spend our lives in a futile effort to prove a worth we don’t believe, or lash out angrily at others and a world because we don’t feel that worth.
From an early age, others can have a powerful impact, both for good or ill, on our sense of self. Two quotations express this truth profoundly. The first I thought initially was from Rumi, but, while it is in his spirit, it comes from Sarah Durham Wilson. I recently shared it on Facebook.“The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers.” The other quotation is from a 20th century psychologist. “We are not who we think we are. We are not who others think we are. We are who we think others think we are.”
The second reflects the tendency in our society to be concerned with what we believe others think of us. I once came across a humourous comment that we would worry much less about what people thought of us if we realized how seldom they did. In a book, The Five Top Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware writes that the first regret is this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Gabor Maté, a favourite author, comments that to speak of courage in this situation is to pass a moral judgment on ourselves. It may well be the case, however, that we were programmed as children to sacrifice our authenticity for the sake of acceptance. At the time, this action felt necessary for our survival. Yet Maté affirms that by compassionate–and not judgmental–self-inquiry, we may retrieve and learn to live more and more from our authentic self.
The core of that authentic self is, I believe, our sacred worth. It is the foundation that cannot be replaced. It is the underlying truth that who we are is enough. Our sacred worth precedes and does not depend on anything we do, and it can never be lost by anything we do or fail to do. Our sacred worth can only be lost sight of, or lost at the deep feeling level, and then it can be betrayed in self and others. As Gregory Baum once wrote, most of the terrible things people do is not because they love themselves too much, but because, at a deeper level, they do not love themselves at all. That is to say, they do not have an underlying sense of self-worth.
Much of my own thought and teaching and writing was a wrestling with a sense of lack of worth, of inadequacy, of not only not doing enough, but not being enough. As Maté has said, it is correlative with a sense of not being lovable or worthy of love. That is also why Thomas Moore’s interpretation of the Narcissus myth seems so powerful. He has written that the core of the story is this: unless a person uncovers an image of themselves as loveable–a death and rebirth experience–they will not be really open to give or receive love.
One line in the famous writing called “Desiderata,” I find very striking. “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Scientist, Brian Swimme, adds that we are, literally, stardust. All the elements in our physical makeup do indeed come from the stars. As I’ve also noted before, by the very fact that we are breathing, we are part of and so belong in the whole ecosystem of earth, which, in turn, is part of the universe.
As I have mentioned so often, the pathways to uncovering our sacred self are solitude in silence, friendship and intimate conversation, and some form, however simple, of social contribution, from small kindnesses to participation in a social justice movement. These, of course require further elaboration, which we may elaborate in future reflections.
Norman King, July 29, 2024.
