"Isn't it all about ME?"

"The ancients have said that the giants advanced themselves against God, to pull him off of his throne. Let us omit these fables. In very truth you querulous and murmuring men are these giants. For if it be so that God not only tolerates but send all these things, then you who thus strive and struggle, what do you do but, as much as in you lies, take the scepter and sway of government from him?

 "O blind mortality! The sun, the moon, stars, elements, and all creatures else in the world, do willingly obey that supreme law. Only man, the most excellent of all God's works, lifts up his heel, and spurns against his maker. If you hoist your sails to the winds, you must follow where your will is forced, not where your will leads you. And in this great ocean sea of our life will you refuse to follow that breathing spirit which governs the whole world?

"Yet you strive in vain. For if you do not follow freely you shall be drawn after forcibly. We may laugh at him who having tied his boat to a rock, afterwards hauls the rope as though the rock should come to him, when he himself goes nearer to it. But our foolishness is far greater, who being fast bound to the rock of God's eternal providence, by our hailing and pulling would have the it obey us, and not we it.

"Let us forsake this fondness, and if we are wise let us follow that power which from above draws us, and let us think it good reason that man should be pleased with that which pleases God."

--Justus Lipsius, On Constancy 1.14 (tr Stradling)

 The Renaissance Stoic Justus Lipsius isn't pulling any punches here. As uncomfortable as it may make me feel, he is calling me out for my stubborn pride. I can, in almost every case, trace my problems back to the fact that I am insisting that the things rightly outside of my power should be subject to my own will.

I would get angry at my mother when, after one of my usual adolescent rants and raves about the injustices of the world, she would lovingly say, "so it's all about you?" I was angry because I knew she was right. Pride goes before the fall.

I shouldn't have to feel resentful because I am not God. To find joy and appreciation in what I am isn't making anything less of me. It is making something more of me by understanding how I play a part, small but necessary, in the order of all of Nature. By humbling myself I can truly exalt myself.

I have always enjoyed the wonderful imagery of Tolkien's Creation Myth from the Silmarillion. Iluvatar directs the Ainur to assist him in Creation by singing together in a beautiful harmony, each part playing a role in the magnificence of the whole. It is only Melkor in his vanity who seeks to spoil the great theme with his own composition. But it wasn't all about him.

If I am playing in a symphony orchestra, or singing in a choir, I can freely share in the beauty of the music made by all of us together. Or I might try to stubbornly and arrogantly play or sing only my on tune. In the first case, I am joyfully lifted up into the harmony. In the second, my lone voice of dissent will be drowned out by all the rest, and I will feel resentful and miserable.  So it is with Providence.


Written on 11/23/1999