Our Shimmering Self

For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God's presence resides? Starting very early, life has taught all of us to ignore and distrust the deepest yearnings of our heart. Life, for the most part, teaches us to suppress our longing and live only in the external world where efficiency and performance are everything. We have learned from parents and peers, at school, at work, and even from our spiritual mentors that something else is wanted from us other than our heart, which is to say, that which is most deeply us. Very seldom are we ever invited to live out of our heart. If we are wanted, we are often wanted for what we can offer functionally. If rich, we are honored for our wealth; if beautiful, for our looks; if intelligent, for our brains. So we learn to offer only those parts of us that are approved, living out a carefully crafted performance to gain acceptance from those who represent life to us. We divorce ourselves from our heart and begin to live a double life. Frederick Buechner expresses this phenomenon in his biographical work, Telling Secrets:

[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all ... rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather.

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