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6 “It’s Not About You” Kenosis as a Way to Live Introduction When we turn from the stories of some remarkable people—in fact, saintly people—to their relevance for our own life and times, we are in for a culture shock. The world that greets us scarcely appreciates or even understands the meaning of the words restraint, self-sacrifice, give-and-take, limitation, and so forth. From their understanding of the self as universal, we move to a view of human life as radically individualistic and even narcissistic. “It’s Not About You” is the title of an op-ed column written by David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. It returns us to our opening chapter, titled “But Enough About Me,” as it outlines the contemporary American Dream, which “preaches the self as the center of a life.” In these pages so far, we have been considering two central paradigms for living the good life: One advises developing the self from the inside, with the goal of realizing the limitless possibilities that lie within us and of reaching our dream of self-fulfillment, while the other view, the universal self, is very different. The first view expresses, as Brooks suggests, the “whole babyboomer theology,” a gospel of radical individualism in which one should “follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself.” Unfortunately, the  graduates did not enter a world devised to fulfill their lofty goals, and they, encouraged by “helicopter parents” who hovered over all their decisions and congratulated them merely for “trying,” were scarcely prepared for the bitter realities of a world in financial recession and planetary decay. Moreover, as Brooks claims, genuine fulfillment seldom comes from the conscious pursuit of happiness. As he suggests, if you read the biography of someone you admire, the things that impress you are not what “they did to court happiness—[rather, it is] the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred.” How strange this seems! Here is a writer for the New York Times who claims that the narcissistic American dream 141 142 Blessed Are the Consumers of self-fulfillment should be “outer” not “inner” directed. He notes that “most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task.” He ends his comments with a riff on Matthew :: “The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” How odd that the seemingly esoteric, archaic notion of kenosis, of selfemptying , is infiltrating even the corridors of the New York Times! What is happening? Are the threads weaving the fabric of the American (and now worldwide) gospel of self-realization through the hoarding of material goods fraying at the edges? Are people beginning to realize that “Enough really is enough” and that more is not better? Are the signs coming to us from the financial meltdown and the warming of the Arctic beginning to question not only the possibility of the growth of the GDP as the barometer of well-being but also its satisfactions? Is the age-old question of how to live the good life sending us back to Aristotle, the poets, and the religious traditions for insight into the most fundamental questions of human existence: Why are we here? Who are we in the scheme of things? What should we be doing? Are we finally open to alternatives to the accepted, conventional, and presumably “natural” model of human life as centered on the individual self? Does “It’s Not About You” begin to intrigue us, and are we, at last ready to consider an alternative? In the last several chapters of this book, we have been looking at the lives of three extraordinary people—people we have called saints—who have written in large letters and shouted in our ears that such an alternative is a possibility: a life fulfilled by responding to a call from outside the self to give the self away. Their lives suggest that fulfillment does not come about through expressing a developed inner self; rather, it is a slow process of growth in response to a call, a need, a cry, from the world. In the process of this gradual...

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