analogies on Self-Centeredness

Former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple describing original sin I am the centre of the world I see; where the horizon is depends on where I stand…Education may make my self-centeredness less ...

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

The apostle Paul said, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on thin...

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

Maybe this sounds silly, but go outside and look up. You cannot see yourself. All you see is a vast expanse of possibilities. Look down. You will see yourself and little else. This is true in life. Lo...

The word eccentric comes from a combination of the Greek terms ex (out of) and kentron (center). When combined, ekkentros means “out of center.” The term gained currency in the late Middle Ages, when ...

He may have been the hardest person I ever counseled. He was self-assured and controlling. He argued for the rightfulness of everything he had ever done. He acted like the victim when in fact he was t...

Those who insist we are even more self-centered today might point to how the titles and focus of our popular magazines have shifted, as photographer Fred Ritchin notes: “I always use a quote by Paul S...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

Carl Jung, one of the early pioneers of modern psychology, wrote this from his years of experience as a therapist: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of ...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

Imagine celebrating a birthday party for your child. You buy a cake, invite guests, and give her presents. Now imagine discussing the party with your spouse later that night. Your spouse asks you what...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson points out our blind-spots with respect to pride: We rarely think of ourselves as proud. I...

Dear Everybody, We have a serious problem: All of us think we’re good people. But Jesus says we’re not. Sincerely, Brant P. Hansen …PS. IF YOU THINK I’M WRONG—about how we think we’re good people...

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the w...

How good it is to center down! To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by! The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic; Our spirits resound with clashing, with noisy silences, While some...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the tension that all ministries must live in; the focus on this world or the wor...

I sit in a bright-lit June meadow at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It is early afternoon, and I have been here since morning in what can only be described as an uneasy sol...

We live in a culture today where we are used to evaluating and giving our opinion on everything. Whether it’s the pizza we ate, our Uber driver, the movie we saw, or our friend’s picture on social med...

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

We might not say we believe a Jesus-plus-our-efforts idea of the gospel, but when we place our performances on the pedestal of personal progress, we’re not relying on the grace of God. We’re worshipin...

Remember how you felt that Christmas when your sister opened the gift you wanted? Or when your brother got a T-bird for graduation and you got stuck with the family Nova? Fast-forward to today and ask...

I actually want to believe that when it comes to communication, my biggest problem is outside of me, not inside of me. I want to think that it’s my kids, my wife, my neighbors, my boss. I want to thin...

For many of us, living in excess doesn’t express itself in extremities. It doesn’t translate to tying $4,000 to balloons and releasing it into the air. It doesn’t have to amount to owning six houses (...

In my home country, the Netherlands, you still see many large wagon wheels, not on wagons, but as decorations at the entrances of farms or on the walls of restaurants. I have always been fascinated by...

Even though Carl Jung first introduced the terms introvert and extravert back in 1921 (in his now-classic volume Psychological Types), the concepts—especially introversion—crashed into the public’s co...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...