Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Beware Your Own Myth

When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, I taught math and coached track at a boarding school for "motivationally challenged" boys.  I was an intense and quiet person then, opinionated, and forceful in the expression of those opinions when asked, but not very talkative.  Generally, my students considered me a soft touch.  When asked which teacher they would want to have to face were they ever in deep trouble, the answer was usually, "Mr. Currier."  The faculty, on the other hand, apparently thought of me as aloof, even arrogant, though I was completely ignorant of this until some years later, when a former faculty member shared this with my wife.  My colleague had no reason to slam me or be less than honest.  We had had a good, collegial relationship, so I trusted her observations.  My wife confirmed that some of her own friends had had the same impression.

Hearing all this left me stunned and bewildered, because it wasn't how I conceived myself, nor was it how those closest to me viewed me.  I had assumed that, in the adult world, my self-conception was what others would perceive about me, but that was not, in fact, the case.

I have come to realize since then that living from the inside out, as we all do, limits our vision and warps our self-understanding.  This is not to say that those who stand outside our mind's eye are any more accurate than we are in developing a full picture of who we are.  Far from it.  Looking from the outside in has its own limitations, many of them quite constraining (stereotyping, projection, etc.).  Nonetheless, a perceptive friend or colleague is often much more aware of how we interact with the world and the impact we make on those around us than we ourselves are. Some of us listen thoughtfully to their observations and revise our self-understanding in light of the assessment of those we trust.  Many more of us, I suspect, persist in our delusions about who and what we are.

Over time our self-perceptions, however inaccurate, build themselves into a history that tells the story of our pilgrimage through life.  The older I get, the more history I accumulate, the more aware I become of how prone we are to "editing" those histories.  We are convinced, usually, that our memories ensure a reasonable facsimile of the truth of our stories, whatever the limits of our perception.  But memory is a very slippery thing.

Most of us understand our memories to be something like a digital recorder that has the bad habit of dropping files, leaving gaps in the data.  Nonetheless, we usually assume that what our memories retain is basically accurate.  Contemporary memory studies, however, have shown that it is a much trickier and less reliable tool in recording the past than we think.  We often unconsciously edit what we remember, bleeping out what might cast us in an unfavorable light or what causes us the deepest pain.  Sometimes we fill in the blank spots with material that never existed.  Our minds work to construct a coherent narrative that makes sense, even if it does not correspond to what actually happened.   The discovery of false memory syndrome and documentary films such as "Thin Blue Line", which, along with the use of DNA testing, have called into question the reliability of eyewitness testimony, have given us reason to doubt the veracity of any history we construct.  Indeed, anyone who has ever sat down at a family reunion to swap stories has had a hint of how prone we are to self-delusion when a sibling or a parent interrupts our story to say, "Hey wait!  That wasn't how it happened.  Here's what I remember!"

The limits of our self-perception and the unreliability of our memories have convinced me that our self-constructed histories, the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are, are not "the truth" about us in any objective or empirical sense.

This is a disturbing notion. It compels one to ask, "Who am I then?  If not who my memory and my sense of self tell me I am, then who?"  It casts doubt on all our perceptions, not just our self-perception.  If I cannot perceive the real me, how can I hope to perceive the real in anything?  Perhaps everything I experience is nothing more than illusion, an elaborately constructed myth that lends coherence and meaning, but nonetheless bears little correspondence to the world as it truly is.

I believe that God has created me as a unique and precious expression of his own "image."  In my capacity to love and to create, I reflect that image in my own peculiar way.  But my awareness of what this way truly is is skewed and darkened.  When St. Paul wrote that now we see in a mirror "dimly" (I Cor. 13:12, NRSV)-- or, more literally, "in a riddle" (en ainigmati) --I suspect this is what he had in mind.  He was aware that his own perceptions, as profound as they were, still lacked a fullness and maturity, that in some way they still represented "childish things."  He longed to know both himself and the world as God knew them and to be known by others as God knew him.  He recognized the provisional quality, the incompleteness, of his vision.  And yet he was so entranced by the riddle, so captivated by intimations of its solution, that he could not abandon the pursuit of a fuller, truer vision of "the Real", which he saw in Christ, the fullest embodiment of God's image ever to grace the cosmos.