As I lay on the bench in the park just praying and listening to God today, I was thinking about the blog I wrote yesterday, about individualism in the West and how we make it a kind of god or idol. I was thinking about what it means to meet with God in prayer, in silence and solitude, about how important the individual is to God. And how amazingly revealing that is to us, that God loves each individual too. Maybe our sense of individualism in the West, in our religion as well as in our culture, has partly come from a good understanding of how God loves us. I think I’m reacting now to what I find distasteful in my own culture, but not really appreciating the richness of our spiritual heritage.
Another thing, when I was just lying in silence, I kind of felt myself decreasing and my awareness of God increasing. This was really exciting, but it made me think about other worldviews where annihilation of self is important and oneness with the whole and the other is everything.
But God isn’t like that—he doesn’t want us to disappear, he wants us to understand who he is and who we are in him. To really understand who we are by understanding him and who he made us to be.
Maybe we are infatuated with individualism in the West, but I need to be careful not to lurch too far as a reaction to this. Holding the role of the individual and of the Church together in some kind of balance brings a more complete view of how we should live in the world.
What do you think?
[It’s up to you whether you think that “you” is plural or singular…]