The Adventure of Forgetting Ourselves
By Joe Carroll
I’ve always had an instinctual admiration for monastic forms of life — whether it be embodied in the saffron robes of Thibet, the monochrome habits of cloistered nuns, or the bare cave of the desert hermit. Strict commitments of diet, work, and prayer are not for the faint of heart. I suspect many people share that esteem, and I would venture that the popularity of the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis, for example, is not due simply to their promotion of peace and mercy in the world. Even if the monastic lifestyle is not for most of us, myself included, it fills an important niche of the human ecosystem. One can appreciate that the life of a monk is set apart for good reasons, among them making space in one’s life for a special connection to something divine. A monk makes a life is a visible sacrifice made for something bigger than oneself.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that monks are special because they make that effort to get outside themselves. True enough, most of us in the modern, northern Atlantic world lead lives that look almost nothing like even the modern convents of St. Francis of Assisi. We tend to make heavy use of technology, accrue wealth, freely enter social relationships, and move about as family and career require. We have wealth, liberty, and technologically-enhanced ability that monks tend to eschew. Despite that, we all share the same hunger — and opportunity — to live for something bigger than ourselves.
It is a sadly familiar story now that Americans are both freer and richer than we have ever been, while at the same time being more likely to be depressed and in personal crisis. Even as household incomes trended upward in recent decades, deaths of despair continued to grow, as well, even before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted modern life. It seems that for many, something is missing in life. By most measures, Americans have more than we could ever possibly need of just the things that the monks give up. So should we all become monks?
Not necessarily, although a substantial body of social science and personal anecdotes do demonstrate the benefits of sacrifice. Short of adopting vows of poverty, one lesson we can take from our monastic brothers and sisters is that we need to find some thing(s) really worth sacrificing for. At the risk of over-generalizing across important and profound diversity in religious practice, one thing we can learn about is to make our decisions with the goal of a twofold self-transcendence: both moving beyond ourselves as our measure of worth and beyond ourselves as the focus of our efforts.
There’s nothing wrong with self-improvement and a healthy amount of self-care. But I also worry that we might be misled today by an over-reliance on personality tests and inventories of personal strengths. It’s true that the world’s deep needs are fulfilled by people’s deep personal gifts, but part of the joy in growth comes from discovering where those two meet. There is a striking structural similarity to the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, two programs that have worked profound personal change in people’s lives, and at the center of both is focus on a higher power, an acknowledgment that we aren’t quite as big as we’re tempted to think or completely capable of giving our own lives meaning.
Where we people really come alive is in cooperation and fellowship with others. A life of excellence in isolation would be, at best, excellently boring. Paradoxically, the more we scramble on our own terms to make our lives full, the more empty they tend to become. Life holds a surprising joy in that self-emptying tends to leave us more full than we were before. Sure enough, not all higher powers are equally good. Relationships can become manipulative, and co-dependency is bad for everyone. Drugs can be quite powerful and quite over-powering, hence they make for bad master. As both Aristotle and Confucius exhort us, all things in their proper amount, even when that amount is zero.
So how do we know which things and in which amount? As many students of philosophy have discovered, books and theory can only take us so far. Part of the adventure of life is learning what the adventure is really about. A friend of mine in the Peace Corps came home early because he thought he would find himself and his purpose in life on an isolated mountain, only to realize that where he really needed to be was, much like the protagonist of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, right at home. Bilbo Baggins didn’t need to leave home so he could defeat the dragon; he needed to defeat the dragon so he could learn why he should love his own home. Bilbo didn’t need a personality test, he needed to forget himself in a great adventure. Perhaps we can encourage each other to take that first step, like Bilbo or so many real life adventurers, out our front door, to join our companions in a mission that is larger than ourselves.
Joe Carroll is PhD student in philosophy at Saint Louis University.
