{"id":19750,"date":"2021-01-25T09:48:12","date_gmt":"2021-01-25T14:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19750"},"modified":"2021-01-25T09:48:12","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T14:48:12","slug":"my-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19750","title":{"rendered":"My Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rwIBU8OKE0Q\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p>The modern and postmodern world is the first\nperiod of history where a large number of people have been allowed to take\ntheir private lives and identities seriously. This marks a wonderful movement\ninto individuation, but there is also a diminishment and fragility if that is\nall we have. It is a paradox! This first dome contains my private life, those\nissues that make me special, inferior or superior, right or wrong, depending on\nhow \u201cI\u201d see it. \u201cI\u201d and my feelings and opinions are the reference point for\neverything now. This is the small self we must let go of through contemplative\nprayer; and yet most people, including Christians, take this very tiny and even\nfalse self as normative and sufficient. (<a href=\"https:\/\/email.cac.org\/t\/d-l-cukjyly-tlkrijkrdu-r\/\">View the three domes of The Cosmic Egg on our website\nhere<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The dome of My Story is often all the postmodern person has left: my\npower, my prestige, and my possessions. It\u2019s the little stage where I do <em>my <\/em>dance and where the questions are usually \u201cWho\nis watching me? How do <em>I <\/em>feel? What do <em>I <\/em>believe? What makes me unique?\u201d It\u2019s a passing\narena, to be certain. It will be over in a few years and is frankly not very\ninteresting if it is all we have to talk about. My Story is not big enough or\ntrue enough to create large or meaningful patterns by itself. It is all just\npersonal anecdotes, and some people live their whole lives there with no need\nfor broader connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps we can see how fragile, unprotected, and constantly striving\nthis self will almost certainly be. Self-focused people are very easily\noffended, fearful, and therefore often posturing and pretentious. My opinion is\nthat if we stay in this smallest dome of meaning, we often move toward a\nneurotic self-image. Psychologist Jean Houston puts it this way: \u201cWhen mythic\nmaterial remains latent, unused and unexplored, it can lead to pathological\nbehavior.\u201d [1] This small and fragile self needs to be a part of something more\nsignificant\u2014and so it creates dramas, tragedies, and victimhood to put itself\non a larger stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The small self is intrinsically unhappy because it has no ontological\nfoundation. It is not real. It does not exist. It will always be insecure,\nafraid, and scrambling for significance. In Jesus\u2019 language, \u201cthe branch cut off\nfrom the vine is useless\u201d (John 15:5).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>However, when we are able to move beyond the small or \u201cfalse self\u201d\u2014at the right time and in the right way\u2014it will feel precisely as if we have lost nothing. In fact, it will feel like freedom and liberation. When we are connected to Our Story and The Story and not just My Story, we no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. We are now connected to something expansive and inexhaustible; and we can become a useful and contributing citizen in both this world and the reign of God.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/The-Cosmic-Egg-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"The Cosmic Egg image showing The Story on most external, Our Story in the middle, and My Story on the inner most area.\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The Three Domes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just as the body needs food, so the soul needs meaning, and the spirit needs ultimate meaning. Often that meaning is communicated through story. The function of all mythologies, religion, and even family lore is to help us situate ourselves inside of a safe and meaningful universe. This week\u2019s meditations focus on a \u201cCosmic Egg of Meaning\u201d inside of which people can find their rest and happiness. The image I\u2019ve used in numerous books, and first learned from Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926\u20122016), to describe this \u201cCosmic Egg\u201d is that of three overlapping domes. (<a href=\"https:\/\/email.cac.org\/t\/d-l-cuhhily-tlkrijkrdu-r\/\">View this image on our website here<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The smallest dome of meaning is my private\nworld of interests. We can call it \u201cMy Story,\u201d where we proudly proclaim, \u201cThis\nis me!\u201d No people in history, up until the last forty years or so (particularly\nin the United States), have had the language or the freedom for this level of\npersonal meaning. My Story is full of subjective, interpersonal, psychological,\nand self-help language. It\u2019s the vernacular of talk shows, blogs, and social\nmedia. I\u2019m not criticizing it; in fact, it has its origins in Christian history\nwith Augustine\u2019s sophisticated <em>Confessions<\/em>\n(4th century). This language does answer a lot of questions, so it\u2019s\nunderstandable that we revel in it. It is very good, as far as it goes<em>. <\/em>The trouble is that it is\nso rich it can become a substitute for true transcendence. My Story is not yet\ntotally <em>The <\/em>Story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a second and larger dome of meaning\nthat encloses the first. I call this \u201cOur Story,\u201d where we declare, \u201cThis is\nus!\u201d This is where most people in all of human history have lived their lives:\nidentifying completely with their ethnicity, their gender, their group, their\nreligion, and their occupations. The biblical tradition honors both of these\ndomes of meaning and takes each of them seriously. Though it doesn\u2019t name them\nas such, My Story and Our Story are both part of the narrative. The life of the\nindividual and the life of the nation of Israel are both arenas for God\u2019s\naction, but religious traditions affirm that they are connected to something\nInfinite, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The third dome\nof meaning that encloses the two smaller ones is \u201cThe Story.\u201d By this, we are\nreferring to <em>the patterns\nthat are always true\u2014beyond anecdote and my cultural history<\/em>. The biblical tradition\ntakes all three levels seriously: My Story, Our Story, and <em>The Story<\/em>. Biblical revelation says that the only way\nwe can move to The Story and understand it with any depth is to walk through\nand take responsibility for both <em>our personal<\/em>&nbsp;story and <em>our group<\/em>&nbsp;story.\nAnything less we now call \u201cspiritual bypassing.\u201d This is quite common among\nmany fundamentalist groups\u2014jumping to spiritual answers or theology without any\nhonest self-knowledge or knowledge of history. We\u2019ve got to listen to our own\nexperience, to our own failures, to our own sin, to our own gifts and calls.\nPlus, we have to recognize that we\u2019re a part of history, a part of a culture, a\nreligious group, a nationality, a gender, for good and for bad. <em>When all three domes of meaning are deemed\nworthy of love and attention, we probably have a rather mature spiritual\nperson.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The modern and postmodern world is the first period of history where a large number of people have been allowed to take their private lives and identities seriously. This marks a wonderful movement into individuation, but there is also a diminishment and fragility if that is all we have. It is a paradox! This first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19750"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19751,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19750\/revisions\/19751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}