Switching Temples

I have long been amazed by the absolute un-necessity of the individual human being. I have seen it in death, a wrenching separation that everyone else, strangely and sometimes unwillingly, manages to live through. I have seen it in divorce, more painful than death in some ways because the person you knew died and their face and form still populate the world. I have seen it in departure, in which friends and family go their own ways and have their own lives. I see it even on a small scale, when I am away from my church for a few weeks. Two weeks in a row away from my church is enough time for some momentous changes to happen. Two weeks’ absence is enough time to show that you aren’t really needed at all.

Which is all as it should be, shouldn’t it, at church above all other places? Isn’t God the only one who is ever truly necessary? Yet the deity of self insists on worship. It demands to be needed, to be missed, to be wanted—regardless of the passage of time, regardless of deserving—needed, missed, and wanted for the sake of self. For the deity of self, it is easier to draw back from everyone and live completely alone than to confront the fact that you are not the center of anyone’s universe. To claim your right to be the master of your fate and captain of your soul, even if your fate is inner death and your ship is sailing over the edge of the world.

One of my favorite comments on how we should perceive ourselves in relation to others comes at the end of Dorothy L. Sayer’s book Gaudy Night. When Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane, she asks, “If I refuse, will it make you desperately unhappy?” He replies, “I would never insult myself or you with the word ‘desperate.’ But if you accept, it would make me very happy.”

There is no loss that truly takes the life out of us, not the whole life. There is no person without whom we could not go on living, without whom we would be desperate, despairing of all hope. But there are people whose existence makes us very happy. There are people who have been placed into our lives as blessings from God. There are people who come into our lives as trials from God, and when you get down to it, even the trials are blessings. None of these people are there for forever, and to try to hold onto them as if they were is an insult to them, to ourselves, and to God, who has appointed seasons for all things and for all people.

May God be the only one we can’t live without, and may we wake every morning to find the deity of self lying prostrate and broken before His glory.