The few lines of today's Merton Monday are deceptively simple; the ideas of "true" self and "false" self may not, in the end, cover all the bases. At the very least, I think the false self can be broken into false selves as far as I tend to view it. And then there's the idea in my mind that all this disunity within me, this propensity to foster the disunity by breaking things down, is a (if not the) problem. At the very least, walking a path of discovering one's "true" self in God involves not only casting false selves aside, but also integrating them—or parts of them—into a whole. In other words, part of my true self is the very fact that false selves tend to exist within me; I cannot ignore them, pretend they don't exist. I must recognize them and—in a certain sense and for a certain moment in my life—accept them. After all, there's no way to acknowledge them, to identify them, to bid them farewell, unless I first agree that they exist and then converse with them. And most likely, it is only some aspect of my true self that can accomplish this. Just thinking out loud for a minute.

What I like most about this Merton Monday is the idea of the immense tension which exists between the humility to be ourselves and the pride of our false self (or selves). Merton is correct that this is a struggle of heroic proportions. The idea of it reminds me of intuitions I feel when I'm around other people. At one end of the spectrum are folks who are totally immersed in false selves (their own and those of other people). At the other end are the rare breed who seem to have found their true self and are amazingly humble and peaceful. In the middle is all the rest of us. Toward the people along this spectrum, I confess, I hold various opinions and feel various emotions. I feel compassion for those who are so mired in falsehood they don't even think about truth. I am amazed by those few who seem to have found their true selves. Honestly, I think the ones I just can't stand are those who are fully bound up in falsehood yet spend their time proudly proclaiming it to be the singular Truth. And honestly, I think the ones I identify with the most are those who at some level understand the struggle and are fighting gallantly, against the whole world, to win it. Some of them appear as total freaks to the rest of the world, but I really think that many of them are attempting something quite noble—whether they fully realize it or not. The role of humility in this latter case is to recognize that being considered a freak may at times be necessary—unavoidable, even—in the quest for truth, but it is not an end in itself. Being a freak for the sake of being a freak is a pride which is just as ignoble and ugly as any other of its more common, accepted forms.