IS INTIMACY POSSIBLE ALONE?

'A fear I often return to is whether intimacy of the self counts. Does self-knowledge have to rebound from another, be in collaboration with someone, to give you the best look at yourself? Otherwise, might I only be hearing myself as echoes? I'm afraid that if I am not seen, heard and observed in the smallest, pettiest, most inconsequential moments of my life, my most basic nature might always be slightly concealed from me. As though my one true self is being witheld by the lack of romantic love.'

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue, p.104.

SEA SWIMMING

'Even now, to be by the sea is to be in my senses in a way that doesn't seem possible elsewhere. When you're in your senses, you clear a space for truth. The wily part of you is no match for the sea; the sea cannot be deceived, and in the water, I cannot deceive myself either. I am vulnerable and in a state of receiving, ready to listen and ready to speak. It is a kind of intimacy.'

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue, p.96.

INTIMACY WITH YOURSELF

'To be a real agent for God to connect with the neighbour in the way we have been thinking about, each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself; that is to say, it's no good just saying to yourself, 'I'm a sinner,' in general terms. The specific facts of your experience may or may not be helpful to another - you should not assume that you always need to share the detail, but you need to know it yourself. To be the means of reconciliation for another within the body of Christ, you must be consciously yourself, knowing a bit about what has made you who you are, what your particular problems and brick walls are, what your gifts are.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.39.

INTIMACY WITH YOURSELF THROUGH INTIMACY WITH OTHERS

'Personhood develops in relationships. In turning to face each other, we see ourselves through new eyes, learning about our assumptions, fears, dreams and desires. As the other person draws out what is unique to me, I learn to become myself. Others experience me and tell me what they experience, freeing me to explore the external world in a new light. The encounter will be as rich as the honesty and generosity of hearts that accompany it. Other people confirm our existence and validate our worth by accepting and enjoying our presence.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.178.

POWER DYNAMICS

'Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot more about the sitter - the way he shifts his weight and moves - whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.115.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'We're all of us the better for seeing a caricature of ourselves now and again!'
Winifred Peck, House-Bound, p.244.

SELF-DECEPTION

'Self-deception is not the worst thing you can do, but its the means by which we do the worst things. The sin that is most distorting your life right now is the one you can't see.'

Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Way of Wisdom, p.84.

LEADER, KNOW THYSELF

'...all of us create worlds in our own image, but the difference for leaders is that they have the positional authority to do so. If I am right in this, then it is vital for leaders to appreciate that they have the mandate and the power to impose their personality on the community around them. Within the environment over which we have authority and for which we have responsibility (be it a family, a classroom, an office, a voluntary society or the boardroom of a global multinational), we impose our own personal strategy on those around us and seek to create a world that meets our own needs. The community becomes an extension of us, and our followers become performers on our stage, using our script to tell our story. There is an identification of the person of the leader with the performance of the organization they lead.

For us, therefore, there is a moral responsibility and ethical imperative to know ourselves, not for our own benefit but for the benefit of our followers. And not only to know ourselves but to be free from ourselves. It is freedom that is the critical factor: freedom to make decisions and choose courses of action that in the end may lead to personal loss rather than personal gain.'

Simon P Walker, Leading out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership, p.47. 

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'"All right, I'll tell you. I'm a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I'm a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of . I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife! Of whom I know more than you have any hint of, to whom I could do a thousand kinds of harm, never meaning to...'"

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.228.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPATHY

'Empathy. that is,the imaginative identification with a perspective that is not my own, is not just an optional extra in our human identity and our human repertoire, it's something without which we cannot know ourselves. Without identification with the other, I don't know myself.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.58. 

WHEN YOUR FREEDOM TO BE THE PERSON YOU WANT TO BE IS LIMITED BY YOURSELF

'It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you're the only one standing in your way - to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the "you" you've made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over again and over again. After the thrill of independence and experiments in self-actualization, drinking your so called "potential for Being" to the dregs, when the exhaustion starts to set in and then eventually morphs into a kind of self-disgust, you can reach a point where you know you want a different life but are enchained to the one you've made.'  

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.64. 

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

'Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,'
Walker Percy in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.98. 

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO WITH YOUR LIFE?

'Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: 'What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?' Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.' 

Friedrich Nietzsche in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.98. 

THE CHALLENGE OF FORGIVING YOURSELF

'"I know that God has forgiven me, but I do not feel it inside." Why? The problem usually lies in the fact that, in spite of God's certain forgiveness these individuals have not forgiven themselves. The sin they have committed has been so great an offence to their self-image, their self-love has been so deeply hurt, that they are incapable of forgiving themselves. This especially occurs in cases where the sin is sexual immorality. If there has been a genuine confession, but the person still feels guilty, we are probably facing a psychological problem. The inability to forgive oneself is an issue more related to our self-image than our faith; the obstacle is not in our relationship with God but in the relationship with ourselves.' 

Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain, p.15. 

KNOW YOURSELF WELL TO GET TO KNOW OTHERS WELL

'...the necessary requisite for us to be able to approach others adequately is a healthy concept of personal identity. The development of intimacy in relationships will depend upon the security that  one has in oneself. The more unsure a person is, the more relational conflicts the person will have. The poorer the person's self-image, the greater the difficulty in becoming close to others. Deep down, people who have relational problems with others have not learned to relate well to themselves. They are in conflict with others because of the conflict with themselves.

The result of all of this will be problems in having an intimate relationship with God. They will find it difficult to trust in God because it is difficult for them to trust in themselves.' 

Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain, p.105.   

BITE-SIZED SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self-knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at that moment; the little daily dose.' 

CS Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm, p.32. 

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Mystery & Manners, p.35. 

THE ESSENCE OF HUMILITY

'Once, when asked by a student at a lecture, "Miss O'Connor, why do you write?" she answered, "Because I am good at it." At first glance, this reply might seem conceited or proud. But the truth is that knowing what we are good at and what we are not, doing what we are supposed to do, and not what we aren't, being what we are supposed to be and not what we aren't, is the essence of true humility.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.236. 

YOU FIND YOURSELF WHEN YOU FIND GOD

'Against the prevailing mindset of our day - you are what you make yourself - union with Christ tells you that you can discover your real self only in relation to the One who made you. You are not, you cannot be, self-made. Union with Christ tells that you can only understand who are you are in communion with God and others. And that is a wildly countercultural claim.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.135.  

WHAT EXCESS MOST APPALS YOU?

'There is nothing more telling, nothing more revealing of one's character and history and taste, than one's reaction to other people's excess. Tell me which kinds of excess fascinate you, tell me which kinds of excess appal you and I will tell you who you are. This would be one, excessive, way of putting it. Or one could more sensibly say: notice which excesses you are drawn to (and there is, of course, an excess of excesses to choose from now - road rage, fundamentalism, self-improvement, shopping), the ones you can;'t stop complaining about, the ones that make you speak out, or the ones that just give you some kind of secret, perhaps  slightly embarrassing pleasure, and try to work out what about them is so compelling.' 

Adam Phillips, On Balance, p.8.