Self-Expansion or Common Enterprise?

"We're an overconfident species." So writes columnist David Brooks in The Modesty Manifesto printed in this past Friday's New York Times.

He goes on to write that "there's abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted from a culture that emphasized self-effacement -- I'm no better than anyone else, but nobody is better than me -- to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion."

This is possibly, he believes, a reason for some of our current problems in the United States. We have so inflated our sense of self, so fallen into narcissism, that political leaders are no longer motivated to listen to those who disagree with them, making it nearly impossible to reach the sort of compromise, let alone consensus, that allows us to make the difficult decisions that will have a long-term impact on the United States.

"Citizenship, after all," he writes, "is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise."

I think Brooks is on to something here that speaks directly to a central challenge for congregational life in these early years of the 21st century. We in the church are trying to create religious communities in an age in which people are looking for personal spiritual fulfillment. In other words, it seems to me that so often people seek a church because they are yearning for self-expansion.

Understand, please, that I'm not being critical. Too many people have been hurt or pushed down by the church, their schools, or some other institution (or even their families). As Jesus did with the woman who committed adultery (see John 8:2-11) we need to lift people up, proclaiming to them that they are not condemned but loved. There are a lot of people out there who need some healthy self-expansion.

Yet didn't Jesus invite us to give up our selves and follow him? Are we not inviting people into a divine community, into a religious citizenship that is, to use Brooks' words, "enmeshed in a common enterprise"? To create this community, don't we need to invite people to look beyond their own personal fulfillment to work for the fulfillment of the whole? And is it not true that, paradoxically, each of us finds our truest sense of fulfillment when we give our selves over to the Jesus we experience and make manifest together?

So, it's Lent and for those of us who gathered at church on Ash Wednesday, we've been invited "to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word" (Book of Common Prayer, p. 265).

There's a lot of "self" in that invitation, but somehow I'm thinking that all of this spiritual "work" I'm supposed to do during Lent is not supposed to be all about me, that it's not all about my personal relationship with Jesus.

What might happen if, during Lent, we focused on our relationships with both Jesus and each other, if we focused on our "common enterprise." That might even lead to some transformation, an expansion not simply of the self but of the community.

I'm thinking that -- perhaps -- that could be just what Jesus wanted.