(The Nationalist, 23 January 2004)
Most of us live below our best. Most of us think below our best. Most of us think of ourselves below our best.
Those are sizeable statements to make, but I believe they are true. For the most part, we belittle ourselves. Many people walk through life crippled by low self-esteem, burdened, staggering under a weight of self-loathing. One small external sign of this is the level of vandalism around us. People who vandalize their locality are advertising their contempt for themselves. They are saying, ‘We are nothing but rubbish, so we deserve nothing better than to live in rubbish’. If they moved into a new locality which was clean and well-kept, they would set about wrecking it, because in some perverse way, they would see it as a reproach to themselves.
My point is not about vandalizing localities but about the self-vandalism of the soul. It is sad to see so many people in different situations – and they may be among the rich and “successful” – who think they are worth nothing. They then live down to that expectation. Am I right or wrong in thinking that Irish people are more prone than others to belittle, to disparage, and slow and parsimonious with praise and encouragement? It’s such a pity to see even the young, who have scarcely begun the journey of life, already warped as a result of this twisted thinking.
‘God takes delight in his people’, says the Bible. God, for some strange reason, seems to think differently. And God also seems to have the highest expectations of us, not settling for second-best or letting sleeping dogs lie. There’s always a nudge from God that says, ‘You are called to greatness’.
As an image of how God sees his people – and that’s all of us – God speaks of a bride-groom rejoicing in his bride: – ‘As a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so will your God rejoice in you’. It’s such different language from the debilitating self-mockery which we Irish people have internalized in some perverse tribute to the image of the stage Irishman, as if that image were a law not to be transgressed. Why does so much of Irish comedy consist of self-mockery, portraying ourselves as drunken, foul-mouthed eejits? Why, too, are most of us afraid to excel, settling instead for mediocrity?
The same Bible reading says, ‘You will be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord confers’. The new name is the one we got in baptism, that signifies God’s power calling us to live up, not down.