“As we move along, God will lead us into the third stage, in which our attention becomes more and more drawn to the divine Center. ‘It begins to consider God more often than it considers self, and insensibly it tends to forget self in order to become more concerned with God with a love devoid of self-interest.’
Please understand, this is not the destruction of self or the loss of individuality in some sort of ‘cosmic consciousness.’ This is the discovery of the self achieved by focusing our attention on the Creator of the self. It is losing the self in order to find it. Only in this way can the true self blossom and flourish.
This third stage is a marvelous virtue, something sublime. It is the natural charm and unpretentious exuberance of simplicity. We admire people who walk in this way, and enjoy their company. Gone is the forced behavior and sticky righteousness.
Do you know the wonderful new freedom this simplicity brings? No longer is there the stifling preoccupation with ourselves. Now there are new liberating graces to care deeply for the needs of others. And most wonderful of all, we can lay down the crushing burden of the opinions of others. Fenelon witnessed, ‘With this purity of heart, we are no longer troubled by what others think of us, except that in charity we avoid scandalizing them.’ We do not have to be liked. We do not have to succeed. We can enjoy obscurity as easily as fame.
We have also a curious liberty to speak about ourselves not excessively but naturally. I say ‘curious’ because most people assume that those who are truly unself-conscious would never talk about themselves. That approach belongs to an earlier period in which, out of false modesty, we try to quell any rise of pride. We are afraid that maybe we have said too much. We slip an example or word about ourselves into the conversation and immediately worry that it was inspired by vanity. We determine that we will never speak of ourselves, neither our accomplishments nor our failures, lest in either case we become the center of attention. At many points this is indeed good counsel, but it is a strained humility and contrary to simplicity. In time, however, we begin to relax, and are enabled to speak of ourselves with the same candor as we do of others. ‘Simplicity consists of not having any wrong shame, or false modesty,’ writes Fenelon.
The Apostle Paul knew this freedom to an amazing degree. He could assert his Roman citizenship and his Hebrew lineage when it was needed. He could boast of his many sufferings for Christ’s cause…He received his apostleship and teaching from Christ alone, and even opposed Peter for his cultural Jewish Christianity (Gal 1,2). He was so free and unpretentious that he could boldly urge believers, ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.’
Here is language that most of us would not dare utter. On our lips it would seem like the height of arrogance, and probably that is exactly what it would be. But Paul was beyond such petty self-admiration. He had passed through all that long ago. The hidden preparation through which God had put this man had changed him. We cannot understand the things that Paul said and the life that Paul lived until we see that he had given up on all the little human systems of self-aggrandizement. Without exaggeration he could call it all ‘dung,’ because he was living in a greater Power.”
Foster, pages 116-117