Reflecting on Reflection

I've always been a cheap philosopher by nature, so here it goes...
I sometimes rant about blogs being the perpetrators of what I perceive to be one of the most grievous and confusing travesties of technology: the proclamation of some personal inwardness at the expense of it being regarded as entertainment, or maybe worse, fodder to perpetuate vanity on the part of the writer. The former can be seen in the popularity of those uber-serious dating television shows and the public's response that is little more than some type of destructive emotional pornography, the same emotional pornography which feeds the exploitation of intimacies otherwise known as common gossip. It should be no surprise to me that these things take natural sentiments and distort them, but it still really makes me angry. Curiosity about an individual should first and foremost be taken directly to that individual, and the prevelance of Facebook or Myspace being some type of mashed-up destroyer of the graces and beautiful gifts of intimate communication, is very troubling. In other words, using the intimacies of others without temperance or regard for their soul seems to me to be a usurpation of what I hope our natural sentiments are for: training us to regard others as better than ourselves and training us to bear with the sufferings of others. For these things to happen, first and foremost, I have to abandon superficial regard for how I am perceived, and as Oswald Chambers says, “my right to myself,” my own falsely perceived “rights” I think I have to my own feelings or “needs,” above the needs of those around me. I haven't greeted my brothers and sisters together in vulnerability to each other and before God in my home church, through trust in Christ, since Christmas Eve, and I now realize the incredible responsibility I have to them. Here's how Merton speaks of this:

“Of course no one assumes this responsibility merely in obedience to arbitrary whim or to the delusion that one is of oneself capable of taking the troubles of the whole Assembly on one’s own shoulders. But one emerges “in Christ” to share the labor and worship of the whole Christ, and in order to do this one must sacrifice one’s own superficial and private self. The paradoxical fruit of this sacrifice of one’s trivial and “selfish” (or simply immature) self is that one is then enabled to discover one’s deep self, in Christ."

I'm hoping that blogging, in one sense, can be a medium that fuels trusting abandonment at the expense of my own “need to be taken seriously” which is fundamentally vain bullshit more than anything else.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the idea of self-contemplation, and the ever-foreboding thought in my mind in the midst of contemplation that -- self-contemplation isn't bringing me anywhere but to a place of despair, or at the least, confusion. Though I perceive it as a way of understanding myself and my actions in hopes of justifying myself to myself, in vanity justifying myself to others, and less frequently to God, it becomes a bludgeoning tool--some purveyor of a perceived isolation, instead of bringing me the inner consolation I am looking for. Walker Percy has quite a bit to say about our failure to know ourselves completely through self-scrutinization, reverberating Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky's assessments that as human beings, we are fundamentally enigmatic to ourselves. We try to understand ourselves through our own eyes and through the eyes of others, but to no avail. We can never know ourselves through everyone else or through self-scrutinizing examination. Kierkegaard writes in “The Present Age,”

"For unless the individual learns in the reality of religion and before God to be content with himself, and learns, instead of dominating others, to dominate himself, content as priest to be his own audience, and as author his own reader, if he will not learn to be satisfied with that as the highest, because it is the expression of the equality of all men before God and of our likeness to others, then he will not escape from reflection."

It seems to me that we can only know our true selves through seeing ourselves as Christ sees us: together unworthy, together soaked in sin and self-obsession, and together goaded in patience and mercy to accept grace and realize that it is ultimately up to Christ, not our own limited perspectives, what takes place after this life.