Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 18

Today I passed a (barely) teenage boy in the grocery aisle whose black shirt greeted me in large white letters: “Here I Am. What Are Your Other Two Wishes?” I involuntarily smiled one of those knowing smiles. I remember as an adolescent feeling such exuberant watch-out-world-here-I-come, I-can-be-anything-I-want-to-be grandiosity. Later that day I thought how appropriate it would have been if on the back of the boy’s shirt, to add some balance to the front, were the words, “It’s Only One Six-Billionth About Me.”

Wise people and prophets in every age have advised us to hold our divinity and our mortality, our “I’m king of the world” blessedness and our “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way” frailty, in healthy tension.

When Julius Caesar paraded through the streets of Rome, fresh off victories in Gaul or Germany, a lowly slave stood by his side in the chariot, holding Caesar’s crown. As adoring throngs cheered the august one, the slave performed his other role, occasionally whispering in Caesar’s ear three Latin words, sic transit gloria. In modern English: “All fame is fleeting.”

Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Peshischa taught that we should carry two scraps of paper in our pockets. The message on one reads: “The world was created for my sake.” The message in the other pocket reads: “You are dust and ashes.”7 When we get to feeling too much the truth of one, we need to remind ourselves of the truth of the other.

In my experience, for every narcissist who needs to hear the dust and ashes message, there are between two and twenty little lost sheep who need to hear the one about being great with divinity.