Look at Me!

by Thomas Howard - October 31, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

The local Community House in Moorestown, New Jersey, where I grew up, used to sponsor a little parade on their grounds each year at Halloween. We would all line up in our costumes and file past a table on the lawn where the judges sat deciding which costume was the best. The great thing was to show up in what one hoped would be judged to be the most original, amusing, or beautiful costume.

One year – I was perhaps ten years old – I cobbled together a miscellaneous get-up with bits that I thought were amusing, other bits that I thought original, and even an item or two that I thought might qualify as beautiful.

The judges were not swept away. To my hopeful eye, they never gave even a moment's attention to me. (This corroborated a lifelong conviction that I had, in any case, that it was my lot in life to be passed over.)

The prize went to a boy who showed up riding an ostrich (his legs were the ostrich's legs, and he – or his mother – had rigged up little stuffed-stocking legs that dangled over the ostrich's homemade sides). Even the most envious of us had to admit that there was only one real candidate for the prize.

This wish to be noticed and applauded and, perhaps, accorded even fame is of course not universal. I often wonder whether men are not more susceptible to it than are women. We all have to cope with various forms of vanity, but men appear to be driven in this respect more urgently than is the case with most women. In all of us there is the desire to be known, in the sense of wanting some attestation from outside of ourselves – at the least, the attestation of a parent, a spouse, or a friend. It all arises from the sort of creature we are. If one is a person and not, like the poor wildebeests or herring, merely one of the multitude, then that personhood cries out for some recognition.

From the small girl in her frilly white First Communion frock, shod in black patent-leather Mary Janes and white socks, to the schoolboy who has worked long over a tiny wooden cart in Manual Training class, to the adolescent girl arising early to get her make-up just so, to the college prof preening his feathers at the lectern, to someone who finds to his delight that a TV interviewer has waylaid him – we mortals most earnestly wish to be known, and perhaps (for some of us) lauded and garlanded.

It is understandable. After all, we are made by God in His image, and He is, in a mystery, a threefold unity in which the Persons "know" one another in perfect bliss. We are addressed by Him as thou. We are not seeds in a granary.

But this desire to be known is prey, alas, to the warping effects of evil. It can become tyrannous and turn into egocentrism – pride, in other words, which will send us to hell if we finally insist.

So there arises a paradox, it seems to me. On the one hand the desire to be known belongs to our very personhood, which is the gift of God; but on the other hand, Scripture, the Church, and the saints, not to mention Our Lord Himself, would appear to cut across this desire. Deny yourself, we hear. You cannot even be my disciple unless you "lose" your life. You must be "crucified." It sounds as though we are to forswear the very thing that seems to belong to our personhood, if we want to be whole and free. What is one to do?

For one thing, we may recall the "great multitude which no man can number" from St. John's Apocalypse, whose whole joy is to adore the Lamb. Here there is no plucking of sleeves with, "But look at me!" Bliss and fruition for every single individual seems to attend this self-forgetting adoration. It is what we were made for in the first place, this adoration of That Which (He Whom) alone is finally to be adored – by seraphim and the whole angelic hierarchy – and by the whole creation: winds, dew, whales, frost, the sun and moon, clouds,us men. Benedicite, omnia opera Domini Domino. They all look as though they have forgotten themselves.

But how shall I ever come to such a state of affairs?

The answer would seem to lie along the track indicated by the saints when they talk of renunciation, retirement, withdrawal, detachment, stillness, and poverty. Daunting words. But (they tell us) joy lies at the end. And not only that: It turns out that, as one trudges along that track, joy very gradually begins to dawn upon one. What I thought I had to secure by anxious efforts comes as a by-product of my having given over my anxiety.

For presently one finds oneself addressed by the One who says, "Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." It is the One of whom the psalmist was speaking when he said, "Thou knowest my downsitting and my uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off." Even poor Hagar had a just inkling when she said, "Thou, God, seest me."

That day at the Halloween parade was big with the promise of this.

Thomas Howard is retired from 40 years of teaching English in private schools, college, and seminary in England and America.