Paul Ricoeur, in his excellent treatise, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination has taken me back to school in very many ways, but most especially, he has helped enucleate further my understanding of my role as a spiritual companion. Like Virgil, in Dante’s Divine Comedy and in preparation for Lent, he has guided me through serpentine alleys of past caliginous and in some ways totally forgotten territory—stains, if you will, in my own life tapestry. And he has quickened my imagination with clearer possibilities in a work begun while I was an undergrad in Seminary treading vestigial steps of Duns Scotus through Scholastic philosophy: being and the meaning of God and man. My thesis centered on the Self-concept that so fascinated Thomas Merton, an awareness of which reassured me that my path through life may indeed have been in the right direction, at least.
In his chapter, “Pastoral Praxeology, Hermeneutics and Identity,” Ricoeur, a phenomenological hermeneuticist, has formulated my questions surrounding the path of self-discovery articulated in Greek class by “the man, himself,” Plato: “the first and best victory is the victory over self” in a more helpful and focused framework than my young collegian-apprentice philosopher mind could ever have. My thesis focused on a limited view of Self as constituted by psychology, never even approaching the far deeper aspects: anthropologically, philosophically, theologically or even spiritually. Ricoeur put a full skeleton and skin on the topic by suggesting I many have missed the whole point of the topic by over-looking, or misreading the topic as a bundle of topics-- “privileged objects of interpretation: texts, events, institutions and personage.” He transformed the exercise into one of hermeneutical interpretation of the “relations of intersignification” among all these objects to understand each element in their parallelism, intersections and intersignifications. Who knew? At least this tyro did not have a clue!
My academic training for spiritual direction guided me and helped to shape my vision of the role of the spiritual director as a companion or fellow-traveler amid my directee’s journey through the corriders of her life. I had actually adopted Cicero’s characterization of “anam chara,” soul-mate, by applying his definition of friend: Amicus est tamquam alter idem, a friend is the same as another self-- without having a full conception of what that role entails. The spiritual director is a figure of Virgil, leading Dante, as in the Divine Comedy.
Ricoeur helped to put meat on the bones of the issue, suggesting that the quest of the directee is one that mimics the famous “snipe hunt” for what she hopes is a deeper understanding of Self or Identity as both idem and ipse. What aspect of one’s Identity is permanent (if such can even be the case) and what represents the Self we are becoming, the self the directee hopes may emerge via our spiritual praxis in direction? The problem, as we go deeper into the recesses of being, arises when we see that as “companions” we see and hopefully “accept” a latent Self that the directee thinks she is as a result of all her book learning (texts); experiences of development and coping (events); internalization, as shaped by all society’s influences (institutions); and her God-given gifts of personality and talent (personage). The directee also expresses an ideal Self representing who she wants to be, or aspires to be and finally, a Self she truly is, Thomas Merton’s “true self.”
It is the final fruit that we hope to harvest with our directee as we cultivate our relationship together with the Holy Spirit. Ricoeur offers us the hermeneutical interpretive dimension suggested to him by Heidegger in his term Selbtsheit, selfhood, later translated into French by Emmanuel Martineau—ipseite’. In Latin-English it becomes: ipseity, which hearkens to Duns Scotus’ famous haecceity, “thisness”—the very element of identity that makes a thing a thing or a person a genuine person, Heidegger’s “Dasein”—that gives that person it’s very dignity and univocity with God. So, you see, Ricoeur took me full-circle as a devoted Scotist. He has redirected me to my original life goal—the quest for the True Self—and in pursuit of my own telos, a very definite focus upon a deeply meaningful contribution to the consciousness-raising Teilhard de Chardin posits as the most meaningful behaviors each of us can engage in as full participants in the evolution of the Noosphere. Ricoeur reveals a dimension of studying and grappling for our directee’s peripeteia, the “changes and reversals of fortune” in their unique narrative of life in concordance, discordance and final accordance of self-identity, Fr. Richard Rohr’s interpretation of “order, disorder, reorder.”
Ricoeur suggests that life is open-ended, introducing another of life’s dialectics: of closure and opening. Spiritual direction and the hermeneutic of discerning one’s life narrative is to “posit a beginning…or several beginnings and discoveries, a middle cum highs and lows and finally an ending.” In so doing, together, the director and directee complete a course of study, a discernment project, even a book. Unlike a written discourse, life is open at both ends and the story never ends. As St. Gregory of Nyssa counsels, the epektasis continues even beyond this existence—constantly revising and spiraling in the direction of Chardin’s Cosmic Christ and His Omega perfection of Creation.
Isn’t it wonderful? We are the author, protagonist-hero, narrator in our own books and deuteragonists in everyone else’s, hearkening to the Stoics’ estimation that we are each a “history written by the gods,” or in our Christian existence, a unique parable written by Christ. In the spiritual direction process we become converted by embarking on a truly “examined life.” We claim our meaning by taking Socrates’s (Know thyself) seriously and working to make our own meaning in consort with the grace of the Holy Spirit who hovers over and throughout our story.
- Phil Zepeda
