Nowadays, there is a mirror everywhere: in a bedroom, in a bathroom, in a living room, in a car. I am curious about how the mirror was first discovered. Here is what I learned. One day a rich man went to an antique store looking for a gift for himself. He was attracted to something that looked like a picture hanging on the wall. Through it he saw a handsome man. When he smiled at the man, the man smiled back at him. And so, he decided to buy that object. When he returned home, he hid it in a drawer of a guestroom. Every day he went to the guestroom to look at the object he bought. He was so happy because the man in the object seemed to understand him and share his feelings. Whenever he was sad, the man he saw was sad. Whenever he was in a good mood, the man showed the same gladness. After a few months, his wife suspected him of doing something in secret. She followed him to the guestroom and saw him looking at the object, smiling at it and putting it back into the drawer. She waited until the moment when her husband left the room to see the object by herself. When she saw a beautiful woman in the object, she cried out aloud saying, “how did my husband visit this beautiful woman every single day? He was no longer faithful to me.” At that moment, her husband entered the room putting his hands on her shoulders to calm her down. She saw him in the picture and asked, “why are you standing behind the beautiful woman?” He said to her, “this beautiful woman is you.” They burst out laughing when they discovered that it was a mirror.
I am sure that many of you, more than once, have posted an image of yourself on Facebook or Instagram. You did so in a careful manner, not only to be seen but also to be judged. You took care of that picture as if it mirrored your true self. You took care of that picture as if your value depended on it. Instead of entering in a real interaction with those who are near and dear to you, you allowed a virtual image of yourself to be seen and to be judged by friends of course and also by strangers.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks us to, “go to [our] inner room, close the door, and pray to [our] Father in the secret.” At his request, we can go to our inner room, look at a mirror to see who we really are. This self-discovery is first of all a discovery of self. We are the first person to discover our true self. Needless to say that we cannot become ourselves without knowing the one in whose image we are created. How can we become ourselves by not knowing and worshiping God who created us in his own image? In our inner room and with the help of prayer, we can ask God to show us our true self, hidden even from us.
In order to discover our identity which is hidden in God, we need to imitate his creative act. When he said, “let there be light,” a new world was created. This logic wasn’t followed by Saint Augustine and his friends in the pear stealing episode. I am sure that you know this story very well. It is impossible for a student at Austin Prep, guided by the Augustinian tradition, to ignore this story. You might recall that one day Augustine and his friends decided to steal some pears from a neighbor’s vineyard. They did not savor the fruit they stole. There was nothing about the color or the flavor of the fruit that led them to steal. They were worse than Eve in the garden of Eden. There, the fruit appeared good to eat and pleasant to the eyes. Here, Augustine and his friends enjoy the theft for its own sake. The end of the act is not beyond it, but the act itself. There is no cause for their evil but evil itself.
Notice that Augustine loves the negative character of the act, not only for itself, but also because of companionship. He would have never stolen the pears alone. Peer pressure follows pear pressure! When his friends say, “let’s go, let’s do it”, Augustine cannot resist. It’s a perverse imitation that inverts the original act of creation. When God said, “let there be light,” a new world was generated. When Augustine’s friends said, “let’s go, let’s do it,” they destroyed the thing God created. The first saying come from a positive community, established through the love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The second saying comes from a negative community, gathered together to do evil. The first saying comes from a true friendship: getting together to do good. The second saying comes from an accomplice companionship: getting together to do evil. This mirroring is a perverse mirroring.
During our Lenten journey, we are invited to form our identity by following different stories we hear from the Bible. Those stories mirror our life stories. Those stories have a positive impact on the formation of our identity. Ultimately, our identity is narrative. We develop our identity when we listen to the stories of the Bible. We form our identity when we share our story with one another. Who is the wonderful man and the beautiful woman that you see through the mirror of a biblical story? Who is the generous man and the companionate woman that are standing behind the story you read? It’s you!
