Are You a Good Narcissist or a Bad Narcissist?

The question that titles this post reminds me of a question put to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Many years ago I played with the metaphor in a sermon for More Light Presbyterians during the Wichita General Assembly, in the wake of the controversy over the Re-Imagining conference where Christian women “dared” to re-imagine God. My sermon title was, “Which Witch is Which in Wichita?”

Narcissism is much discussed these days, from national leaders to everyday postings on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Long before that, I have wondered about my own narcissism in writing a blog. At its inception I intended that it not be about me, but about enhancing the spirituality of progressive Christians—a kind of grounding for who we are, what we believe, and what we do. But I soon found I couldn’t leave myself out of the equation. I need to write about who I am, what I believe, and what I at least try to do.

For years I carried in my wallet the best counsel I’ve received in a fortune cookie: “Your romantic life is interesting only to you.” The thought makes me smile, and keeps me in check when I begin to assume too much about my own experience, not just romantic.

I believe it was the author John Updike* who said writers believe our lives are interesting. That is certainly true for me, but I would qualify Updike’s assertion by saying writers just plain believe that LIFE is interesting. We try, with mere words, to capture or reflect or reveal the wonder, passion, beauty, complexity, humor, and drama of it all. But, to invert Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase, if there is to be a “there there,” we have to put ourselves in the midst and mix of words. I believe this is true even in, and perhaps especially in, writing fiction.

This is not unlike any artist or preacher or performer who needs to be center stage to accomplish their art, proclaim the gospel, or entertain. When any of these persons do not seem to be “present,” they are accused of “phoning in” their performance. So a touch of narcissism—awareness of how we are perceived, how we wish to be perceived, or how we perceive ourselves—is needed to put ourselves “out there” and put ourselves “on the line.”

The current conversation about narcissism wisely distinguishes “good” narcissism from “bad” narcissism. Bad narcissists are those who are so full of themselves and so focused on their own needs, desires, and plans that others are either ignored, derided, destroyed, or exploited. In contrast, good narcissists humbly offer themselves and their stories in hopes of improving others’ lives. (An excellent example of this is Henri Nouwen’s many books on his life events and experiences.)

I believe it was in the hope of improving others’ lives that Jesus reportedly said, “I, when lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). The gospel writer John, the mystic, and patron saint of Celtic Christianity, gives us a Jesus who knows his place in the cosmic drama of “one-ing” us with God. 

Whether or not we believe John’s word of Jesus’ certainty, almost all of the stories we have of Jesus in the Gospels suggest he had a strong sense of what God was asking of him, of us. As we who follow Jesus have our own sense of call deepened, bad narcissism will be recognized as “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1) and good narcissism will be revealed in faith, hope, and especially, love.

*The closest Updike quote to this I could find is from an interview in a Zagreb literary magazine in 1979, later translated in English in The New Yorker in 2009: “Every man’s life is infinitely precious, at least to him, and somehow infinitely interesting. … Maybe the wish to write is somehow connected with…I wish to say that life is sacred.”

On each day of Holy Week this year (March 26-April 1), you might want to reflect upon these earlier posts on Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the cross:

Monday: “Forgive Them, for They Know Not What They Do”

Tuesday: “Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise”

Wednesday: “Woman, Behold Your Son. Son, Behold Your Mother.”

Thursday: “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”

Friday: “I Thirst”

Saturday: “It Is Finished”

Sunday: “Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Sacred, Saving Texts

(To listen to a podcast of my sermon this past Sunday at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, click here.)

In a recent interview, Garry Wills said, “Nabokov was right: there is no real reading but rereading. I rummage in old favorites all the time.”

Having typed this, I look across the top of my laptop and see what remains of my copy of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek on the bookshelves in my home office. The binding is completely gone. What I see are the pages pressed together by James Baldwin’s Giovanni's Room and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on either side. If I were to remove it, I would have to hold it as carefully as an ancient manuscript lest the pages spill all over the floor.

The professor who introduced me to this sacred text was convinced that Kazantzakis would have won the Nobel Prize for literature if he had not written in Greek. What a gifted storyteller! And thank God he met Zorba, who, in the book and possibly in real life, challenged him not just to write about religion, but to embrace a lusty, embodied spirituality.

In similar shape, on the bottom shelf, is my childhood copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, whose Boo Radley and Tom Robinson and Atticus Finch all spoke to different parts of me as a young boy who knew what it meant to be queer, to be unjustly judged, to want to work for justice. And Scout—dear Scout—I wanted to be a story teller like her. If one only reads or writes one book, this is the one!

Three books down the shelf is The (well-worn) Portable Mark Twain, whose keen wit and humor cut through my youthful piety, both religious and patriotic. Huck Finn, included in this volume, I consider the long lost friend I never met. And between Lee and Twain is James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, whose Shangri-La and valley of the Blue Moon cultivated my hunger for the contemplative life.

Worn Volumes 1 and 2 of my Norton Anthology of English Literature remind me of the road not taken as an English major (either as professor, novelist, or poet) yet revisited again and again as a reminder of the ecstatic possibilities of language. And in the center on top of my bookshelves is Shakespeare, a nine volume set published in 1863, less read than revered, symbolic of his many plays and sonnets I read and reread in less fragile editions, also on my shelves.

Less worn but more read than other books on my shelf is Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love, whose anguish I better understood grieving his death and later, grieving the death of what I thought would be a lifelong relationship, and whose more positive entries I reread whenever I need to remind myself that I too am a beloved child of God.

Suffering severe book spine problems are books by Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, Mahatma Gandhi, J. Barrie Shepherd, Anne Lamott, Maya Angelou, and John Boswell. The most fragile of these is Mohan-Mala, A Gandhian Rosary, 366 “pearls of thought” from Gandhi, which I’ve read through daily for as many as a half-dozen years strewn throughout the decades since I acquired it at the Lake Shrine bookstore of the Self Realization Fellowship in California when I was in college. And on the same shelf is Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings and Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life, both frequently consulted.

And I’ve already written of The Temple of God’s Wounds, which I have reread almost every Holy Week since a fraternal worker in India, Rev. John Cole, gave it to me during Eastertide, 1988.

Finally, the Bibles—the most used and worn of all. My clothbound Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version is going the way of Zorba, its binding barely hanging on, curled outward, and its back cover completely detached. Inside, the pages bear underlinings and markings of agreement and disagreement, exclamation points and question marks, a few coffee or wine stains, as well as occasional welts on the thin paper caused when we were caught in an unexpected rain doing our prayers.

I can’t find the exact quote on the internet, so I paraphrase Gertrude Stein: readers have no need of heaven, for they have had books!

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes. Past posts are available in the archive in the right rail on the blogsite. Tax-deductible donations welcome! Please click here. Thank you!

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Why Christians Need Contemplation

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