The search for the real self is central to our journey, wrote Daniel O’Leary. And finding our real self means we have to face our shadows. ‘In facing one’s shadows, one begins to know truly the light of one’s soul.’

‘We resist the call into our own mystery,’ he writes, ‘our own depths. We fear further hurt by unknown demons in the barren places. We rightly suspect that our wounds are deeper than we think – and often hitched to each other all the way back to childhood. It truly is the uncomfortable place we would rather not go. But something tells us it is necessary.’

And he quotes Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest, who tells us we must live our wounds through instead of thinking them through. ‘It is better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, to let them into your silence. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.’

‘Instead,’ says Father O’Leary, ‘we cover the hurts of our hearts with the bandages of the mind. We bury our painful emotions and think that they are dead. We forget that our presence and personalities are profoundly influenced and shaped by these underground and often violent realities. We live and act out of the invisible shadow-world that turns silently, within us. Pain needs light. Nothing heals in the dark.’

We grow by dying, he writes. ‘There is no other way. In this dying we recognise the false face we’ve grown used to, the daily lies we tell, the thoughts and deception that crowd our minds, the infidelities we do not commit only because we might get caught, the lovelessness of our lives parading as shallow compassion, our collusion with conformity, our fear of beauty and big dreams.’

We die to self, he says, when we sacrifice the ego of our vanity for the essence of our truest being. ‘This is the dying that daily scrapes the self-renewing fat of pride from the ribs of our soul, bringing a fearless inner lightness and clarity. When the eye is unblocked, the Buddhists tell us, the vision is sure.

‘This is the liberating dying that puts the truth in our eyes, the resonance in our voice, the power in our presence, the depth in our listening. Since we are now all connected up inside, our heart is no longer divided. Rinsed and cauterised, all that is unauthentic is zapped from our infected being. When the small gods go, God arrives. Heaven, in the end, is where we belong.’

An extract from Finding Your Hidden Treasure

© 2010 Benignus O’Rourke OSA

Published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd

© Photo: Ian Wilson OSA

Get the book: www.theaugustinians.org