I’ve been terribly busy lately – it’s tapping season, the busiest time of year on a maple farm – and I haven’t had time to write down the long thoughts I’ve been having, but one of the themes in my mind has been an examination of the idea of self-sufficiency or self-reliance. I’ve long thought that this is where the Transcendentalists went wrong, and I still find it’s a common theme when people ask me about my life. They like the idea of self-sufficiency. In my mind I think, “there would be nothing worse than true self-reliance, nothing more inhuman than self-sufficiency.” I feel I have the opposite – a constant burning for something outside of myself, which nature does in part satisfy, but only because it is so beautiful and so alive. I want to be able to contribute as well as desire – that’s my version of this form of pride – but I know I’m not out for self-sufficiency. Not long ago I put a new sparkplug in my generator, and as I took it out of its box I looked at it. I could have labored on it for months and never been able to make such a marvellous thing. It cost three dollars. I was an infinite distance from self-sufficiency, and I didn’t mind. I then came across the following thing of beauty from the pope emeritus:
“The depths we call hell man can only give to himself. Indeed, we must put it more pointedly: Hell consists in man’s being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient. It is the expression of enclosure in one’s own being alone. . . . Hell is wanting only to be oneself; what happens when man barricades himself up in himself. . . . As fulfilled love, heaven can always only be granted to man; but hell is the loneliness of the man who will not accept it, who declines the status of beggar and withdraws into himself.” –Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity”
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