I Spy

AM Psalm 30, 32 • PM Psalm 42, 43
Exod. 25:1-22 • Col. 3:1-17 • Matt. 4:18-25

In today’s reading from the Epistle to the Colossians, Paul (or someone writing as Paul) tells the Colossians:

“But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”

The matter of language is tied up with one’s old self and one’s new self. And one’s new self is expressed through Christ. Or, put another way, Christ is expressed in the new self.

What Paul calls “the new self” is, I would suggest, what Richard Rohr calls the “true self.” The false self is what we may develop from infancy—to cry or laugh, to play the bully or the court jester, to cajole or brutalize, in order to get what we want. The true self, on the other hand, is the self that God wants us to be. Rohr writes:

“Your ‘false’ self is how you define yourself outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After you have spent many years building this separate, egoic self, with all its labels and habits, you are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t you be? It’s all you know. To move beyond this privately concocted identity naturally feels like losing or dying.”

Rohr credits Thomas Merton with developing the idea of false self and the necessity for it to die. Merton did this, says Rohr,

“to clarify for many Christians the meaning of Jesus’ central and oft-repeated teaching that we must die to ourselves, or ‘lose ourselves to find ourselves’ (Mark 8:35).”

I have just finished watching, for the umpteenth time, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley, a movie I appreciate more and more with each viewing. The movie is based on John le Carré’s 1974 novel of the same name, called by some to be the greatest spy novel of all time. Purists (my father among them) may insist that the 1979 BBC 7-part series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley is more true to the book than the 2011 movie. I’ve seen and admired that series, but the movie is excellent in its own way.

One of the great themes of spy literature is “who do you trust?” In trusting someone else, do we trust that person’s false self? Do we trust with our own false self?

Tinker Tailor (as my father called it) presupposes that though the line between good guy and bad guy may be blurry, the Brits (and thus “The West”) are the good guys, and the Soviets are the bad guys. In the film, the Soviets lie because they are bad. The Brits lie because it is in the service of the good. I will not enumerate the entire list in Tinker Tailor of who is lying to whom, but suffice to say that the Soviet mole in the highest echelons of the British Secret Service lies to everyone else in the Service in order to protect his identity as a Soviet spy. George Smiley and his protegé, Peter Guillam, must lie in order to catch the mole. They accomplish their mission—and temporarily save the British Secret Service—by projecting a false self in the service of the good.

A trope in some spy literature is that we use our “false self” to engage the other so often, that it becomes even more difficult to determine where our false self ends, and our true self begins. To perhaps oversimplify, can we remain good guys if we choose to masquerade as bad guys? Such is also a recurring trope in movies about police officers taking illegal drugs to get close enough to drug dealers to put them out of business. (See for example the 1991 film Rush starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric).

Paul’s false self dies on the road to Damascus so that he can become the person that God wants him to be. It would be lying to say that in dealing with students, colleagues, friends, and loved ones, I have never projected a false self. But regardless of whether or not I see myself as a good guy, that false self could hurt somebody. Maybe even myself. I don’t think I would be a very good spy. Real life is hard enough.

Work Cited: Rohr, Richard. “Losing Myself to Find Myself”. Center for Action and Contemplation. cac.org.

Written by James Gamble

James Gamble is enjoying Ordinary Genius by Kim Adonnizio, and hopes he is learning something about writing poetry.