16th August 2009 - "Are We Self-Made?"

Revd. Canon Dr. Alan Winton -St Peter's, Tewin
Exod. 2.23-3.10; Heb.13.1-15

We sometimes hear people declare themselves to be self-made men or women. It tends to be people who believe that they have had very little by way of privilege in their upbringing but who have gone on nevertheless to make a big success of their lives, usually, it seems, success of the financial kind. I don’t know how the expression makes you feel, but it always seems to me to be a touch arrogant to think of yourself as self-made: you soon discover if you look more closely that most people’s success is dependent on the hard work, support and cooperation of others.

I remember some years ago going to visit the house where the artist Vanessa Bell lived at Charleston in East Sussex. She was the sister of Virginia Wolf and one of the so-called Bloomsbury Group of painters, writers and thinkers who lived in the early twentieth century. She lived at Charleston with her husband Clive Bell, with Roger Fry and the artist Duncan Grant, with whom she decorated the house beautifully. And their lives there were marked by visits from many of the great people of the period like Virginia Wolf, E.M.Forster and Maynard Keynes. It was a house of huge achievement and distinction.

We picked up a postcard while on our visit, a painting that Vanessa Bell had done: it was of the maid who kept house for them and the painting was called simply ‘The Kitchen’. Tellingly, the maid’s name – I think it was Mary - didn’t even make it on to the title of the painting. And yet the success and achievement of the people who lived in that house and visited as guests was built on the hard work and support of their house keeper, Mary, who made their food, washed their clothes and cleaned for them, so that they had the leisure in which to pursue their art and writing. As the writer of Ecclesiasticus says in a very knowing verse: “The wisdom of the scribe depends on the opportunity for leisure”.

In my view, no-one is really self-made: who we are and what we achieve is worked out in relationship with others – the people who raised us and educated us, colleagues we work with, people whose labour frees us to do the things we want or need to do, a whole host of people with whom our lives are connected and upon whom we depend.

And the Psalmist who wrote Psalm 100 didn’t really have a lot of time for the idea of the self-made man or woman: he said this, “be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that has made us and not we ourselves”. In part that verse may be an example of the Psalmist’s frequent rejection of idolatry, making clear which way round things are. In contrast to ‘the nations’ who worship gods that they have themselves made out of wood or silver or gold, we are the people who worship a God who made us.

But we need to think for a moment about what exactly is meant by that claim. When the Old Testament talks of God making us, it tends not to be referring back to creation, but to the calling of God’s chosen people. Israel was made by God in the sense that he called his people and set them apart and gave them a vocation to be the vehicle through which God’s blessing would come to all the nations.

In theological terms also then we are not self-made, we are given our identity by God, we are called to live in relationship with the God who loves us and makes us who we are.

In fact, the whole of this short but beautiful Psalm is an expression of this idea that we should recognise that our lives are best lived in relationship with the God who called us and calls us, and the simplest way in which we give expression to that belief is when we praise God – praise is turning out from ourselves, from our self-obsession towards the

God who made us and loves us.

One writer on the Psalm put it like this: “A life without praise is more likely a life turned in on itself. It is a life of autonomy and self-invention, which imagines that one is self-made, need answer no other and can rely on no other. Such a notion of self-groundedness is a pervasive temptation …. But this Psalm is an acknowledgement that life is a gift. Life is always and regularly to be referred back to the giver”.

So we are not self-made, and we are not to be self-praising, pleased with ourselves for our great achievements, but we should recognise that it is God who makes us, and that our lives will come to their deepest fulfilment as we live out that conviction. For the Psalmist, our lives, our identity, our sense of who we are, is above all else the gift of God.

But the conviction that we are self-made runs very deep in our society. This is why politicians go on and on about the importance of choice, and great effort goes into enacting policies that maximise people’s choices. Having the freedom to choose and, in some measure, create your own life, is far better than living under an oppressive regime that leaves you no personal freedom, and far better than living under the poverty of opportunity that leaves no choice. So there are things to celebrate in living lives that allow us to make choices for ourselves.

But there are also dangers in placing personal choice at the very top of our list of factors that make our lives what they are, that make life worth living.

About ten years ago now, the issue of assisted dying was being debated in the States, as it is much in the news today in this country. A group of distinguished philosophers were asked to contribute their thoughts. Their view, expressed in a written submission to the Supreme Court, was that the best way to live and die is to do so deliberately, autonomously, in a way that enables us to view our lives as our own creations. In their view, the best lives are led by those who see themselves not as participants in a drama larger than themselves but as authors of the drama itself. In the context of the debate about assisted dying they said “Most of us see death as the final act of life’s drama, and we want that last act to reflect our own convictions”.

Their view was that people should have the right to end their life if they chose, because a

self-made life is the best life, and therefore that those who help in such acts, should not be punished. The matter of how we view ourselves, how we see our identity being formed, touches important questions, questions of life and death in fact.

If we go along the path of exalting the idea that we are self-made people whose identity is formed primarily by our own deliberate choices, then there is some logic to the way of reasoning expressed by the distinguished philosophers. But the Psalmist challenges us to think whether our lives are best described and conceived of as simply the product of our own choices? What about the connections we have with other people: those upon whom we depend or those who depend on us; those who love us and care for us and need us? Are we free simply to choose to end our lives because we wish to retain control, we wish the drama of our lives to be essentially our own creation?

The Psalmist writes that it is God who has made us, not we ourselves. Here is a claim that our lives are part of a drama bigger than simply our own choices, our desire for control and autonomy. The Psalmist would argue, I think, that we are made not simply by our own choices, but also more profoundly by God’s choice of us. That is the gift that underlies our lives. And if our lives are ultimately given to us and shaped for us as a gift from God, are we free to control them right to the end?

I realise that these thoughts don’t say all that would have to be said about a subject as important and sensitive as the debate about assisted dying, and there would be much more to be said about the pastoral dimension of this question alongside the straightforwardly ethical.

But this lovely little Psalm, a simple hymn of praise to God, has got me thinking about a vitally important question that has implications in many areas of our lives. Who do I think I am? Is it right to think of ourselves as self-made, primarily the product of the choices we have made, the risks we have taken, the opportunities we have seized? Or can we accept that life is at the deepest and most significant level a gift that we receive from God, not ours to live as we please, or to end when we please, but something to be cherished and enjoyed, directed to God’s praise, even if there may be times, when life is simply something to be endured.

Are we right to view the drama of our lives as ultimately of our own creation, or does faith require us to see ourselves within a much bigger drama, the direction of our lives determined by something much more even than our own choices. What will it mean for us to see our lives as a gift from God, for the Psalmist wants us to believe and to live by the claim that “it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves”. Amen.