I have been reading Thomas Merton’s “No Man Is An Island” and toward the last part of the book he describes a man he names the “proud solitary” who has no personal core. He is hollow and living in fear he will be discovered and exposed for what he is.
“Maddened by his own insufficiency, the proud solitary shamelessly seizes upon satisfactions and possessions that are not due him, that can never satisfy him, and that he will never really need. Because he has never learned to distinguish what is really his, he desperately seeks to possess what can never belong to him.
In reality, the proud solitary has no respect for himself because he has never had an opportunity to find out if there is anything in him worthy of respect. Convinced that he is despicable, and desperately hoping to keep other men from finding it out, he seizes upon everything that belongs to them and hides himself behind it. The mere fact that a thing belongs to someone else makes it seem worthy of desire. But because he secretly hates everything that is his own, as soon as each new thing becomes his own it loses its value and becomes hateful to him. He must fill his solitude with more and more loot, more and more rapine, seizing things not because he wants them, but because he cannot stand the sight of what he has already obtained.
These, then, are the ones who isolate themselves above the mass of other men because they have never learned to love either themselves or other men. They hate others because they hate themselves, and their love of others is merely an expression of this solitary hatred.
Having no true solitude and, therefore, no spiritual energy of his own, he desperately needs other men. But he needs them in order to consume them as if in consuming them he could fill the void in his own spirit and make himself the person he feels he ought to be.
Last Sunday we read the account of the Philippian jailer and I remembered Merton’s description of the man concealing a guarded secret whose release would destroy him. The jailer had something similar in his charge to lock Paul and Silas in the inner cell ensuring they could not escape. If they did, his life was over because there were no excuses for failure. It’s not uncommon to find people today for whom failure is fatal.
But, for me, the essence of the story is what happens after an earthquake releases what we have spent our lives hiding and threatens to expose us.
I’ve often thought about our having those interior maximum security places in our own lives. There are things we lock away in the inner cell where it remains hidden. But, what do we do when that which is locked up securely gets loose and the things we feared the most actually happen? What happens when that prisoner breaks free in an earthquake?
For some, it destroys them or their careers. The hidden past or the secret life suddenly emerges and wrecks them. How many more illustrations do we need for career-destroying behavior than we have seen in the last several weeks? You may have followed the story of Josh Duggar, the star of the show “19 Kids and Counting” and director of a program for the Family Research Council. He admitted to molesting four of his siblings when he was a teenager.  Lance Armstrong hid his doping for years but in 2012 was banned from sanctioned Olympic sports for life and his seven Tour wins were voided. These are what I would call personal earthquakes. They are invisible fault lines in a personality that suddenly snap and expose the broken foundations of their lives.
I believe the earthquake in Philippi was not to release Paul and Silas but to shake the very foundations of the jailer’s life. Paul was already free. It was the jailer himself who was in chains.
With what questions do we come to the Lord when those prisoners we have guarded with our lives get loose? Those questions become the basis of a new life if we will let them.
“Sir, how do I face my wife and kids?”
“Sir, how can I ever trust anyone again after this betrayal?”
“Sir, how can I get through this?”
“Sir, is there a place I can hide?”
I think we have partly over spiritualized the jailer’s question. He was not just asking a theological question but the most practical and urgent question in the world. How can I live through this and not have to kill myself and my family? How can I survive? But Paul answers the question below the obvious, the question that is deeply buried in the fear of everyone keeping something prisoner in the inner cell.
How can I be as free as you are?