Musings: Which is bigger, you or the situation?

In the interest of growing in selflessness and in service to one's fellow humans, the Catholic Church and other conservative Christians quote the Bible to say that "I [the self] must grow lesser, so that he [Christ] may grow greater" -- and this is true, as far as it goes. Yet Christian beliefs become overspiritualized and spread too thinly when they are considered apart from their roots in Judaism and in human life itself.

A faith-based emphasis on sacrifice and service is meant to counter the natural human tendency to be selfish. However, applying these principles stringently to persons who are already largely religious or moral becomes akin to whitewashing a mime. The holier-than-thou crowd actually forgets what it's like to be "mere fallible mortals" (because they have no real wish to be). These more conservative believers see themselves as God's pedagogues to humanity's children, who need to be alternately patronized and castigated for their brutish behavior.

Moreover, turning the other cheek and playing the patsy will pointedly earn you failure in the professional and in most public and private spheres -- proof further that Judeo-Christian morality is a compass to guide one's steps, not to be confused with a map that predetermines them. We all bear God's imprint in our personality, our imagination, and our will. It is God's will that we learn to cooperate with him and with those who do likewise, not abandon our will or initiative wholesale.

If we look around us, those persons who are doing an excellent job at practicing their humanity as well as exercising their divinity are the ones who are doing well. God doesn't want us to be a nothing, a cipher, or an automaton merely programmed to enact his bidding -- if for no other reason than this: Without seizing personal responsibility for discerning and choosing what God's will is for one's own life, a person is going to end up accepting someone else's interpretation of what God's will is.

Besides, look to any saint or martyr: Their person and will may grow lesser in relation to the growth of God's person within, but they themselves are growing even as God within them is growing. Christ is using algebra in that scripture, not simple math. Clearly any faith-filled witness who faces a trial even unto death is not becoming lesser or asymptotically approaching zero; he or she is hyperbolically soaring towards a celestial infinity of confidence in Christ. Without God, yes, we diminish; but once our reality is symbiotically linked to God's own life -- with God, yes, we grow greater than even the situations that formerly confined us.