Search me O Lord.

“Make room in our lives for the Holy Spirit to search through our hearts. We need to make amend in areas where we have been unfaithful in our relationship with Him. The searchlight of the Holy Spirit needs to be lit.” (my father-in-law, pastor Clarence made this plea some time back). 

That plea brings me back to Psalm 139. It reads: “Search me, O God, and know my heart today; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.”

I have written my reflection on the Psalm a few years ago, and this morning, I took a long walk and came full circle with my thoughts. Here it is, revised and updated... 

In this day and age, is religion still relevant as a guide for our  conscience? What does the still small voice of God mean to us? Has science disproved it as a figment of our imagination, or as nothing more than our neurons firing at different modular levels at different times of the day? 

And when we are thinking, when we hear voices in our head, are they voices of someone or some entity outside of us? Or are they just memories and emotions we perceive and store inside of us making their unsolicited presence heard in our head? 

Alas, what is inside us anyway? What is our defining core? Do we even have one common identity thread that runs through our life from cradle to grave? 

Surely, the hearts/minds of men have many compartments. Even he himself has yet to explore them all.

Imagine a mansion with many rooms, many corridors, with basements, hidden chambers, and for some, silent catacombs of our darkest ambitions. Imagine further that each holds a thought captive, a desire bound, a fear chained, a lust caged and a hope pinned. 

It is a labyrinthine (or serpentine network) of conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious thoughts, dreams and pre-formed ideas all sloshing around for attention, selection and retention. 

Imagine again rushing floodwaters beating against the crumbling levee that divides the conscious self from the unconscious self. Lust raging for release. Anger triggered beyond our control. Fear looking to be unleashed. And worries that at times are out of control.  

The search for the real me at any given moment is sometimes as elusive as looking for the "identity" needle in the "unconscious" haystack. As seemingly endless is my fluctuating identity or self, so it is with my appetites, desires and emotions. 

The nuances, the shades of grey, and the fleeting-ness of my emotions, memories and identities all make it almost a herculean task to pin down the real me inside me.

Even so, is there a core me that remains constant throughout my life? Is there the proverbial pearl at the heart of my identity? 

Or am I constantly in a mental state of flux and flow, changing with time, convicted and un-convicted, and at all times, learning and unlearning, whilst maturing, experimenting and developing at different phrases of my life?

Tell me, what keeps a preacher from sin at one moment and falling into one at another? What makes a parent embrace her child with professed affection for all seasons, and at the heat of the moment, torture her child with unbridled anger? How do you explain such extremes? The starkness splits the personhood into two, one destroying the other.

I recall an interviewer once asked writer Margaret Mead to what did she attribute the failure of her three marriages. “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered. “I had three successful marriages, all for different developmental phrases of my life.” 

Well, levity aside, I think the message of a changing self implied in Mead’s sardonic wit is undeniable.

As the world becomes more complicated and cosmopolitan, with increasing cultural assimilations, exploding secular knowledge and unrelenting internet bombardments, our ideas and personalities are undergoing changes in similar, fast-paced direction. 

One academic and epidermiologist Dr Brooke Magnanti commented, “I’d say if you have too healthy an appreciation for who you are, that leaves you open to fossilising yourself. Everything’s open to revision.” 

The truth is, I cannot imagine the same constancy of myself in terms of my ideas, my motivation and my actions over time. And I am not even talking about my physical appearances. 

You see, I would expect the young me to be more impulsive than the middle aged me, and the middle aged me to be more ambitious than the older me, and the older me to be more philosophical than the dying me, and the dying me to be the most forgiving of all the many me before. Indeed, to know what to overlook is the hallmark of wisdom or a soon-to-expire life.

Walt Whitman once said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself. I am large and I contain multitudes." 

I can somehow relate to this multifaceted side of me. And I dread to think how multi-variate and multi-conflicted are the hearts of the double minded, the serial adulterer, the persistent doubter, the machiavellian opportunist, the devious conspirator, the aimless depressed, the troubled suicidal and the conniving sociopath. 

Alas, in the same way that you never step into the same river twice, the river of self is always changing and you are never the same at any one time.

So, when the psalmist says, search me O God and know my heart today; know my anxious thoughts, try me and lead me out of my mental maze, I pray, who is doing the searching? Who is my judge and who is my guide?

Is it the me within as the judge and guide and no one else? Am I talking to myself when I am correcting, reprimanding or congratulating myself? Is the impartial spectator that Adam Smith talks about the real me all along, composed of all the experiences of my past that have molded and remolded me?

Well, science may want to think that duality is an error of Cartesian proportion. That our brain is nothing more than thinking meat. But religion still plays a guiding role in my life, in my mind. It is not readily explainable, but is deeply felt. 

The history of science may not have verified the existence of the supernatural, but you cannot even imagine our history as a whole without also considering the supernatural as a creative force at work, or as a still small voice making itself heard even in the darkest catacombs of our soul.

So, returning to Psalm, let me make the same plea to myself. Let me beseech the Spirit to capture the mental ferret in me and still the restlessness of my thoughts. I implore the Spirit to set an anchorage in my soul and center the bearings of my yearnings. Arrest my thoughts, transform them and make them swim in the direction of your leading. 

Let me not hide from you. Neither make my mind scarce from thy guiding hand. Reach deep into my spirit and make a wellspring of joy, hope and faith to come gushing forth. 

Let all transformations be from the inside out and guard my soul from the carnal influences of this world that aim to change me from the outside in. 

In all this, let your molding and sharpening be deep and not superficial, all pervasive and not limited, enduring and not transient. 

In the end, take me by the hand and lead me in your everlasting way. Amen.