Dragonslaying XIII

The Dragon That Does So Much Good, and No Good at All

“There is a loss because of glory, and there is a man who raises his head from a humble estate.” Wisdom of Sirach 20:11

“Babe! Come here. Quick! Can you see this!?”

I was standing in front of the mirror when I noticed it: a sliver of forehead that had not previously been part of my life. Maybe a quarter inch. Maybe less.

It didn’t matter.

I knew.

I was approaching 35 and prided myself on my Samson-like locks. During our touring days with our little rock band, I’d allowed my lush brown tresses to cascade past my shoulders and was excited about future Pantene commercials and the like. I felt like I single-handedly pioneered the hippie-man-bun thing a full decade before the trend swept the internet in the 2010s.

Both grandfathers were bald as boiled eggs. My dad wore unkempt, sparse vestiges of random gray shrubbery atop his skull. My younger brother had begun losing his hair in his early twenties.

Poor guy, I had always thought.

Despite all evidence, and genetics to the contrary, I had looked at every bald man in my family and concluded: not me.

This particular morning was the beginning of the end.

Within a year I was cutting my hair short.

Day by day, I watched a U-shaped cul-de-sac grow, working its way from the front of my skull toward the back. About five years ago I quit trying altogether, grabbed the BIC, and shaved it to bare skin. I have been as bald as a baptized baby ever since.

The comforts of those nearest and dearest have failed to uplift my devastated heart since the loss.

"Dan, just stay in shape, tan, and you look great."

This, my wife's loving admonition, bound by vows made when I had hair. I get it. A pasty white cue ball atop a love-handled, fluffy body is not exactly Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

“Honestly, Dan, you’ve got a great head for baldness. Nice and round. No weird dents.”

My friend’s generous assessment of my skull’s symmetry. This from a guy whose only hair concern is an overly zealous cowlick sabotaging his impeccable side part.

“Just think, now Jesus has fewer hairs to account for on your head.”

That one was me, giving myself a theological chuckle while reading the gospel accounts of the Lord’s precise knowledge of every hair on every head in all the world.

Now, I recognize, dear reader, that in the full accounting of the human plight in this life, going bald should barely register.

And yet here I am.

Still grieving.

Not just the hair. Something larger and more potent.

My glory.

The hair was part of who I was. A crown of sorts. It added weight to my sense of self.

The loss of the hair was the loss of glory.

John Cassian, the fifth-century monk who catalogued the demons that plague the human soul, would have recognized this grief immediately.

He called it cenodoxia: vainglory.

An incessant starvation for the good opinion of others. The need to be seen and admired. The anxiety we experience when the image we have constructed of ourselves begins to go thin.

Cassian studied this dragon and found that it does not confine itself to any single room of the soul. It pervades every nook and cranny of the human psyche.

Vainglory doesn’t die. It shapeshifts and lurks in all that we do and desire.

One moment it’s about your hair. The next, your ministry. Your reputation. Your legacy. That mirror on an ordinary morning was just showing me where this particular dragon was making its kill in this particular way on that particular day.

And it has continued to kill, in a million other ways, through all of my days thereafter.

Etymological Clarity

Vain comes from Latin vanus: empty, hollow, without substance.

It is the root of vanitas, the word Jerome used when translating Qohelet’s famous refrain in the book of Ecclesiastes: vanitas vanitatum.

Vanity of vanities.

The Teacher was not calling us conceited. He was calling us hollow.

Vain doesn’t mean proud. It means void.

Glory comes from the Latin gloria: fame, renown, the bright regard of others.

But the biblical concept runs deeper than the Latin. The Hebrew kavod, which gloria is pressed into service to translate, means literally weight or heaviness. Glory, in the scriptural imagination, is substance. It is what God has, and what God shares. To behold God’s glory is to encounter something with genuine mass and gravity.

Which makes the compound devastating.

Cassian’s term is cenodoxia: kenos (empty) plus doxa (glory, opinion, reputation).

The hunger for the weight of regard without the substance to back it. Jerome renders it vana gloria: vanus chasing gloria, weightlessness posing as weightiness.

Vainglory is the pursuit of a shadow of a substitute.

We want substance. We settle for reputation. And reputation, it turns out, evaporates in a mirror on an ordinary morning when you notice your hairline has begun its long retreat.

We want weight. But what we derive significance from things that register as almost nothing on the scale.

The word itself is the diagnosis.

Insignificant Significance.

Weightless Weight.

Hollow Applause.

Empty glory.

The terrible danger of vainglory is how lightly it arrives. Its first touch is a feather on the soul, barely perceptible, almost pleasant. But feathers accumulate. And one morning we wake up unable to move, pinned down under tons of vainglorious need.

Why We Need Glory

The temptation here is to chastise ourselves for such vapid need.

Resist that impulse.

Underneath vainglory is a cosmic weight we were designed to carry, a glory we were built to inhabit.

We arrive in the world with one urgent need: to be seen. Before language, before applause or accolades, an infant turns toward the caregiver, searching for eyes that recognize it.

The progenitor of attachment theory, John Bowlby, called this biological necessity. Neuroscience names the chemical cocktail we thirst for: oxytocin, dopamine, mirror neurons that light up when we are beheld. Curt Thompson puts it plainly: we are not just psychologically shaped by being seen. We are neurologically formed by it.

The need for glory is structural. It goes all the way down into every fiber of our physical, and metaphysical being. Because underneath the neuroscience is theology.

The imago Dei tells us we are made by and for a God who is himself a community of mutual beholding, Father and Son and Spirit eternally knowing and being known. Psalm 8 says we were crowned with glory and honor. We were made to be seen, to feel weighty. The need is not a disease, it is the design.

From the beginning, the full weight of God’s attention rested on Adam and Eve. Their identity was unadulterated, rooted in the Father’s love, and in turn they gave glory back to Him. That was lost at the Fall. Shame entered, and with it the frantic scramble for covering. Cenodoxia is what happens when our hunger for attention is ripped from its true source and redirected toward any face that will look back.

We were made for the weight of God’s regard. In its absence we reach for anything that feels like it. We clothe our innate sense of shame and smallness in the applause of people. Cotton candy. Sweet, immediate, and gone in a breath, leaving us emptier than before.

“My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:13

The crowds, the peers, the platforms: fickle sources, all of them. Their regard evaporates. Their approval, no matter how much of it we accumulate, never quite reaches the place in us that need it.

We cannot get enough.

We will never get enough.

Our souls were designed to be satisfied with forever.

The Glory We Were Made For

Framed by Genesis, the pursuit of glory is not sinful.

It is what we were made for.

Sanctification, or as the Eastern traditions name it, theosis, is the return to that original glory: bodies, hearts, minds, and souls receiving again the bestowal of God’s beauty and pleasure. Being weighed down by him. Given gravity. Given significance in His sight.

This is what Jesus prayed for on the night before he died.

“Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us... I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.” John 17:21-22

The weightiness, the delight, the love the Father bestows on the Son: given to us in Christ. The whole of the Christian life is a turning from the empty glories of this world toward the eternal satisfaction of the Father’s delight.

Paul clung to this like a drowning man in the midst of his sufferings:

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Romans 8:18

There is a glory coming that makes every craving for applause look like what it is: a child eating sand when a feast has been prepared.

Vainglory Does Good

Here is where Cassian’s discernment was so very incisive.

His most penetrating insight was that vainglory often produces genuine good in the world. He watched his monks: their diligence in study, their rigor in fasting, their commitment to community. All of it admirable. Much of it driven by vainglory. The monks were performing for each other. Seeking acclaim from the brothers.

And so it goes with us.

From the small child praised for putting her toys away, to the pastor whose sermons have changed someone’s life, to the CEO who turned an organization around, good things are done through vainglory.

God, in his infinite grace and wisdom, brings genuine fruit through our desperate efforts to feel weighty in this world.

Vainglory does not diminish the good done through us. It simply diminishes the soul’s capacity to receive something weightier than the applause of fellow dirt balls who will all return to the dust.

The good we do for the world can be motivated by vainglory.

The good that comes to the soul must come from God alone.

For Cassian, the wound beneath the vice was a driving sadness, a despair in the soul aching for weight and stability. Vainglory is anxiety in disguise, always scanning for an audience, always performing, never resting in the one who has come to indwell us.

The Curated, Weightless Self of Modernity

We have given rise to the curated self: an empty myth we present to the world. The number of likes on a post determines the weight of a life. We have taken inward virtue and turned it into exterior performance, signaling to everyone within the algorithms range that we have value because of what we’ve done or what we’ve said. We have transformed our souls into brands to be marketed from platforms.

Here is an uncomfortable truth: it is precisely readers like you and writers like me who are most aggressively consumed by this dragon.

The creatives. The thoughtful. The students and the teachers.

We are the ones most thoroughly possessed.

How can I say such a thing?

Even as I write on vainglory, I am desperate to be applauded for it.

And, if and when, the applause doesn’t come, my soul is left with a sense of meaningless emptiness. And for those of us shaped by this dragon, this feels like death. And, if and when, the applause does come, it arrives like thunder, and within seconds it is gone, leaving us emptier than before and in need of more.

The terrifying thing about vainglory is not that it makes us look bad. It’s that it makes us look good, right up until the moment it destroys us.

Jesus challenged those who drew weight from the watching world rather than from God himself.

The Pharisees were not hypocrites because they were wicked. They were hypocrites because they were desperately, tragically addicted to glory from men, and when the true weight of God showed up in the body of a Galilean carpenter, they could not receive it. Their cups were already full of something lighter. They chose their applause over their Messiah.

“How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?”

The question was a warning for the Pharisees to flee a dragon that would not only consume their souls, but drive them to crucify the very source of glory they longed for.

But from that cross, Jesus gives back what we lost in the garden: our weight, our worth, our glory. The cross he asks us to carry is not meant to crucify the need to be seen. It is meant to crucify the performance. To kill the curated, empty self built on other curated, mythic selves perceptions. To let the truest, heaviest, most beautiful version of who we are rise from the ground and live as we were always meant to live.

The Cure Is A Secret

The cure Cassian prescribed is still the cure today.

Flee into the desert. Literally and metaphorically.

Take time to disappear into secret, hidden places where only God sees you. Curate a personality in obscurity that has weightiness and significance to it, alone and unseen, in the unending love of God.

Jesus was unambiguous in Matthew 6. Pray in a closet with the door shut. Let your face look bright while you fast. Keep your left hand ignorant of your right hand’s generosity. This was the King saying: Let my glory rest on you. Let my approval satisfy you. Turn from the empty praise of human beings.

Live small.

Live secret.

Live hidden.

Pray prayers no one sees.

Give gifts no one knows about.

Fast without wearing it on your face.

The desert fathers had a word for this practice: apatheia, not indifference, but freedom from the tyranny of the passions. Including the passion to be seen. We cannot perform our way into this freedom. We can only stop performing long enough to be found by the one who has been looking for us all along.

“Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.” Psalm 34:5

My glory days are in the rearview mirror. The monk’s tonsure atop my head confirms it. But something so much better than hair has been offered: a life of true weight, true worth, true glory, in the sight of the one whose applause is the only applause that lasts.

Age has a way of doing what we refuse to do ourselves.

Something about losing the hair, the speed, the ease, the youthful plumage, forces a reckoning with where I actually derive my worth. The body stages an unstoppable intervention. It takes things from you until you are forced to ask what remains.

What remains is what was always there.

A Father whose gaze has not moved. A Son who prayed that the glory given to him would rest on me. A Spirit who has made his home inside me, not because of what I have achieved or how I look or how many people read these words, but because I am His and He is glad about it.

“The LORD your God is in your midst... he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” Zephaniah 3:17

This is the weight of glory, landing on us, right now, in whatever obscurity we find ourselves in today.

This week: Each morning before you open your phone, before the metrics and the notifications and the performance begins, sit in silence for two minutes. Read Zephaniah 3:17 out loud. Pray one sentence: Father, your delight is enough. Then go live your hidden, beautiful, weighted life.

Identify one thing you do that is driven, even partly, by the need to be seen. It might be your posting. Your serving. Your generosity. Your praying. Choose to do it once this week in secret. Tell no one. Offer it to God as an act of anti-performance. Notice what the silence feels like. Let the Father’s pleasure be enough.

At the end of each day, ask yourself: Who did I perform for today? Bring the honest answer to God in prayer without explanation or apology. Just name it. Let him look at you in your actual condition. That look, the Father’s unhurried, unimpressed, utterly loving gaze, is the beginning of the cure.

May you be seen and signifgant in heart, mind, and soul. May the glory of God rest upon you, weighing you down in goodness and grace.

Believe the truth.

I am weighty and full and significant and alive in the eyes of my Father forever and that is what I want more than anything else.

(...and I hope to have my hair back in my resurrected body!)