Sick of Myself

I love St. Augustine for his ability to capture in a few words a deep sense of an interior spiritual condition:

non ego vita mea sim: male vixi ex me, mors mihi fui: in te revivesco.

"May I not be my life: I have lived badly my way and have been death to myself: in You I will grow to live again." (Confessions, XII:X)

I myself am the worst enemy of my peace and spiritual joy, and only by losing this false self in the best of friends, God, can I even begin to live.

"It is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily, you yourself do now know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is preventing you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself." ~Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 112.