When God Orbits Us
Bishop Robert Barron’s homily for the Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time offered a “deceptively simple image”: either we revolve around God or we try to make God revolve around us. The reading in question is Luke 18:9-14, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.
The ego is meant to revolve around God; not God around the ego.
In that story, Jesus contrasts two men praying in the temple. The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like other people, especially not like the tax collector nearby. The tax collector, meanwhile, stands at a distance, beats his breast, and pleads, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
It might not be immediately clear. It can be deceptive to tell what is circling what. And the same is true in the spiritual order.
In mimetic terms, the difference is one of orientation. The Pharisee’s desire has turned inward; he no longer imitates God’s goodness but performs for God’s approval. He prays “to himself,” as Luke pointedly says, and in doing so he makes himself the model and God the subject, as though divine judgment should orbit his self-image. The tax collector, by contrast, remains subject to God as model, the one true source of being.
René Girard used model and subject to describe the fundamental structure of desire. A subject learns what to desire by imitating a model, someone whose being we find attractive or complete. Desire is never self-generated; it’s always borrowed. When the model is God (as it should be), desire leads upward toward being. When the subject tries to replace the model, rivalry begins, and desire collapses inward.
If God is revolving around me that means that my ego, my life project, my desires, my plans come first. They’re the center of gravity. Everything else is contributing to that or threatening it in some way.
This is the heart of rightly ordered imitation: all desire is desire for being1, and the only stable orbit of the self is around the divine center. When we try to reverse that order, when the ego demands that God confirm its righteousness, we fall into the oldest rivalry of all, the one that began with “you shall be like gods.”
Grace restores the right gravitational field. The Pharisee’s error is not mere hypocrisy but ontological inversion. The tax collector’s humility is not self-loathing but the rediscovery of right relation, the return to the proper orbit.
This quote is specifically from “When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer”, page 12.
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