On a shop window, two words: Second Hand. Inside, clothes that once hung on other shoulders, walked other roads, and now wait to be worn again. There is nothing wrong with a worn garment. The wrong begins when the man himself comes to resemble the window: thoughts taken from others, desires taken from others, faith, purpose, even sorrow taken ready-made. Only the name on the label is still his.
You can wear nothing but new clothes and still be second hand on the inside.
The first garment taken from someone else
The first borrowed desire was in Paradise. The fruit had always been there, and Eve had not desired it until a foreign voice described it to her: „Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). The desire no longer sprang from within her; another had placed it in her soul. She began to want what the serpent wanted her to want.
Here lies the root of the second-hand man. When God’s gaze ceased to be his measure, the gaze of the other took its place, and ever since man has conducted himself by the eyes around him.
The Fathers call this sickness vainglory (kenodoxia). Evagrius observes that it requires a witness, unlike pride. St. Maximus the Confessor goes deeper, to self-love (philautia), from which all the passions are born. From it springs the need to be seen, then to be seen in a certain way, then to become whatever looks good when seen. St. Paul puts it harshly: „If I were still pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ”(Galatians 1:10).
What those who studied man without seeking God have said
Philosophy and psychology have described the same wound without being able to heal it.
• Heidegger says man lives as „one says,” „one does,” „one wears” (das Man): in the name of a „they” he does not know and who answers for nothing.
• Kierkegaard writes that the crowd is untruth. Not because it is always wrong, but because no one in it answers with his own face.
• René Girard shows that we desire after the model of another. We do not desire a thing because it is good, but because someone else desires it.
• Winnicott names the false self: the mask made so that we may be accepted, which ends by adhering to the face and replacing the face.
• Fromm sees in modern man a „marketing orientation”: he offers himself as merchandise, keeps his „packaging” in good condition, and measures his worth by how much he is in demand.
• Asch’s experiments showed that many people will contradict their own eyes rather than stand alone in a correct answer.
These descriptions are exact, but their remedy, „be yourself,” is a command without a foundation. For who are you, if you have no one from whom to receive your being?
The adult
The second-hand adult does not have an opinion, only a subscription to opinions. He thinks what he read this morning, is outraged as everyone is outraged, and has a career he entered because that was what was „fitting.” He has copied a definition of success too, and ran after it until he arrived, and then discovered it was not his.
The quietest and most dangerous second hand is inherited and unembraced faith. You can go to church because your parents went, know the prayers because everyone knows them, and speak „theologically” without ever having stood before God for a moment with your own name. Christ does not put „a piece of new cloth on an old garment” (Matthew 9:16): faith is not patched onto a soul that has not been lived.
The young person
Today’s young person receives an identity before he has sought one. The endless stream of faces tells him what to wear, what to desire, what to hate, how to suffer and how to show that he suffers. The „I” has become an image project, and loneliness has moved in front of an audience. Daily he compares himself with hundreds of „not-me”s, cleaned, retouched, selected, and each time he loses a match he never started himself.
Psychology calls this social comparison. The Fathers call it vainglory, with one difference: in their day the gaze belonged to a village, today it belongs to the whole world, and the craving for the gaze knows no satiety.
The child
The child faces another danger, and the fault is the adults’. He first sees himself in the parent’s eyes, and from there learns whether he exists and how. Winnicott called the face that bends over the infant a mirror. If in the mirror he sees only a project, an unfulfilled ambition of the grown-ups, or a quiet bought with a screen, he learns that he is loved for what he does, not for what he is.
A child does not do what he is told, but what he sees. If the adults live second hand, he learns this language as his mother tongue. „Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble…”(Matthew 18:6): the greatest stumbling block is not the bad word, but the borrowed life held up as the norm.
But not everything received is second hand
Here every hasty judgment falls. Orthodoxy is itself tradition(paradosis), something received. „Remember your leaders… and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7). St. Paul can say: „Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
The difference is seen in Elisha. Elijah’s mantle fell to the ground, but Elisha did not ask for the mantle; he asked for „a double portion of your spirit” (2 Kings 2:9). When he struck the waters with it, he did not strike with a garment, but cried out: „Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” A garment taken from a saint without the saint’s Spirit is second hand. The same garment taken with its spirit is tradition.
So two questions arise:
• Who stands behind the garment I wear?
• Does this garment make me more like Christ, or more like the crowd?
The price and the robe
The market puts a price on man. Christ puts another price: „Not with perishable things such as silver or gold were you ransomed, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18-19). Man cannot be sold a second time, neither to the crowd, nor to the gaze, nor to his own image. He was bought once, and what has been ransomed may no longer offer itself cheaply.
For the Fathers, the image of God in man is never lost, for it is his very being. It is darkened, stained, covered. The likeness, however, is wounded and lost through sin, and in Christ it is restored. The second-hand man has covered his image with borrowed images.
In the parable of the prodigal son, the father does not give his son just any garment, but „the best robe” (Luke 15:22), literally the first robe. Not a worn one, nor a refurbished one, but the first, the original radiance of the image. The first robe is not bought in a shop; it is received from the Father, from the one who waits at the gate.
The way out
The market promises refurbishment: wipe away the traces, change the label, set another price. The Gospel asks for something else, repentance (metanoia), the changing of the mind. „Put off the old man… and put on the new” (Ephesians 4:22-24). It is not recycling. It is death and resurrection.
What is to be done each day, without technique and without tricks:
1. Silence. For Abba Moses, „the cell will teach you everything.” If you cannot sit for a moment alone with yourself, a borrowed life is holding you.
2. Guarding the mind (nepsis): to notice whose thought it is. If it comes from the crowd, from fear of the gaze, from the pride of appearing, do not follow it.
3. Prayer, and above all the Name of Jesus. Then you stand before the only Gaze that does not use you but loves you.
4. Confession and the spiritual father: the mirror in which you see yourself as you are, not as you appear.
5. Care for the little ones: do not give them a borrowed face, but help them find the face God has given.
Questions for the inner room
• What do I truly believe, and from whom did I take it?
• What do I want, and would the desire remain if no one could see me?
• What do I do only in order to be seen?
• What do I fear more: God or men?
• What would remain to me if praise, titles and image were taken away?
• What do I show the children about who I am: a face or a mask?
The second-hand shop is not an enemy. It is a mirror. Whoever looks into the window may see his own life there, as in a reflection. And if he no longer fears what he sees, he can begin the road back toward the First Robe.
