The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

by David G. Benner

In all of creation, identity is a challenge only for humans. A tulip knows exactly what it is. It is never tempted by false ways of being. Nor does it face complicated decisions in the process of becoming. So it is with dogs, rocks, trees, stars, amoebas, electrons and all other things. All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him. Humans, however, encounter a more challenging existence.

Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

As we shall see in what follows, there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ. But the uniqueness that comes from being our true self is not a uniqueness of our own making. Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.

true knowing of our self demands that we know our self as known by God, and true knowing of God demands that we know God not just as an abstraction or as objective data but in and through our lived experience.

Thomas à Kempis argued that “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning,”

Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.

it is also quite possible to be stuffed with knowledge about God that does nothing to help us genuinely know either God or self. Having information about God is no more transformational than having information about love.

Theories and ideas about God can sit in sturdy storage canisters in our mind and do absolutely no good. If you doubt this, recall Jesus’ harsh words for the religious leaders of his day who knew God’s law but did not know God’s heart.

To truly know love, we must receive it in an undefended state—in the vulnerability of a “just as I am” encounter.

Truly transformational knowledge is always personal, never merely objective. It involves knowing of, not merely knowing about. And it is always relational. It grows out of a relationship to the object that is known—whether this is God or one’s self.

The things we know from experience we know beyond belief. Such knowing is not incompatible with belief, but it is not dependent on it.

People who have never developed a deep personal knowing of God will be limited in the depth of their personal knowing of themselves. Failing to know God, they will be unable to know themselves, as God is the only context in which their being makes sense.

Deep knowing of God and deep knowing of self always develop interactively. The result is the authentic transformation of the self that is at the core of Christian spirituality.

“we cannot attain the presence of God. We’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”

But nothing is more dangerous than presuming that we already see when we do not.

Transformational knowing of God comes from meeting God in our depths, not in the abstraction of dusty theological propositions.

fifteen minutes at the end of each day for the next week to do the following. First, take your journal (or something on which you can write) and find a quiet place where you can sit undisturbed. Select a Gospel account of one event in the life of Christ. After a brief prayer inviting God to allow you to imaginatively enter this experience and encounter Jesus, spend five minutes daydreaming on the passage. After thanking God for the gift of time spent with Jesus, ask for help in reflecting on your day in order to better discern Divine Presence during it. Allow the events of the day to replay before you. Accept whatever comes into focus, no matter how trivial it initially appears to be, as a gift from God. Ask for help to discern Divine Presence in the experience. End your time by thanking God for gifts received during this process.

Personhood is not an accomplishment; it is a gift.

Any other identity is of our own making and is an illusion.

That’s not completely true. On the one hand, we see that God created the world and said what he had done is good. He created human beings in his image with the ability to create. There is nothing wrong with a human being creating some and then saying “this is good.” What we make of ourselves is more complex than simply “this is the way God made us.” Certainly, how God uniquely gifts us in once factor. However, the influence of our families and culture also play a part, and most importantly we all have a God-given responsibility to make of ourselves what WE want to pursue. God uses and redeems that, even if it is less than perfect. This is important and seemingly missing here.

J. I. Packer correctly captures the priority in all this knowing: “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me.”

We know God, because God first knew us, and continues to know us.

Hmm. I believe the Bible says we LOVE God because He first loved us. Never does it say we know God because he first knew us.

I am convinced that God loves each and every one of us with depth, persistence and intensity beyond imagination.

I like and agree with this.

God cannot help seeing you through

eyes of love.

I despise when people say “God cannot help but...” If this is true, then something outside of God is greater than God and controlling him. That’s heresy.

Even more remarkable, God’s love for you has nothing to do with your behavior. Neither your faithlessness nor your unfaithfulness alters Divine love in the slightest degree.

“The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart. And the Lord said, “I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing—all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. I am sorry I ever made them.” Genesis‬ ‭6:5-7‬

The problem is that there are important aspects of our experience that we ignore. Many of us, like the woman mentioned in chapter two, refuse to face our feelings of shame. They make us feel too vulnerable. So we pretend they do not exist and hope they will go away. Or it may be our broken and wounded self that we try to deny. When we do so, however, these unwanted parts of self do not go away. They simply go into hiding. If, for example, I only know my strong, competent self

and am never able to embrace my weak or insecure self, I am forced to live a lie. I must pretend that I am strong and competent, not simply that I have strong and competent parts or that under certain circumstances I can be strong and competent. Similarly, if I refuse to face my deceitful self I live an illusion regarding my own integrity. Or if I am unwilling to acknowledge my prideful self, I live an illusion of false modesty.

Powerful conditioning in childhood encourages us to acknowledge only the most acceptable parts of our self.

Any hope that you can know yourself without accepting the things about you that you wish were not true is an illusion.

Until we are willing to accept the unpleasant truths of our existence, we rationalize or deny responsibility for our behavior.

If God loves and accepts you as a sinner, how can you do less?

attempts to eliminate things that we find in our self that we do not first accept as part of us rely on denial, not crucifixion.

It is that which we avoid, he asserted, that will most tyrannize us.

The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self—the real me.

Some people are highly skilled in deceiving others. However, their duplicity pales in comparison with the endlessly creative ways in which each and every one of us deceives our self.

To see God as God is—not as who we want God to be—requires that we see our self as we actually are.

Daily experience impresses upon me the painful fact that my heart has listened to the serpent instead of God. As James Finley says with brutal honesty, “There is something in me that puts on fig leaves of concealment, kills my brother, builds towers of confusion, and brings cosmic chaos upon the earth. There is something in me that loves darkness rather than light, that rejects God and thereby rejects my own deepest reality as a human person made in the image and likeness of God.”

Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong—or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner.

Real knowing of ourselves can only occur after we are convinced that we are deeply loved precisely as we are.

For it to be meaningful, knowing ourselves as sinners must involve more than knowing that we commit certain sins. Sin is more basic than what we do. Sin is who we are. In this regard we could say that sin is fundamentally a matter of ontology (being), not simply morality. To be a human is to be a sinner. It is to be broken, damaged goods that carry within our deepest self a fundamental, fatal flaw—a flaw that masks our original creation goodness and infects our very being.

Spiritual transformation does not result from fixing our problems. It results from turning to God in the midst of them and meeting God just as we are. Turning to God is the core of prayer. Turning to God in our sin and shame is the heart of spiritual transformation.

Something else that we know from experience is how to hide and how to pretend.

We also learn to cloak hate with apparent love, anger with apparent calm, and indifference with apparent sympathy.

So what theme? Let kids take their hate and anger to their logical ends? While I’m sure you have a broader point here, this statement alone doesn’t stand or meet with common sense.

But without God the most we can ever do is make ourselves into a god.

Basil Pennington suggests that the core of the false self is the belief that my value depends on what I have, what I can do and what others think of me.

Because it is hollow at the core, the life of a false self is a life of excessive attachments.

We think of our attachments as anchors of well-being. We feel good when we are surrounded by what seem like innocent indulgences and think they secure a state of pleasure that would not be ours without them. In reality, however, they sabotage our happiness and are hazardous to both our spiritual health and our psychological health.

One of these is defensiveness.

Some people bristle easily if they are not taken seriously, thus betraying a need for others to see the self-importance that is so obvious to them.

our compulsions.