The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery (The Spiritual Journey, #2)

by David G. Benner

Revelation usually begins, as it did for this woman, by God’s revealing us to ourselves. Only then does God reveal the Divine self to us.

I only know Divine unconditional, radical and reckless love for me when I dare to approach God just as I am. The more I have the courage to meet God in this place of weakness, the more I will know myself to be truly and deeply loved by God.

Genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcomed parts of self.

these unwanted parts of self do not go away. They simply go into hiding.

There is enormous value in naming and coming to know these excluded parts of self.

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

Christian spirituality involves acknowledging all our part-selves, exposing them to God’s love and letting him weave them into the new person he is making.

To truly know something about yourself, you must accept it. Even things about yourself that you most deeply want to change must first be accepted—even embraced. Self-transformation is always preceded by self-acceptance.

And the self that you must accept is the self that you actually and truly are—before you start your self-improvement projects!

Reality must be embraced before it can be changed. Our knowing of ourselves will remain superficial until we are willing to accept ourselves as God accepts us—fully and unconditionally, just as we are.

God’s acceptance of us as we are is not in any way in conflict with Divine longing for our wholeness. Nor is our acceptance of our self. But until we are prepared to accept the self we actually are, we block God’s transforming work of making us into our true self that is hidden in God. We must befriend the self we seek to know. We must receive it with hospitality, not hostility. No one—not even your own self—can be known apart from such a welcome.

However, possessing such information about himself would not have been the same as truly knowing himself. The difference lies in self-acceptance. 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? You can never be other than who you are until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are. Only then can you truly become who you are most deeply called to be.

Some Christians become quite upset at the suggestion that self-acceptance must precede transformation. They argue that self-acceptance is the exact opposite of what we are supposed to do to the parts of self that do not honor God. What we are supposed to do, they say, is crucify them, not embrace them.

But 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. Crucifixion should be directed toward our sin nature. And we must first accept it as our nature, not simply human nature.

Such an important point! I have to see it and confess it as sinful first. I have to even acknowledge that part of me exists! I have to bring the darkness to the light. Acceptance does not always mean agreement, but in this case it means acknowledgment. Ownership.

Only after we genuinely know and accept everything we find within our self can we begin to develop the discernment to know what should be crucified and what should be embraced as an important part of self.

Freud noted that things about ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge are given increased power and influence by our failure to accept them. It is that which we avoid, he asserted, that will most tyrannize us.

Yesss.

Self-acceptance does not increase the power of things that ultimately need to be eliminated. Rather, it weakens them. It does so because it robs them of the power that they develop when they operate outside of awareness and outside the embrace of self-acceptance.

Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves, for no one can give up what he or ...

Before we can become our self we must accept our self, just as we are. Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

We search for a missing spiritual key, but we tend to look for it outside of ourselves where it seems easiest to search. But the key is inside, in the dark.

The secret place where we encounter God in a truly transformational way is in our inner self. Prayer is meeting God in the darkness and solitude of that secret place.

What makes this encounter possible is looking at God looking at us. As we see how deeply loved we are by God—in our depths, complexity, totality and sinfulness—we dare to allow God more complete access to the dark parts of our soul that most need transformation.

The roots of our pretend self lie in our childhood discovery that we can secure love by presenting ourselves in the most flattering light.

The truly spiritual life is not an escape from reality but a total commitment to it.

when our life experiences confront us with things about ourselves that we are unwilling to accept, we call on psychological defense mechanisms to help maintain a sense of safety and stability. While these unconscious strategies help with short-term coping, they block long-term growth.

Ultimately, their function is to protect us from unpleasant truth.

Self-deception occurs automatically. This is part of what psychologists mean when they say that the defense mechanisms operate in the unconscious.

Spiritual transformation involves the purification of sight. Jesus said that if our eye is healthy, our whole body will be full of light (Luke 11:34). We have to learn to see—and accept—what is really there. Stripping away our illusions is part of this process, as it reorients us toward reality. To see God as God is—not as who we want God to be—requires that we see our self as we actually are. For the same cloud of illusions obscures our view of both God and ourselves.

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. And there is all the difference in the world between the two. Sin is a corollary to our primary status as greatly loved children of God. First we were loved into being, created in the good and sinless image of our Creator God. And although sin damaged that which had been utterly good, it allowed us to discover that God’s love is directed toward us just as we are, as sinners.

Real knowing of ourselves can only occur after we are convinced that we are deeply loved precisely as we are. The fact that God loves and knows us as sinners makes it possible for us to know and love our self as sinner. It all starts with knowing God’s love.

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.

being. If all we know about ourselves is the specific sins we commit, our self-understanding remains superficial. Focusing on sins leads to what Dallas Willard describes as the gospel of sin management3—a

Knowing our sinfulness becomes most helpful when we get behind sins to our core sin tendencies. Now we shift our focus from behavior to the heart.

For years he had sought to crucify his sexual desires, being convinced that they were the core of his problem. But rather than crucifying his sexuality, he needed to embrace it, hospitably receiving this very important part of himself and thus allowing it to be integrated within the fabric of the total self.

Are we putting over-emphasis on the flesh? Like any desire that is sinful or any sinful behavior is the flesh that needs to be crucified? What if this sinful behavior needs to be examined more closely instead of avoided before denied? What if that behavior is pointing to a greater need that God wants to fulfill and we miss it because we are just trying to get rid of the behavior.

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.

helping him feel free enough from judgment to risk honesty and awareness.

This is good. People are so quick to judge themselves that they miss learning more about their true self and what they really need.

Sixes need security and are tempted by fear, self-doubt and cowardice. Timothy is a good example of a Six.

Begin with a simple prayer asking God to help you be still. Don’t feel you need to fill your time with words or thoughts; just remain still and believe that you are in God’s presence whether you sense it or not. At the end of the time—not during it—write your experience in your journal. Note your thoughts, reactions and feelings and then give them up to God. The point is not analysis but identification and release. Note them for what they are and then give them to God. Self-knowledge is God’s gift, not the result of your introspection. Remember, this is not self-therapy. It is spending time with God and allowing God to meet you and help you know yourself as you are known.

At the core of the false self is a desire to preserve an image of our self and a way of relating to the world. This is our personal style—how we think of ourselves and how we want others to see us and think of us. I may have an image of myself as rational and careful.

Richard Rohr suggests that the basic question we must ask is whether we are prepared to be other than our image of our self.2 If not, we will live in bondage to our false self.

Something else that we know from experience is how to hide and how to pretend. At some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves.

But of more importance to the development of the false self is the discovery that our ability to hide isn’t limited to what we say or don’t say. We learn to pretend. We discover the art of packaging our self.

we learn how to present our self in the best possible light—a light designed to create a favorable impression and maintain our self-esteem.

Instead of letting the light of Christ shine through us, we try to live in our own light. Which means we have to create it, a false light.

While this might seem quite benign, the dark side of pretending is that what begins as a role becomes an identity. Initially the masks we adopt reflect how we want others to see us. Over time, however, they come to reflect how we want to see our self. But by this point we have thoroughly confused the mask and our actual experience. Our masks have become our reality, and we have become our lies. In short, we have lost authenticity and adopted an identity based on illusion. We have become a house of smoke and mirrors.

The core of the lie that Adam and Eve believed was that they could be like God without God. But without God the most we can ever do is make ourselves into a god.

With the self that is created in God’s likeness rejected, our false self is the self we develop in our own likeness. This is the person we would like to be—a person of our own creation, the person we would create if we were God. But such a person cannot exist, because he or she is an illusion.

Spiritually, attachments serve as idols: we invest in objects and experiences that should be invested only in God.

We hide behind the fig leaves of our false self. This is the way we package our self to escape the painful awareness of our nakedness.

And the more prickly a person you are, the more you are investing in the defense of a false self.