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There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself. and if I find my true self I will find Him. Thomas Merton
Finding that unique self is, as noted by Thomas Merton, the problem on which all our existence, peace and happiness depend.2 Nothing is more important, for if we find our true self we find God, and if we find God, we find our most authentic self.
Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.
Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.
Thomas à Kempis argued that “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning,”1 and Augustine’s prayer was “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.”
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. John Calvin wrote, “Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.”3
transformational knowing.
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.
Personal knowing, on the other hand, is based on experience. It is therefore subjective. I know that my wife loves me because of my experience of her. While I can describe her love to someone else, I cannot prove it. I cannot make it objective. Yet this does not detract from the validity of my knowing.
Knowing God’s love demands that we receive God’s love—experientially, not simply as a theory. Personal knowledge is never simply a matter of the head. Because it is rooted in experience, it is grounded in deep places in our being.
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. Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God. For such persons, ideas about God provide a substitute for direct experience of God.
Knowing God and knowing self are therefore interdependent. Neither can proceed very far without the other. Paradoxically, we come to know God best not by looking at God exclusively, but by looking at God and then looking at ourselves—then looking at God, and then again looking at ourselves. This is also the way we best come to know our selves. Both God and self are mostly fully known in relationship to each other.
Deep knowing of God and deep knowing of self always develop interactively.
Revelation is fundamental to the Divine character. God longs to disclose to us.
But “God has no more stopped being Revelation than he has stopped being Love.”
Because God is love, God can only be known through love. To know God is to love God, and to love God is to know God (1 John 4:7-8).
Knowing God also requires surrender.
But Divine self-revelation was made complete in Jesus. To know Jesus, therefore, is to know God (John 14:9). Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15 nrsv). Thus he is the filter through which we need to pass all our ideas about God as we seek to move from knowing about God to meeting God personally in Jesus.
A second extremely rich resource for spending time with God is the discernment of Divine Presence in daily experience.
The omnipresent God whose name is Immanuel is not distant but nearer to us than we can imagine. God is not alien to the circumstances of our lives but comes to us in them. Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.8
Richard Rohr reminds us that “we cannot attain the presence of God. We’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”
Whether we realize it or not, our being is grounded in God’s love. The generative love of God was our origin. The embracing love of God sustains our existence. The inextinguishable love of God is the only hope for our fulfillment. Love is our identity and our calling, for we are children of Love. Created from love, of love and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from Divine love. Neither knowing God nor knowing self can progress very far unless it begins with a knowledge of how deeply we are loved by God. Until we dare to believe that nothing can separate us from God’s love—nothing
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anyone else to us (Romans 8:31-39)—we remain in the elementary grades of the school of Christian spiritual transformation.
Christ presents a particularly poignant contrast to this. His identity was defined by his relationship to his Father. This was who he was. His whole life flowed out from this. What he did was not the basis of his identity but rather pointed to who he was: “The works my Father has given me to carry out, these same works of mine testify that the Father has sent me” (John 5:36).
At his baptism, Jesus had heard a Divine declaration of love for him as the Son with whom God was well pleased (Matthew 3:17).
Moving truths such as “God loves me” from our head to our heart is often difficult. It is possible, but only as we journey with others. The God who is Divine community is known only in human community. Deep knowing of perfect love, just like deep knowing of ourselves, demands that we be in relationships of spiritual friendship.5 No one should ever expect to make the journey alone.
There is enormous value in naming and coming to know these excluded parts of self. My playful self, my cautious self, my exhibitionistic self, my pleasing self, my competitive self and many other faces of my self all are parts of me, whether I acknowledge their presence or not. Powerful conditioning in childhood encourages us to acknowledge only the most acceptable parts of our self. And parts of self that are not given a place at the family table become stronger, not weaker. Operating out of sight and beyond awareness, they have increasing influence on our behavior.
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 do this, we must be willing to welcome these ignored parts as full members of the family of self, giving them space at the family table and slowly allowing them to be softened and healed by love and integrated into the whole person we are becoming.
Deep knowing of self gives opportunity for deep knowing of God, just as deep knowing of God gives opportunity for deep knowing of self. It turns out just as John Calvin said it would be.
Self-acceptance and self-knowing are deeply interconnected. To truly know something about yourself, you must accept it.
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!
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.
If God loves and accepts you as a sinner, how can you do less?
Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves, for no one can give up what he or she does not first possess.6 Jesus puts it this way: “If you’re content with simply being yourself, you will become more than yourself” (Luke 18:14 The Message).
Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.
We are all much more like Nasrudin than we like to acknowledge. 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. Jesus said, “When you pray, go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place” (Matthew 6:6). 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.
Knowing the depths of God’s personal love for each of us as individuals is the foundation of all genuine self-knowledge.
The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self—the real me. But, master of delusion that I am, I have trouble penetrating my web of self-deceptions and knowing this real me. I continually confuse it with some ideal self that I wish I were. The roots of our pretend self lie in our childhood discovery that we can secure love by presenting ourselves in the most flattering light. A little girl hides her hatred of her brother because she knows that she should love him. This lack of integrity is then reinforced by her parents, who commend her loving
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In short, we learn to fake it, appearing as we think important others want us to be and ignoring the evidence to the contrary.
Self-deception occurs automatically. This is part of what psychologists mean when they say that the defense mechanisms operate in the unconscious. It is also part of what theologians mean when they speak of original sin.
of reaction formation:
rationalization
denial
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.
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. The sequence is important. We must never confuse the secondary fact with the primary truth.
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.
but in fantasy he sought ways of experiencing intimacy that did not make the demands on him of a real relationship.
Treated like the enemy, his sexuality had begun to function like the enemy. But once he accepted that he was not a sexual monster, just a normal male with normal sexual needs, his sexual needs seemed to recede in strength and prominence.
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.
Twos need to be loved and needed, and their competence in making this happen sets them up for pride.
