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

by David G. Benner

Threes need to be successful and are tempted to deceit, as they do whatever they have to do to avoid failure and appear in the best possible light.

Fours need to be special and are tempted toward envy, escapist fantasy and a com...

Fives need knowledge, long for fulfillment, and are tempted by greed, stinginess ...

Sixes need security and are tempted by fear, self-dou...

Sevens need to avoid pain and are tempted by gluttony...

Eights need power, self-reliance and opportunities to be against something and are tempted by lust, arrogance and the des...

Nines need to maintain emotional peace and avoid initiative and are tempted by laziness, comfortable illusions...

complete knowing of our self in relation to God includes knowing three things: our self as deeply loved (dealt with in chapter three), our self as deeply sinful (the focus of this chapter), and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored (which will be explored in chapter six).

We develop what Thomas Keating calls a personal emotional program.1 This is our plan for coping with life and achieving happiness. It is our best guess about what we need to do in order to feel good about our self. It is our strategy for meeting our basic needs for love, survival, power and control.

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.

The Challenge of Authenticity

some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves. Initially it often takes the form of a simple lie—frequently a denial of having done something.

While this might seem quite benign, the dark side of pretending is that what begins as a role becomes an identity.

In short, we have lost authenticity and adopted an identity based on illusion.

For God had created them in the Divine image and wanted them to be like God.

The core of the lie that Adam and Eve believed was that they could be like God without God.

James Finley puts it this way: Any expression of self-proclaimed likeness to God is forbidden us, not because it breaks some law arbitrarily decreed by God, but because such an action is tantamount to a fundamental, death-dealing, ontological lie. We are not God. We are not our own origin, nor are we our own ultimate fulfillment. To claim to be so is a suicidal act that wounds our faith relationship with the living God and replaces it with a futile faith in a self that can never exist.

The false self is the tragic result of trying to steal something from God that we did not have to steal.

Trying to gain more than the everything God offers, we end up with less than nothing. Rejecting God, we end up with a nest of lies and illusions. Displacing God, we become a god unto our self. We become a false self.

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.

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.4 Thomas Merton describes this as “winding experiences around myself . . . like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.”5

life of excessive attachments.

They are a blessing when they are held in open hands of gratitude. They become a curse when they are grasped in clenched fists of entitlement and viewed as “me” or “mine.”

reality, however, they sabotage our happiness and are hazardous to both our spiritual health and our psychological health.

Attachments undermine our freedom, making our contentment and joy dependent on their presence. If

Anything that is grasped is afforded value beyond actual worth, value that is ultimately stolen from God.

Ultimately, attachments are ways of coping with the feelings of vulnerability, shame and inadequacy that lie at the core of our false ways of being. Like Adam and Eve, our first response to our awareness of nakedness is to grab whatever is closest and quickly cover our nakedness. 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.

The problem with the false self is that it works. It helps us forget that we are naked. Before long, we are no longer aware of the underlying vulnerability and become comfortable once again. But God wants something better than fig leaves for us. God wants us to be aware of our helplessness so we can know that we need Divine help. God’s deepest desire for us is to replace ...

leaf false self. We believe that we know how to take care of our n...

Recognizing Your F...

One of these is defensiveness.

The things that bother us most about others—our pet peeves—also point toward falsity in our own self.

Another clue to the nature of our false self is the pattern of our compulsions.

We know this to be true because we have a record of some of those temptations. Pennington suggests that the well-known account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11) is best understood as his struggles with three major potential false selves.7

Jesus knew who he was in God. He could therefore resist temptations to live out of a false center based on power, prestige or possessions.

Coming out of Hiding

Every moment of every day of our life God wanders in our inner garden, seeking our companionship. The reason God can’t find us is that we are hiding in the bushes of our false self. God’s call to us is gentle and persistent: “Where are you? Why are you hiding?”

Coming out of hiding is accepting God on God’s own terms. Doing so is the only route to truly being our unique self-in-Christ. If this is your desire, take a few moments to do two things. First, ask God to help you see what makes you feel most vulnerable and most like running for cover. It may be conflict. Or perhaps it is failure, pain, emotional upset or loss of face. Allow yourself to feel the distress that would be present if you did not avoid these things. Then, listening to God’s invitation to come out of the bushes in which you are hiding, step out and allow God to embrace you just as you are. Second, prayerfully reflect on the image of your self to which you are most attached. Consider how you like to think about yourself, what you are most proud of about yourself. Ask God to help you see the ways you use these things to defend against feelings of vulnerability. And then ask God to prepare you to trust enough to let go of these fig leaves of your personal style. There is an alternative to the false self. And it takes less energy and work. The way of being that is based on our life in Christ is a way of truth that leads to our vocation and to our deepest possible fulfillment.

The true self is who, in reality, you are and who you are becoming. It is not something you need to construct through a process of self-improvement or deconstruct by means of psychological analysis. It is not an object to be grasped. Nor is it an archetype to be actualized. It is not even some inner, hidden part of you. Rather, it is your total self as you were created by God and as you are being redeemed in Christ. It is the image of God that you are—the unique face of God that has been set aside from eternity for you.

We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God. For as I have said, in finding God we find our truest and deepest self.

The self we find hidden in Christ is our true self, because Christ is the source of our being and ground of our true identity (1 Corinthians 15:22).

All children first find themselves in relation to their parents. Jesus would have been no different. Mary was, of course, a woman apart from all others—“highly favored” by God and “of all women . . . the most blessed” (Luke 1:29, 42). Her humble surrender to the will of God—“let what you have said be done to me” (Luke 1:38)—set the stage for Jesus’ own learning of life lived in relation to God. And over time, Jesus undoubtedly began to internalize Mary’s steadfast confidence in the trustworthiness of God’s love. Over time Jesus would have also absorbed Mary’s deep conviction that he was the “Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32). He would have grown up hearing the stories of the remarkable events of his birth and early years. He would have heard of the visits of the shepherds and wise men, and of the prophecies of Simeon and Anna on the day he was circumcised. He would know that his family viewed him as the promised and long-awaited savior, the Christ who would bring salvation to Israel and light to the pagans (Luke 2:32).

And he was beginning to understand that this latter, most fundamental aspect of his identity was the soil out of which his calling was to emerge.

The clarity of thought and action that would later characterize Jesus’ public ministry came from his years of preparation in solitude and anonymity. The core of that preparation was meeting God in the secret place of his inner self. It was through meeting God in places of solitude that Jesus discovered his identity and grew in intimacy with God.

Jesus gave glory to God by being himself—deeply, truly, consistently. Thomas Merton says that “to be a saint means to be myself.”

But identity is not static. It always gives direction to how we live our life. The discovery of our true self does not simply produce freedom. It also generates vocation.

The self that arrives is the self that was loved into existence by Divine Love. This is the person we were destined from eternity to become—the I that is hidden in the “I AM.”