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

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. We think. We consider options. We decide. We act. We doubt. Simple being is tremendously difficult to achieve and fully authentic being is extremely rare.

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.

Self-knowledge that is pursued apart from knowing our identity in relationship to God easily leads to self-inflation.

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.

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.

Relationships develop when people spend time together. Spending time with God ought to be the essence of prayer.

“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 are graven on the palms of God’s hands and never out of the Divine mind. All our knowledge of God depends on God’s sustained initiative in knowing us. We know God, because God first knew us, and continues to know us. Genuine self-knowledge begins by looking at God and noticing how God is looking at us. Grounding our knowing of our self in God’s knowing of us anchors us in reality. It also anchors us in God.

I am convinced that God loves each and every one of us with depth, persistence and intensity beyond imagination. God doesn’t simply like you. Nor does God simply have warm sentimental feelings toward you just because you were created in the Divine image. The truth is that God loves you with what Hannah Hurnard calls “a passionate absorbed interest.”3 God cannot help seeing you through eyes of love. 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. Like the father’s love in the parable of the prodigal son, Divine love is absolutely unconditional, unlimited and unimaginably extravagant.

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. And the more deeply I know this love, the easier it will be to trust it as Christ did—preferring God’s will to my own.

Set the book aside for a moment and reflect on your knowing of God’s love. How much does this knowing form the foundation of your identity? In what ways do you experience Divine love? And how do you know it to be true even when you do not experience it? If you do not like your answers to these questions—or if you feel stuck in this aspect of the journey—tell God how much you long to know perfect love. Pray that God will lead you to someone with whom you can share this desire, someone with the spiritual maturity to journey with you as you seek to know God’s love experientially.

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.

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.

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. Jacob illustrates this type.

We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.

The False Self The True Self Security and significance achieved by what we have, what we can do and what others think of us Security and significance achieved by being deeply loved by God Happiness sought in autonomy from God and in attachments Fulfillment found in surrender to God and living our vocation Identity is our idealized self (who we want others to think we are) Identity is who we are—and are becoming—in Christ Achieved by means of pretense and practice Received as a gift with gratitude and surrender Maintained by effort and control Maintained by grace Embraces illusion as a means of attempting to become a god Embraces reality as the place of meeting and being transformed by God

Jesus gave glory to God by being himself—deeply, truly, consistently. Thomas Merton says that “to be a saint means to be myself.”3 Sanctity is finding our hidden and true self in Christ and living out the life that flows from this self in surrender to the loving will and presence of our heavenly Father. In this, Christ leads many sons and daughters to the Father and to the freedom of being our true self.

Vocation is the older, more theologically rooted word for what we sometimes today refer to as “calling.” Both point us in the same direction—toward a purpose of being that is grounded in God rather than in our self. Our vocation, like our self, can be understood only in relation to the One Who Calls.

The Christian concept of vocation derives its meaning from the belief in “a creator God who molds humanity and all nature with loving intent, seeking the flourishing and fulfillment of all created things.”6 Our calling is therefore the way of being that is both best for us and best for the world. This is what Frederick Buechner means when he states that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”7

We are all called to Christ-following and loving service of God and neighbor. But the specific call that is rooted in your unique identity, gifts and personality will be found as you come to know both God and self in Christian community. To live apart from a sense of calling by God is to live a life oriented simply to our own choices about who we want to be and what we want to do. Calling brings freedom and fulfillment because it orients us toward something bigger than self.

Our call, like Jesus’ call, is to live out our life in truth and in dependence on the loving will of the Father. As was the case for Jesus, the discernment of this call must always involve wrestling with God, our self and the devil in the solitude of our private wilderness. And as for Jesus, this discernment must always occur in the light of our present life circumstances. This means that attentiveness to God’s call is a lifelong matter.

God meets us in our individuality because God wants to fulfill that individuality. God wants us to follow and serve in and through that individuality. God doesn’t seek to annihilate our uniqueness as we follow Christ. Rather, Christ-following leads us to our truest self.

God’s will for us is that we live out the harmonious expression of our gifts, temperament, passions and vocation in truthful dependence on God. Nothing less than this is worthy of being called our true self. Nothing less than this will lead to our deepest fulfillment. And nothing less than this will allow us to show the face of Christ to the world that we have been called from eternity to show.

The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ. This is the reason that the self that embarks on the journey of Christ-following is not the self that arrives. The self that begins the spiritual journey is the self of our own creation, the self we thought ourselves to be. This is the self that dies on the journey. 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.”