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

by David G. Benner

Startling sentences jump out to inscribe themselves in our memory and continuously call us forth into truth: Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives. Created from love, of love and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from Divine love. If God loves and accepts you as a sinner, how can you do less? Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation. We believe we know how to take care of our needs better than God. We all tend to fashion a god who fits our falsity. We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God. Jesus is the True Self who shows us by his life how to find our self in relation to God. Our happiness is important to God. —just to list a few.

Identity and Authenticity

(Matthew 10:39).

Still, Christian spirituality has a great deal to do with the self, not just with God. The goal of the spiritual journey is the transformation of self. As we shall see, this requires knowing both our self and God. Both are necessary if we are to discover our true identity as those who are “in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:17), because the self is where we meet God. Both are also necessary if we are to live out the uniqueness of our vocation.

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 bein...

There is, however, a way of being for each of us that is as natural and deeply congruent as the life of the tulip. Beneath the roles and masks lies a possibility of a self that is as unique as a snowflake. It is an originality that has existed since God first loved us into existence. Our true self-in-Christ is the only self that will support authenticity. It and it alone provides an identity that is eternal.

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.

expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. 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.

one Transformational Knowing of Self and God

To suggest that knowing God plays an important role in Christian spirituality will not surprise anyone. To suggest that knowing self plays an equally important role will set off warning bells for many people—being perhaps just the sort of thing you might expect from an author who is a psychologist, not a theologian.

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. John Calvin wrote, “Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.”

The consequences have often been grievous—marriages betrayed, families destroyed, ministries shipwrecked and endless numbers of people damaged.

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

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.

It would be more accurate to say that he believed God is forgiving but did not know this as an experiential truth.

For example, you may know that Earth orbits around the sun or that Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492 without direct personal experience of either, provided you are willing to accept the testimony of others. This is how it is with much of what we believe.

Personal knowing, on the other hand, is based on experience. It is therefore subjective.

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.

Peter’s Transformational Knowing

At this point this knowing was a belief—a hope based on the conviction of his brother and his own brief contact with Jesus.

In short, he had encountered his weakest and most despicable self, and he was likely filled with self-loathing.

What might Peter tell us at this point about his knowing of God and himself? I suspect he would have first said how little he had truly known either himself or Jesus prior to this. With regard to Jesus, I suspect he would repeat with amazement how forgiving Jesus was. What he had known as objective information from witnessing Jesus’ encounters with others, he now knew deeply and personally. And I am sure he would have spoken of his new level of readiness to follow the Christ

whom he now knew in his heart, not just his mind.

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.

many of us know God less well than we know our casual acquaintances. Too easily we have settled for knowing about God. Too easily our actual relationship with God is remarkably superficial. Is it any surprise, then, that we haven’t learned very much about our self as a result of this encounter?

two Knowing God

J. I. Packer suggests that knowing becomes increasingly complex as we move from knowing objects to knowing people and from knowing people to knowing God: “The more complex the object, the more complex is the knowing of it.”

is personal knowing—knowing that begins with belief but is deepened through relationship.

Many of the things we know about God we know objectively, accepting them as facts on the trusted testimony of Scriptures and the community of faith. These ground our more personal knowing, serving as an anchor in times of doubt and a frame of reference for making sense of our experience.

As valuable as this objective knowing is, Packer reminds us that even “a little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about Him.”3

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). The Christian God is known only in devotion, not objective detachment. This is why Paul’s prayer is that we may know the love of Christ and so be filled with the utter fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19). This is transformational knowing.

Knowing Jesus

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.

all of this objective knowing was dramatically enhanced as Peter came to know Jesus. His two epistles are filled with personal knowing of God that came from spending three years of his life with Jesus.

Consider just a few of the things he learned, found in his first epistle: God is the source of new life and a living hope that is based in the resurrected Christ (1 Peter 1:3) God is the source of a faith that is more precious than gold (1 Peter 1:7) God is a fountain of inexpressible joy (1 Peter 1:8) God judges with fairness and impartiality (1 Peter 1:17) God allows us to share Christ’s sufferings as a way of knowing Jesus through identification (1 Peter 4:12-13) God is faithful and can be trusted to do what is right (1 Peter 4:19) God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble (1 Peter 5:6)

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

However, as it is usually practiced, prayer is more like a series of email or instant messages than hanging out together. Often it involves more talking than listening. It should not be a surprise that the result is a superficial relationship.

But how do we actually do this? We do it by means of Spirit-guided meditation on the Gospels.

Meeting Jesus in the Gospels

I seem to have trouble letting the Spirit enrich the picture by adding other sensory details in the way he does for others.

Drifting thoughts reflect the way God made our brains to follow pathways of associations, so don’t allow yourself to get upset when this occurs.

Another struggle for me was the feeling that meditation was a waste of time.

productivity and efficiency miss the point. What God wants is simply our presence, even if it feels like a waste of potentially productive time. That is what friends do together—they waste time with each other. Simply being together is enough without expecting to “get something” from the interaction. It should be no different with God.

Gospel meditation is gazing on Christ.

Meeting God in the Events of Life

Paul Stevens describes such a spirituality: “If God has come in the flesh, and if God keeps coming to us in our fleshly existence, then all of life is shot through with meaning. Earth is crammed with heaven, and heaven (when we finally get there) will be crammed with earth. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost. Nothing secular. Nothing absurd. . . . All are grist for the mill of a down-to-earth spirituality.”7

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.”9 This is the core of the spiritual journey—learning to discern the presence of God, to see what really is. But nothing is more dangerous than presuming that we already see when we do not.