The Gift of Being Yourself - part 2

The following are excerpts from my readings over the sabbatical. They address the need we have to know ourselves. This may sound like a pursuit of self-absorption. Read on and see what you think. These excerpts come from David Benner’s book, The Gift of Being Yourself.

Focusing on sins leads to what Dallas Willard describes as the gospel of sin management – a resolve to avoid sin and strategies to deal with guilt when this inevitably proves unsuccessful. But Christian spiritual transformation is much more radical than sin avoidance.
(65)

Discovering our core sin tendencies is helpful because it lets us deal with our problems at their root. But even more than this, it is helpful because discovery of our core sin tendencies will inevitably fill us with such despair and hopelessness that we will have no option but to turn to God. 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.
(67)

Everything that is false about us arises from the belief that our deepest happiness will come from living life our way, not God’s way.
(75)

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. Initially it often takes the form of a simple lie – frequently a denial of having done something. 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 repackaging our self.

In short, 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.

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.

Nothing other than truth is strong enough to dispel illusion. And only the Spirit of Truth can save us from the consequence of having listened to the serpent rather than God.
(78-79)

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.

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.

. . . what we get when we choose a way of being that is separate from God is the life of the lie. It is a lie because the autonomy that it promises is an illusion. We do not become free of God by a disregard of Divine will. Instead, by such disregard we forge the chains of our bondage.

What we get when we choose a way of being that is separate from God is the life of the false self.

The false self is the tragic result of trying to steal something from God that we did not have to steal. Had we dared to trust God’s goodness, we would have discovered that everything we could ever most deeply long for would be ours in God. 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.
(79-80)

Basing identity on an illusion has profound consequences. Sensing its fundamental unreality, the false self wraps itself in experience – experiences of power, pleasure and honor. Intuiting that it is but a shadow, it seeks to convince itself of its reality by equating itself with what it does and achieves. 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.

Because it is hollow at the core, the life of a false self is a life of excessive attachments. Seeking to avoid implosion and non-being, the false self grasps for anything that appears to have substance and then clings to these things with the tenacity of a drowning man clutching a life ring. One person might cling to his possessions, accomplishments or space. Another may cling to her dreams, memories or friendships. Any of these things can be either a blessing or a curse. 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.”
(81)

We think of our attachments as anchors of well-being. We feel good when we are surrounded by what seem like innocent indulgences and think they secure a state of pleasure that would not be ours without them. In reality, however, they sabotage our happiness and are hazardous to both our spiritual health and our psychological health.

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 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 our fig leaves with garments of durability and beauty (Genesis 3:21). Yet we cling to our fig-leaf false self. We believe that we know how to take care of our needs better than God.
(82-83)

Touchiness dependably points us to false ways of being. And the more prickly a person you are, the more you are investing in the defense of a false self.

The things that bother us the most about others – our pet peeves – also point toward falsity in our own self.
(83-84)

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.

Having first created a self in the image of our own making, we then set out to create the sort of god who might in fact create us. Such is the perversity of the false self.

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.
(88-89)

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.
(91)

Jesus did not merely accept the identity that others offered him. Had he done so he would have, like us, been pulled in many different directions.

But he did not look to the expectations of others to understand who he was. Instead he looked to his relationship 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.” 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.
(95)

The way of the true self is always the way of humility. Pride and arrogance move us toward our false self, but humility and love allow us to live the truth of our being.

(98)

Too often we think of God’s call (or our vocation) solely in terms of what we do. People speak of being called to the ministry or feeling called to work in healthcare or teaching. However, while doing will always be involved, vocation is much more than our occupation. It is the face of Christ we are called from eternity to show to the world. It is who we are called to be.
(101)

The self is not God. But it is the place where we meet God. There can be no genuine spiritual transformation if we seek some external meeting place. God’s intended home is our heart, and it is meeting God in our depths that transform us from the inside out.

In Christian spiritual transformation, the self that embarks on the journey 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.”
(103)