People affect us. Just the other day, I was having coffee with a friend. The conversation was normal nothing deep or convoluted, no self-examination or interpersonal analysis going on. It was just an easy conversation and an easy-going chat, as comfortable as an old beloved T-shirt. In it I had a little revelation. The revelation was, “I enjoyed the conversation.” But it was not a conversation that would normally raise one to enjoyment, nothing romantic or deeply emotional, nothing to cheery or festive. If I could compare the enjoyment to anything, it would be like the feeling of a fresh cool breeze after being in the sun one moment too long. It was a little life in my life. There are those people that bring us back to life in little ways. Somewhere in there words you hear the echo of hope once forgotten. And you remember, breathe deep the air of hope and live again.
Thomas Merton in an essay from “Love and Living” writes, "the world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it." Merton writes of those people that are fully alive. What he means by that is those people that are fearless to communicate without trying to control the conversation in any particular direction. In this way they open the door to a perceived realness and authenticity that is refreshing. My friend is one of those people.
The church is to be a place of such conversations. And a society filled with such people. But sadly many people never make it to such a place of such personal development. Often they are stunted at the point of social integration, closing there hearts off by closing there circle of friends to a fixed number. This often results in what I call a round shaped social group. Often the only way into such a group is to find the key person that has influence over the group and make them your friend. What results from that friendship is a wider acceptance by the group. They let you in for you come in through the person of influence (the key master). Such groups are not just always a little bit polarizing to the larger community and I think a bit pretentious and personally inconvenient. They also are a large hindrance to the moral development of all in the group.
Lawrence Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental theory of moral reasoning informs us of this fact. In brief, Kohlberg suggests that the journey towards moral maturity progresses from an egocentric, "preconventional" moral orientation (based on punishment and reward), through a "conventional" orientation of interpersonal approval and maintenance of the social order, and ultimately to a Personal "postconventional" orientation of universal ethical principles. In Christian terms, I like to say we grow from “Ego” to “WE” to “For His Glory”. As you can see such circle shaped groups often stop the development of its members at the level of the “We”.
Many end up living from a faults self, a person that is not truly who God remade them to be. The faults self is a mask or better like being an actor. It is mostly based on learned behaviors of conformity to our social group and constructed based on the perceived expectation and taboos of the group. This can be good or bad depending on how close the group’s perceptions come to the biblical ethic. Yet it never goes far enough. All we learn is a procedural morality. So you could say, it is fear of man at its moral best! A person can do all the right things based on external control and never follow from the heart. The heart or true self is left untouched and under cared for. Further in such groups we learn that we can fake it. We learn that people don’t really know us and we should not risk social shame. This is because there is no grace when such groups do accountability. It just becomes sin management. We can hide behind the faults self, the mask of what they think we are. Many learn manipulative techniques and are confined to living from manipulation. Whole ideas of discipleship have been formulated about such manipulation covered over by and sanctified with words like intentional conversations and purposed interaction.[1] Such group dynamics amount to a social jail of sad lifeless people of little vision and much less care for those outside the group. A people that hate the unknown and often define themselves in negative terms, that is I’m not like you. Our want to appear as a certain type person biblically ends at Jesus yet more is legally added and that confines many to a lifeless life of acting out the desires of trying to attain a particular group’s approval.
The alternative is God’s plan of a U shaped group that is open to new people and welcoming towards others, seeing them as interesting as an undiscovered country-side. Simple curiosity and understanding of the universal human condition are all one needs. Theologically put it is a living from the love of God by people that have embraced God’s love on a real lived level. It is practical and honest: the foundation for humility, humor, and hope. Such real people can pick on one another without malice intent, make silly jokes and act 12 years old without loosing a touch of their maturity. They can enjoy conversation about silly things like coffee and TV shows. Such conversations become spiritual, life and real by the fact that they are talked about by a real person made real in the lived security of God’s love. All this can be unconscious, Love under the radar, unknown even to the person and in my friends’ case it was unknown and it was Beautiful!
Becoming a True Self
In circle shaped groups the true self is stifled and often fearfully repressed. But what do I mean by the true self. I do not mean self knowledge for that is cut through with deceptions confusions and all kinds of problems brought on by being people of sinful selfish natures. Nor is it the sum of ones experiences, the treasure of one who has undertaken a journey of self exploration. That is nothing more than self-indulgence for what is kept and what is forgotten is decided by a self centered in itself living out of either pride or insecurity.
The true self is the heart in faith hope and love. Our heart is our passion; that is our purposes and visions, our hopes and dreams. The part of us that calls us to better aspirations than lust and deeper commitments than social conformity, that center of the soul eternally standing in God’s presence, before God’s eye and the place humanity stands alone has to report only to God.[2]
It is the hard learned facts of who you are before God, with God, In God, on a journey back to God. Our knowledge of our true self is always in process. It is learning through repentance and through learning God illuminated by the Spirit. We learn in repentance that I am something and then we give what we know of ourselves to what we know of him. In short, the true self is a self in God’s love. Samuel told David’s Dad that “Man looks on the outer appearance (faults self) but God looks at the heart (true self).” God sees our true self. We are never unknown to God, we can not hide. And yet God in the full knowledge of who we are still loves us, For God so loves the world that he gave his son so we may have life. It is in this Face to face Love that we experience intimacy. Intimacy is being fully known and still fully loved. God’s Love when embraced can make you open in little ways to be daring, open and risky in how you live towards others. People that God has made to experience, embrace, and express his love are people that can diminish the faults self, thinning out the faults, transparent as possible. It takes the security of a great love to do this. Living from your true self begins with truly letting God Love as I explained above. This will look different for different people because we all have different wounds and different experiences. What is common is our desire to be known and to be loved. Thus a significant element I have found is living from a security brought on by embracing God’s love.
People of the true self are real. They are also a bit prophetic. They are one’s that can effortlessly break the conventions of closed groups and call them beyond cycles that do not encircle God. This will often mean dealing with a bit of rejection but who cares “if God be for you – who cares what man may think!”
Being your true self [3]
If you are in
Think about it - If you are in
Sometimes I'm aware that being fully who I am is the most spiritual thing I can be.
But this is only true if I'm aware of that false part of me, that pretend part of me, that not-real-me part of me and if I move away from that and toward the truest me.
Sin separates me from my true inner heart and my true inner life. I separate myself from these things as I put on my mask, cover my real feelings with stuff, wear my personnas, and otherwise try to be more or different than I who truly am.
Jesus reconciles me and brings me back into full relationship with Himself; and He also brings me back into full and right relationship with who I truly am: my made-in-the-image-of-Christ self. Me. Just me. Raw me. Wholly me. Alive me. Passionate me. No-pretense me. Full-of-all-kinds-of-feelings me. Simple me. True me.
I don't leave myself to become spiritual. yet it is important to note the spiritual discipline is this process is of action of denying to the self. I do die to the false parts of myself but this brings me into the freedom to live out of and be my true self. Fully myself in daily dieing to myself.
Brennan Manning puts it this way:
"Sanctity lies in discovering my true self, moving toward it, and living out of it... While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements, and the adulation of others, the true self claims its identity in its belovedness. We give glory to God simply by being ourselves."
I get so weary when I try to live out of the "impostor." Even worse than the "imposter" is the "spiritual imposter." How draining and hypocritical such mortal acting can be. How foolish to think that I have to be more than I am in order to be alive, free, or precious to God. How I need to remind myself that God gave His life so that I would live-- and simply be the true person that He created. It is my truest self that is His beloved, not the other false parts of me that I put on. It is the "real me" being "fully me" that is the object of God's infinite affections. He longs for me as I really -- add nothing.
It is being fully me that God thoroughly delights in! Who I am is thoroughly enough for Christ fills in the rest! And it is in that rest that I am to find my soul's comfort.
I want to give glory to God by adding nothing to who I am. Be a simple person with a simple desire to be a lover of God and a lover of others: Loving freely regardless of rank, status, position, or role, Loving other from being an alive-to-the-world person and, by His grace, an alive-to-God person. Nobodies are homebodies or hard bodies or weird-bodies but they all are somebody to God. All nobodies are magnificent (in His image). I'm nothing, yet I'm the beloved of the Creator. I'm unique, and it's just, simply, plainly, open to the world: A who I am that brings glory to God.
Anyone familiar with Merton's story is aware of how no Significant Other had been dependable: Merton had lost both parents at a young age, and a dear brother, all in tragic circumstances. The pattern of his early life was, in the words of Ann Hawkins, "a series of failed relationships - relationships that are either inadequate or incomplete in some way." He had to be a true self in the face of deep suffering, and become a real person in finding security in the Love of God. On the eve of his fiftieth birthday, almost twenty years after most of his pain, Merton recalls how his early experience had affected other significant relationships:
"I suppose I regret most of all my lack of love, my selfishness, my glibness, which covered a profound shyness and an urgent need for love. My glibness with girls who after all did love me, I think, for a time. My fault was my inability to believe it and my efforts to get complete assurance and perfect fulfillment."
I understand his words and I too fight the tendency to live from the lies and inability of my soul. I too work to overcome such lack of complete assurance and waning fulfillment. Suffering has a way of thinning ones vision of Love as it deepens ones capacity to experience that same Love. In such times just being with God is good thought the pain may cloud you. Yet in all my inner lack of complete assurance and perfect fulfillment, a little conversation reminded me,"people can be real. real people do exist." I went on to experience God's Love in silly uncontrolled and meandering conversation about trivial things made spiritual by the real person talking with me. It is so true, People can help us, even when they don’t know it or just think you’re hitting on them.
Thanks friend and thanks for the coffee talk.
[1] Such conversation work well to change the unaware masses. The more self-aware someone is and the more perceptive their gaze, the more such talk is seen not as transformative but subversive. People are reduce to means to the ends the subversive “disipler” has in mind. Again not all bad for some people cant handle plain truth but that danger is in making sure your leading someone in a biblical direction and not to become something YOU think is good right and beautiful. Also it reduces people to a means to whatever end the other person in the conversation is moving to. I have said many a time, “So what are you getting at!” The direction of such group dynamics is based on influencer of the group, a person that has the social acceptance and trust to use the group’s expectations and mold the group’s vision of what constitutes a good person. But all that is for another blog.
[2] For me, My true self is a paradox. I am a nerd and a warrior, a sinner and a saint, a messenger and a watcher, Fearful and fearless, A screw-up and one who has a charmed life.
[3] My change in tense reflects the personal nature of being and the way one must always place the “I” we live from in view to understand who God has made us to be.
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