Becoming Yourself Before God

Becoming Yourself Before God

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Self-Denial, Self-Erasure, and Becoming Who God Created Us to Be

A Pastoral Essay

Lawrence R. Taylor, M.Div., Ph.D.

We instinctively genuflect to the obvious definition of self – it means me. And yet, does it? Of necessity, all of us develop personae in order to navigate the world. We take on roles, wear masks to be accepted, to get along, to succeed in life. There is nothing wrong with that. We all do it. We must do it. We don’t think about it or plan it. It starts very early in childhood. We quickly learn to be “good babies,” i.e., to cry as little as possible (even though we have no alternative when it comes to communication). “Good” means don’t be a bother. The more self-centered your caregivers are, the greater the pressure to acquiesce. And this all occurs beneath the level of conscious thought or rationalization.

Being silent, still, obedient, and attentive is reinforced in school. It’s the path to being accepted by your teachers and getting report cards that make your parents proud. Get enough good grades and teacher recommendations and you go to a good college where you may be challenged to think, to jettison the outdated morals and opinions of your parents, but also, you’ll do best if you regurgitate the professors’ views back to them. The more you parrot them, the smarter they will think you are. You graduate and pursue a career. You meet a life partner and settle down. Perhaps you have children, buy a home, coach your kids’ sports. You’re good at wearing the mask of midlife in America, suburbs and all.

At any point along this trajectory, if you’re asked who you are, you are ready with an answer – account executive, parent, spouse, committee member, team player. Those are all personae. None of them are the real you. We call this the false self.

The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott distinguished between what he called the “True Self” and the “False Self.” The False Self develops, in part, as an adaptation to the expectations and demands of others. We learn what gains approval, what avoids rejection, what keeps the peace, what makes us acceptable. In itself, such adaptation is necessary; we could hardly live together without it. The problem comes when adaptation becomes identity—when the person I have learned to be for everyone else becomes confused with who I actually am. Beneath this socially compliant self, Winnicott believed, remains the True Self: the spontaneous, vital center from which authentic feeling, creativity, desire, and relationship arise. Spiritual and psychological maturity therefore do not require destroying the social self but discovering that it is not the whole self.

Many (most?) people continue identifying the False Self until they die. Funerals are replaced by “celebrations of life,” where family members and close friends will take turns at the podium telling jokes and revealing your idiosyncrasies. Perhaps someone will speak of you being “up there” having a beer with Uncle Fred.

But the fortunate ones suffer something deep, profound, and tragic. They do not go quietly into the night but rather are shocked into existential angst. Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? It might be a medical scare, the death of a loved one, a bankruptcy, loss of a job, divorce, being victimized by a crime, surviving a traumatic event, betrayal by a faith community or faith leader, severe anxiety or depression. Something happens that brings your world to a standstill. Everything you believed seems shallow. All that effort at work, the money in the portfolio, the picture-perfect lawn, shiny new car, boat at the dock, certificates on the wall, the homilies – who now cares? What does any of it really mean in the grand scheme of things?

If we’re brave and honest, deconstruction happens. The religiophilosophical belief systems that once worked no longer do. Stripped of personae, who am I, really? We have been our masks for so long we do not recognize the person underneath. The structure I identified as “me” crumbles. I find myself gazing into a terrible void. What if there is no God? What if life is ultimately meaningless? Do I have value? Am I anything more than a puff of smoke? What if all that I call reality is merely the stuff of some giant’s dreams that will vanish when he awakens? How do I know what is real and what is not? How do I discern truth from non-truth?

It is at this point that many people latch on to some sort of “cure” – a regimen of medications, affairs, addictions, religious fundamentalism, falling in lockstep behind an authoritarian, or any of the multitude of distractions available to us. It might work to numb things until the next disaster comes along. We hate the pain and agony of grief, so we cover it up with something, or deny it. (Bible verses are frequently pressed into the service of denial.) The same culture that made it mandatory to develop personae does all it can to promote denial. We live in a death-denying, trauma-denying, grief-denying zeitgeist. Stop crying. Take a pill. Find a new partner. Get back out there.

Spiritual and psychological maturity demand that we integrate the False Self with the True Self. The True Self is who we were created to be, not who we were encouraged to become by our families or society. If we are to grow towards spiritual maturity, we must suffer; we must face our suffering; we must grieve; we must grieve redemptively. Herein lies wisdom.

Hokmah is personified Lady Wisdom in Proverbs. Sophia is the personification of \ wisdom in Greek philosophy. Wisdom only comes to those who are suffering or have suffered, and then only to those who grieve their suffering redemptively. By grieving redemptively, we mean allowing ourselves to deeply feel the rage, anger, agony, sorrow, sadness, helplessness, confusion, guilt, fear, and disruption of our loss. Crying, shouting, screaming, sobbing, ranting, raging – all necessary, all painful, all redemptive.

The old structures, all our personae, the foundational religiophilosophical and psychological systems we inherited and absorbed and took for granted, must be razed. It feels like death. It is. The false self is dying. Despair. Sinking into utter darkness void of sound. Suffocating. Drifting. We scream into an abyss. If we make major decisions at this phase, we will invariably get it wrong.

Helpless and at the end of ourselves, Hokmah/Sophia takes our hand and leads us to a wise spiritual director and a depth psychologist. Analysis and spiritual direction slowly, painfully, accompany us as we discover what is under the personae. We come gradually to know our true selves. We develop our own internalized belief system.

Abraham Maslow popularized the idea of self-actualization. Maslow's self-actualization is primarily the actualization of one's capacities and potential, not the discovery of a hidden “true self.” Simply stated, Maslow’s “self-actualization” means becoming as fully yourself as you are capable of becoming. Self-actualization therefore means developing and expressing your deepest capacities, talents, creativity, values, and sense of purpose rather than merely living according to other people’s expectations.

Paul Tillich spoke of the courage to be. For Tillich, courage is more than bravery. It is the self-affirmation of one’s being despite threats to nonbeing, such as death, meaninglessness, guilt, condemnation, isolation, or rejection. Beneath them lies the existential possibility that I may cease to be—or that my being may finally mean nothing. Courage says, “Nevertheless, I am. I consent to being the person I have been given to be.”

This is not autonomous self-assertion in the Nietzschean sense. Ultimately, Tillich thinks the courage to affirm oneself arises because one participates in what he calls the power of Being-itself. Courage is possible because our existence is grounded in something deeper than our own capacity to maintain ourselves. Many of us call that deeper something “God.”

Beneath my courage to stand before God lies a deeper reality. I do not manufacture the courage to exist. Being itself supports my being. The courage to be comes from discovering that I am held by God. I need not earn existence. I need not justify my existence to the crowd. I need not obtain permission to become myself. I need not dominate another person to establish myself. I need not disappear so that another person can exist. This makes possible something much richer than either self-assertion or self-negation, viz., a true self that is sufficiently secure to give itself away without ceasing to be a self.

Søren Kierkegaard spoke of the single individual before God, no longer content to hide in groupthink. For Kierkegaard, the problem is not that we possess too much individuality, but that we possess too little. We hide in the crowd. We become what our family expects, what society rewards, what the church approves, what our political tribe demands, or what other people need us to be. Kierkegaard's single individual (den Enkelte) is the person who finally stands before God without the crowd as intermediary.

Become your true self—and become your true self before God. Have the courage to become the true self that God calls you to be. A person who cannot say no to the crowd cannot meaningfully say yes to God. Someone whose identity depends upon keeping everyone pleased has not transcended the false self. That person may actually be more radically controlled by the false self, because survival has become dependent upon approval.

Kierkegaard's single individual provides an important corrective to distorted notions of Christian humility. I stand alone before God, but precisely because I stand before God, I am liberated to stand with others without disappearing into them.

Carl Jung spoke of individuation, the lifelong process of becoming the whole person you truly are, of fully discovering and embracing your true self. For Jung, we begin life identifying largely with our ego—the conscious image we have of ourselves—and with the persona, the socially acceptable person we present to the world. But much of the true self remains unconscious – rejected qualities, unrealized possibilities, fears, desires, creativity, and what Jung called the shadow. The goal is integration, not perfection. We become consciously and authentically ourselves by integrating the different parts of the personality into a larger whole. For Jung, a persona isn't necessarily false in a pathological sense. It is a necessary interface between the individual and society. The problem arises when I identify myself with my persona—when I mistake the role for the whole person. Moreover, by integration, Jung did not mean individualism or selfishness. Individuation is not “I do whatever I want.” The more genuinely individuated a person becomes, the less dependent they are upon conformity, approval, and the expectations of the crowd, and the more capable they become of authentic relationship with others.

And this is precisely where Jung becomes fascinating alongside Kierkegaard’s “single individual before God.” Both are concerned with becoming a genuine (true) self rather than simply remaining the false self that “the crowd” expects. Kierkegaard, however, locates the deepest ground of that selfhood explicitly in one’s relationship to God, whereas Jung describes it psychologically as the ego’s developing relationship with the Self.

So far, we hear Maslow speaking of realizing potential; Jung of integrating the psyche; Kierkegaard of becoming oneself before God; and Tillich of affirming one’s being despite nonbeing.

Although there is nothing wrong with the roles we play in life, the personae we wear, Jesus taught us to lose the part of the false self that is constructed around possessions, status, domination, fear, and self-protection, and discover the true self that is capable of genuine cruciform love. Jesus calls for self-denial (ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτόν, Mark 8:34), but self-denial is not identical with self-erasure. There is an enormous theological difference between: “I am not the center of the universe” and “I do not matter.” The first is discipleship. The second is psychopathology masquerading as discipleship.

Jesus himself repeatedly demonstrates this distinction. He serves people, but he does not make himself infinitely available to them. He withdraws to pray (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16). He leaves crowds that still want something from him (Mark 1:35–38). He sleeps when exhausted (Mark 4:38). He refuses demands for signs (Mark 8:11–13). He disappoints expectations. He confronts opponents. He allows people to walk away rather than changing his message to retain them (John 6:60–67).

Christian servanthood is not chronic acquiescence. “Servant of all” does not mean “doormat of all.” A doormat does not necessarily serve another person's good. Sometimes acquiescence actually serves another person's dysfunction. If someone demands something destructive of me, saying yes may satisfy the person while saying no may serve the person. Jesus' command to become servant therefore concerns the orientation of power, not the elimination of agency.

Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, yet the man holding the towel is also the man who confronts hypocrisy, overturns tables, refuses manipulation, rebukes disciples, challenges authorities, walks away from crowds, and eventually stands before Pilate without begging for approval. Jesus never said, “You may do whatever you want to me.” Instead, he essentially said, “I will use my power for your good rather than using you for my power.”

Therefore, the Christian alternative is neither selfishness nor self-erasure. It is self-giving. Only a true self can give itself. Love of neighbor assumes a self that is worth loving. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31) The self is not an enemy to be annihilated. It becomes one participant in the community of love.

Christian love decenters the False Self while empowering the True Self.