Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. Asked to sum up the wisdom of Ancient Greece, he replied, “Know yourself.”

This affirmation of the importance of knowing oneself was unchallenged by the church Fathers and Mothers, although from the earliest days of church history, knowing of self and God began to be linked. We see this clearly in the fourth century prayer of St. Augustine, “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee, ” this notion of the deep interconnection of knowing self and knowing God being echoed by many others over the centuries.

When contemporary Christians at times suggest that self-discovery and actualization are incompatible with following a self-sacrificing Christ they seem to forget that Jesus taught that it is in losing our self that we truly find it. By affirming self-sacrifice as the route to self-discovery, Jesus validates both knowing and actualizing our self.

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. Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is inadequately grounded in both our humanity and in reality. Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is dangerous to the soul of anyone—and in spiritual leaders it can also be disastrous for those they lead.

The Challenge of Identity

This journey of knowing and living the truth of our being is not easy. Truly knowing ourselves is a serious challenge for humans.

As far as we can tell, in all of creation, identity is a challenge only for us. 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. The same is true of 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 intends them to be, they are aligned with their essential being - something that seems thoroughly natural for them.

Humans, however, encounter a more challenging existence. We step outside of ourselves and think of how we want to be seen by others. In short, we pretend, and soon lose ourselves in our persona and roles. Simple being is tremendously difficult to achieve and fully authentic being is extremely rare.

Body and soul contain thousands of possibilities out of which you can build many identities. But in only one of these can we find our true self. It is the truth of this self that holds our unique vocation and deepest fulfillment. But, in the words of Dag Hammarskjöld, this truth will remain elusive “until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.”

We all live searching for that one way of being that carries with it the gift of authenticity. We are most conscious of this search for identity during adolescence, when it takes front stage. At this point in life we try on identities like clothing, looking for a style of being that fits with how we want to be seen. But even long after adolescence has passed, most adults know the occasional feeling of being a fraud—a sense of being not what we pretend to be but rather precisely what we pretend not to be. With a little reflection, most of us can become aware of masks that we first adopted as strategies to avoid feelings of vulnerability but that have become parts of our social self. Tragically, we settle easily for pretense, and a truly authentic self often seems illusory.

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.

Finding that unique self is, as noted by Thomas Merton, the problem on which all our existence, peace and happiness depend. 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.

Living Your Truth

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christ-likeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic 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.

There are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of our hidden self in Christ. But the uniqueness that comes from being our true self is not a uniqueness of our own making.

Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God. The desire for uniqueness is a spiritual desire. So too is the longing to be authentic. Both are the response of spirit to Spirit as we are called to discover and live out of the truth of our uniqueness in Christ.

Christian spirituality is a transformational journey. It is taking on the mind and heart of Christ as we recognize Christ as the deepest truth of our being. It is not just becoming like Christ but actualizing the Christ who is in us. It is a journey toward union with God.

The journey into God that is at the core of Christ-following leads to the discovery that the foundation of our very being is our being-in-God. Increasingly we come to recognize the inextricable interconnection of our self-in-God and God’s self-in-us. This doesn’t involve either a loss of our self or becoming God. It involves becoming more and more fully the truth of our being in God.

While our self is not God, it is the place where we meet God. There can therefore 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 the depths of our soul that transforms us from the inside out. This is why the self is so important in the Christian transformational journey. The self must be encountered, not bypassed. It must be embraced and deeply known if it is to be transformed.