Identity
Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God's creature. What you are in his sight is what you are and nothing more. Francis of Assisi
Gregg’s Reflection
My first notion of my identity was that I was the second son of a man who served overseas in World War II and had come back to found a business, a family business. Any thought about what I would be when I grew up was colored by the obligation, clearly conveyed, that I would follow my father into the family business.
So, identity was closely tied to family. Some years ago, Genie gave me a signet ring with the Burch family crest celebrating this family identity. My brother was named after a famous relative, William Barrett Travis, the commander of the Alamo.
When I graduated high school, I had a choice, college or Viet Nam. My college years opened my mind and heart to a bigger world, and a different worldview. I found identity in being the rebel, turning against our culture that celebrated success while propping up broken ideas of supremacy, and world domination.
After a tour of world religions, I was baptized a Christian at age 28. That led me to decades long routines of trying to BE good enough for God to love me. (See this post on Faith vs Works to help clear up this flawed idea.)
Only after I began to wade into the deeper end of the spiritual pool did I encounter a path beyond my egoic self. Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr introduced the idea of moving from false self to true self to soul.
This illustration, which I have posted before, has been clarifying. You see Identity in the lower right corner. The invitation is to put our Identity in Jesus.
Paul says, in Galatians 2:
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
This is movIng beyond small self ego to seeking union with God and finding our True Self. I remind myself every day of who I am and whose I am by wearing a bracelet with a cross as a constant reminder.
Read on and find out how our Identity shapes our lives. But first, here is a rendition of Who Are You? The Who have been an all time favorite band for us.
Blessings, Gregg
Journaling Prompts
What is at the core of your identity in this season of life? What are the traits, values, gifts and experiences that define you? What would it mean to you to place your identity in Christ, to put on ‘the mind of Christ’?
Scripture
So God created mankind in his own image
Genesis 1:27
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.
Jeremiah 1:5
For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
Romans 8:29
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.
Romans 12:3
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:26-28
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
Ephesians 2:19
For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:3
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
Galatians 2:20
Ancient Writings
Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God's creature. What you are in his sight is what you are and nothing more. Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing that you have received...but only what you have given; a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.
St. Francis of Assisi
Who are you, O God, and who am I?
St Francis of Assisi (this question he asked himself over and over)
The things we love tell us what we are.
Thomas Aquinas
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart
One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.
Meister Eckhart
It is easier for us to get to know God than to know our own soul...God is nearer to us than our soul, for He is the ground in which it stands...so if we want to know our own soul, and enjoy its fellowship, it is necessary to seek it in our Lord God.
Julian of Norwich
Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.
Catherine of Siena
In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human success, but rather on how much we have loved.
St. John of the Cross. (For nearly 50 years, I worked to attain success and financial security, but it never brought peace to my soul. The last 25 years, I have invested in relationships, and it has made all the difference.)
Be who you are and be that well. The same everlasting Father who cares for you today will care for you tomorrow and every day. Either he will shield you from suffering or give you unfailing strength to bear it.
Francis de Sales
I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.
John Newton
Modern Writings
There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching.… You are the only you that has ever lived; and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life, spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls….
Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you?... Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions ... that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you because that is the only true guide that you will ever have and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing. You may be famous, you may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.
Howard Thurman, “The Sound of the Genuine,” Baccalaureate Address, Spelman College, May 4, 1980. Text edited by Jo Moore Stewart, Spelman Messenger 96, no. 4, p. 14–15.
I think God wants to make me pure gold, so He is burning out the dross, teaching me the meaning of the fire, the burnt offering, the death of the self-part of me.
Amy Carmichael
What you do matters — but not much. What you are matters tremendously.
Catherine Doherty
Sometimes, the story you tell yourself becomes the person you've become.
Nana Veary, Volume 2
Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.
Mother Teresa
For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.
Thomas Keating, Manifesting God
The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment.
Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation
Whatever there is about human identity that can be objectively known, measured, predicted, observed, whether by the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the tax man, or the omniscient squint of your most insightful aunt, there is a foundational core of what we might as well call identity that remains hidden from scrutiny’s grip and somehow utterly caught up in God, “in whom we live and move and have our being, in whom our very self is immersed.”
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
Aquinas, then, would surely approve that we’re not drawn to search online for answers to the question, “Who am I?” That question can only be answered “from the inside” by me, the one asking the question. At the same time, answering this question isn’t a matter of withdrawing from the world and turning in on ourselves. It’s a matter of becoming more aware of ourselves at the moment of engaging with reality, and drawing conclusions about what our activities towards other things “say” about us. There’s Aquinas’s “prescription” for a deeper sense of self.
Therese Scarpelli Cory, Thomas Aquinas-Toward a Deeper Sense of Self; Fifteen Eighty Four, Cambridge University Press Blog, January 24, 2014.
There is only one question we must definitely answer: “Who am I?” Or, restated, “Where do I abide?” If we can get that right, the rest largely takes care of itself. Paul answers the questions directly: “You are hidden with Christ in God, and Christ is your life” (Colossians 3:3–4). Every time we start judging ourselves, we can ask, “Who am I?” The answer will come: “I am hidden with Christ in God in every part of my life. I am bearing both the mystery of suffering humanity and the mystery of God’s glory, which is precisely the mystery of Christ.” (Relish the universality of Scriptures like 1 Corinthians 3:21–23, 15:22–28, or Colossians 1:15–20.)
God looks at us and always sees Christ, and God thus finds us always and entirely lovable. God fixes God’s gaze intently where we refuse to look, on our shared, divine nature as God’s children (1 John 3:2). Hopefully, one day our gaze will match God’s gaze. We will find God entirely lovable and ourselves fully lovable in the same moment. Why? Because it’s the same set of eyes that is doing the looking: “All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
All we have to do is receive God’s gaze and then return what we have received. We simply complete the divine circuit, “love returning love” as my father St. Francis of Assisi showed so well. This is our spiritual agenda for our whole life.
We are saved by standing consciously and confidently inside the force field that is Christ, not by getting it right in our private selves. This is too big a truth for the small self to even imagine. We’re too tiny, too insecure, too ready to beat ourselves up. We don’t need to be correct, but we can always try to remain connected to our Source. The great and, for some, disappointing surprise is that many people who are not at all correct are the most connected by reason of their intense need and desire.
All we can do is fall into the Eternal Mercy—into Love—which we can never really fall out of because “we belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God,” as Paul so beautifully stated (1 Corinthians 3:23). Eventually, we know that we are all saved by mercy in spite of ourselves. That must be the final humiliation to the ego.
Our holiness is really only God’s holiness, and that’s why it’s certain and secure. It is a participation in love, a mutual indwelling, not an achievement or performance on our part. “If anyone wants to boast, let them boast in the Lord,” Paul shouts (1 Corinthians 1:31).
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 186–187.