Who am I?

When I was in my late teens, I took part in a summer program organized by the Order of the Holy Cross and the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, two Anglican religious orders. As participants came from all over Canada and the US, there were several ice-breaking exercises designed to help us to get to know one another. The only one I now recall required us to sit with one other person who asked repeatedly, “Who are you?” We were expected to give a different answer each time. Try it. After about a minute of this, it becomes ever more difficult to find something to say.

I remember feeling puzzled and strangely stirred by that exercise. I became more sharply aware of the mystery of my own “I-ness,” the uniqueness and singularity of my self. There was no one else who could be the “I” that I was, and that I could never be the “I” they were. Despite all the ways I tried to answer the question – “I am the son of my parent,” “I live in such and such a place,” “I am a high school student,” or even, more piously, “I am the child of God” – there remained the sense that there is more to us than what we are at any given moment, and that we need to find this missing piece.

The great spiritual traditions of the world insist on the necessity of self-discovery. For example, the first and virtually only direction the great 20^th century Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, put to seekers was that they ask, “Who am I?” These traditions may have radically different understandings of the self, but they do agree that human beings as they are commonly found in this life suffer from distorted perceptions and self-deceptions that obscure our true self. In Christian terms, we may say that we are created in the image and likeness of God, but that image is like a broken mirror giving back a flawed reflection.

Our spiritual quest is not intended to make us wiser or more interesting or even more “holy,” but to make us real. Some people are convinced that the way of true self-knowledge is to be found in psychotherapy and analysis. By bringing back into consciousness the forgotten memories and especially wounds suffered in early life, they could undo the damage and become truly themselves. This path can be very helpful to people who commit themselves to it. It can make a huge difference between mental health and emotional distress.

The truth of ourselves is, however, hidden more deeply than any thinking or therapy can take us. It is a more profound mystery than words can express. True self-knowledge is not a product of ideas but a way of self-awareness, of being attentive to ourselves: not to who we think we are, or hope we are, but to who we really are. This is more than becoming aware of one’s own personality or ego, most often in hopes of fixing or improving it. In recent years there has been a growing familiarity among Christians of a more inclusive meaning of self-awareness. There are more and more groups who gather to practice forms of Christian meditation that lead to self-awareness.

Such practice is not at all about being self-centred, focusing exclusively on what is going on inside us. Rather, this aims at the ability to be present to what is real, what is now. The biblical tradition makes clear that we cannot find our true “I” – the truth of the core of our being – unless we search for it in the presence and light of God. We only find our true self in a relationship with God, who alone is the true purpose and meaning of all existence. When the psalmist askes, “What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should seek him out?” (Psalm 8:5), he is not asking a philosophical question. Rather he was reflecting on God and giving voice to his awe at the divine glory that shone through all creation.

Christians share the psalmist’s perspective but add another astonishing dimension to this teaching. It insists not only on the divine self-revelation of God through inspired teachers and prophets, but that “in the fullness of time” God took on our flesh and became one of us. Christ, the incarnate God, the perfect human person, made our innermost reality his own. Astonishingly, this means that the mystery of our self has become the mystery of Christ. This is the gift promised by Christ as the fruit of love: the gift of God “abiding” in us (John 14:23).

This immense mystery can only be approached in faith. We cannot make ourselves experience it. We can only search for it and pray to be given a glimpse of it. If we do experience it, even for a moment, we begin to be able to say with St. Paul, “not I but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Once we have tasted that, we can never be satisfied with any path of self-knowledge that does not have at its heart and its final goal a search for God who dwells in the heart of our being and fills us with life.