Variety: Galatians 2v20
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)
The words, “not I, but Christ” urged me to come home to myself more fully, to the petaled truth buried deep within.
—Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
The author Sue Monk Kidd reflects on her midlife discovery of the concept of the true self:
Over and over again God calls you and me … to the cultivation of what Meister Eckhart called the “true seed” within us. God calls us to tend what lies seeded in the soul, this kernel of our truest nature—the God-image or True Self….
Throughout our lives we create patterns of living that obscure this identity. We heap on the darkness, constructing a variety of false selves. We become adept at playing games, wearing masks as if life were a masquerade party. This can go on for a long while. But eventually the music of the True Self seeks us out. Sooner or later (often in midlife), we’re summoned back to the garden. We’re called to soul-work….
The soul wants to be acknowledged and nurtured. The True Self wants to bloom and grow. And the way to begin this spiritual flowering is to confront your false selves—the ego patterns you have created—and come home to who you really are inside.
Monk Kidd compares soul work to the art of whittling:
The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and—with all the love and discernment we can muster—gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.
Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for. I’ll be honest. As I began my own spiritual whittling, I often clung to my “block of wood” resistantly. After all, wasn’t I fine just as I was?…
But there were also days when I felt drawn to try, when I yearned to discover how I was living falsely….
The writings of Thomas Merton encouraged me. He envisioned much of the spiritual life as whittling away the false self in order to become the True Self. He called the struggle for authenticity a “contemplative crisis” and insisted that no one can avoid it, that eventually we all “get the treatment.” According to Merton, “One’s actual self may be far from ‘real,’ since it may be profoundly alienated from one’s own deep spiritual identity. To reach one’s ‘real self’ one must, in fact, be delivered from that illusory and false ‘self’ whom we have created.”
How real am I, I asked myself. What are the illusions I’ve created? What false selves do I need to pare away? Those are the whittling questions. Taken seriously, they’re tough and agonizing. “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves,” wrote Merton.