True Identity is A Gift of God

There are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my 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. These are not simply psychological longings, irrelevant to the spiritual journey. Both are the response of spirit to Spirit—the Holy Spirit calling us home to our place and identity in God. 

 

Being most deeply your unique self is something that God desires, because your true self is grounded in Christ. God created you in uniqueness and seeks to restore you to that uniqueness in Christ. Finding and living out your true self is fulfilling your destiny.

 

- David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, 2015

The Spiritual Journey

There are two very good reasons to describe the spiritual life in terms of a journey. First, it fits well with our experience. We are aware that the self that begins the spiritual journey is not the same as the one that ends it. The changes in identity and consciousness—how we understand what it means to be me and our inner experience of passing through life—are both sufficiently profound as to be best described as transformational. The same is true for the changes in our capacity for love and the functioning of our will and desires.

The second reason is that the spiritual journey involves following a path. Much more than adopting a set of beliefs, a path is a practice or set of practices that will characterize our whole life. Following this path is the way we participate in our transformation. It is the way we journey into God and, as we do, discover that all along we have already been in God. It is the way our identity, consciousness and life become grounded in our self-in-God and God’s self-in-us.

Christian spirituality is taking on the mind and heart of Christ as we recognize Christ as the deepest truth of our being. It is actualizing the Christ who is in us. It is becoming fully and deeply human. It is experiencing and responding to the world through the mind and heart of God as we align ourselves with God’s transformational agenda of making all things

 - David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, 2015