Who are you?

I find that question keeps coming up, and accordingly, keeps getting posted on this blog. One response to the question was proposed by Maryanne Williamson, who said (as famously quoted by Nelson Mandela at his 1994 inauguration):

On the surface, with terms used such as “God’s glory” and “light and darkness” it sounds like a perfectly acceptable Christian statement. And to a degree, I suppose we could find some agreement with it. We are children of God (those saved by faith in the atoning death of His Son, that is). We are to glorify God and He has created us in His image. But the underlying philosophy is revealed in the one, quiet little phrase: “Your playing small does not serve the world.”

This is the same belief that trips us up when we wonder who we are.

In order to find fulfillment, it’s easy to think we must “live large.” We’ve got to be cool. We must be accepted. We must be glittery, confident, and popular. We must be significant. Surely that is who we are.

But in a paradox (not surprising if you’re accustomed to Bible reading, chock-full of such paradoxes) our only true significance will be found in being small.

On a very basic level, we won’t have friends or companionship if we selfishly cling to our own “manifest glory.” As the French novelist, Muriel Barbery wisely deduced, “We have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves…because other people have become our permanent mirrors… As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.”

Infatuated with being charming, or being loved— we will miss out on loving. If we focus too much on finding who we are (and if we are not content to be small, meek, and serving), we will never truly know anyone else beyond our own “permanent mirrors.”

Instead, I suspect that it is the humble cry like Francis of Assisi’s that results in truly shedding God’s glory: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love, for it is…in dying that we are reborn to eternal life.”

Likewise, we cannot find fulfillment unless we realize the truth. We are small. Our lives are as vapors in the wind. At the same time, we're cherished by a big God.

So, rather than questioning who I am, I find that the answer is always found somewhere else. It is found in God. It is found in the grace I’ve been given freely by Christ. It is found in loving other people; never in seeking to become my own.

Photo credit: Ivan Petrov.