Thoughts about
‘Becoming Who You Are’

Speaking of Religion
The Rev. Dr. Tim Griffin

For me to be a saint means to be myself. (Thomas Merton)

Last week (Nov. 1), Christians observed the feast of All Saints. All Saints is the day on which the Church remembers and celebrates those pillars of the Christian faith whose lives and witness embody the ideals of Christianity.
Significantly, or so it seems to me, I was browsing through a bookstore the day before All Saints Day, and I happened upon a thin volume by a Jesuit by the name of James Martin. Its provocative title, Becoming Who You Are, inspired me to pick it up, and once I began reading it, I was unable to put it down until I finished it.
Martin’s book is concerned with the topic of sanctity, among other things. More particularly, he reflects on the idea of the "true self," as it is developed in the lives and writings of Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen.
Merton, more than any other religious writer, discussed and contrasted the true and false self. For Merton the true self is the self that God has created and who God desires me to be.
In contrast, the false self is the self of my own creation. It is not the self God created me to be. Rather it is the self I have created and that I present to the world.
Those of us who have felt at times that we are simply playing a role or putting on a mask — that is, all of us, I suspect — to present to the world, have an intuitive sense of the false self. In short, the false self is the self we want to share with the world. It is the façade behind which we hide so that others do not discover who we really are, with all of our faults and foibles. In fact many of us identify so strongly with the image we have created that we believe the false self is who we really are.
In contrast, Merton believed that the true self is, as I noted, the self who God created us to be. Our true self often lies dormant beneath the muck and debris that we have created in order to hide from the world.
However, we can, through grace, prayer, and effort, draw closer and closer to our true self. As we do, we become more accepting of ourselves and as a result more accepting of others as well. As part of this process we become less fearful and freer to become who we are and allow the world to see who we are.
According to Merton, this is the work of a lifetime. It is the work that God has assigned to each of us. This explains the quotation from Merton above. The point is not that we have nothing to do in order to become a saint. The point is rather that as we grow towards becoming who God created us to be, we grow into the sanctity of God.
This message, as Martin makes clear, is often lost on us. We wrongly believe that we need to become someone else in order to be a saint. But that is not it at all.
In fact, most of us have spent our lives trying to be someone other than who we are — other than who God created us to be — and it is this that keeps us from realizing our sanctity. However, once we begin to let go of those false images and embrace our true identity, we naturally grow in sanctity.
Of course this does not mean that we will suddenly be free of sin, though we will be more willing to accept God’s forgiveness for it, and therefore more willing to forgive ourselves.
Nor does it mean that after death we will be canonized by the Church, though it will mean that we will be able to freely share more of ourselves, and therefore God, with the world. As concerns this last point, we may diminish the contributions that we are able to make.
As Martin points out, few among us are called to the kind of service that characterized the lives of, e.g., Mother Theresa or Dorothy Day. But on the other hand, we all have abundant opportunities to serve the world as we go about our daily lives. It is in taking advantage of these opportunities and awakening to our true selves that we rise to the level of sanctity. ••
Father Tim Griffin is priest-in-charge at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, at 1946 Welsh Road in Bustleton.