Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. … My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love — outside of reality and outside of life. And such a life cannot help but be an illusion. … The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. … Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in him. … Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him, I will find myself, and if I find my true self I will find him Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (pp. 34-36).

I’ve been reading David G. Benner’s book The Gift of Being Yourself for Lent this year. One of the key emphases of Benner’s account is the importance of self-knowledge as a companion to knowing God. For Benner, like many similar writers, these two quests – to know the self and to know God – are intertwined and interdependent. You cannot fully know youself in a solipsistic way, as this is not your true self, which is only revealed in intimate self-disclosing and vulnerable relationship with others. And similarly, you cannot know God without setting out on the first quest. In this he follows a long line of Christian spiritual theology including modern thinkers like Thomas Merton (quoted at the top), but also a wide range of historical spiritual theology as well, including intensely psychological thinkers like Augustine of Hippo, Thomas A’Kempis and Julian of Norwich. I’m mindful that theology can tend to veer in either of these two directions, struggling to hold them together. We find tomes elaborating knowledge of God in abstract (dare I say “analytical”) ways, with authors who fail to see any reason for self-disclosure (contra Augustine’s confessions). And the past decades are littered with spiritual leaders who offered a public profile based on personal narrative, a journey towards success and strength and supposed authenticity only to discover that this was an aspirational and ultimately untrue performance of self. I’m particularly fond of the work of thinkers like Teresa of Avila and Henri Nouwen as they do so much to emphasise the fragile, fallible self as a core feature of this spiritual path of self-discovery. We do not uncover truth in our strength, but in our frailty. This also excludes grandiose stories of overcoming weakness towards strength. The truth of our beloved creatureliness lies in our continued partiality, fallibility and desparate need for companionship.

But I’m also mindful that this journey into the self comes with different levels of complexity. Victims of trauma can often experience a darkening of the self where personal biographical memory can become fragmentary at best. The narratives in which our self-reckoning might be situated can be rendered inaccessible, sometimes permanently so. In a similar way, many neurodivergent persons are subjected to behaviouralist modes of conditioning when they are young, encouraged (sometimes harshly coerced) to “mask” and conceal their differences. This too can result in a concealment of the self from the self. Sometimes there is a negative reinforcement, with trauma colluding with training. When this is the case, as it has been for me, setting out on a journey to understand yourself is a recursive one, leading to a process by which one must work through a series of personas.

Many people never venture on this journey, as – though ultimately rewarding and important – it can be difficult, humiliating, and strenuous. It can sometimes be easier simply to live in the moment, making a go at a virtuous life which leaves our reactions, motives, and behaviours uninterrogated. For those who venture forth, there are rewards, opening yourself to new levels of transparency and awareness of your own frailty can enable deepened relationships and new forms of interpersonal care and mutual aid both with human and divine companions.

I wonder how our forms of spriritual care and empowerment scale towards the complex form of this journey. I’m not meaning to say that self-discovery is simple for anyone, but I think it is fair to say that for some of us it is complex at a level that passes a certain qualitative threshold, given the need to draw on levels of psychological energy and generate interpersonal precarity which can pose hazards to wellbeing. The journey can require heroic levels of energy and / or time, particularly if one is working recursively.

Benner stresses the point that the self can be found, that the journey is not endless, that knowing the self can be attained. I think this is not exclusive to, but nonetheless a unique feature of certain forms of spirituality including Christian spiritual practice. This uniqueness lies in the (at least in the context of orthodox Christian belief) assumption that (1) our self is irreducible, that is, unique only to a particular embodied subjectivity and not something which can be passed from one bodily form to another, or – ultimately – leave the body entirely and (2) in the conviction that this quest can have an outcome, that knowledge and perception of self is desirable, not to the extent of self-absorbtion or solipsism (which is certainly possible) but in a way that exists in dialectic with knowledge of “the other”. In the best instance, you may reach a level of authentic self-realisation which is a crucial part of the spiritual journey, and ultimately a factor in the health of the spiritual communities you are a part of. In stressing this point, however, I think Banner’s account could be augmented to attend to the ways that there are different forms of journey, some which potentially exist beyond a threshold of unknowing. Is there a unique valence to spiritual practices and experiences for people who have experienced this kind of complex subjectivity, for whom there is an experience of being unknown, even to yourself, in spite of seeking that knowledge? I think there might be, and am keen to unpack some of those dynamics in future writing. Stay tuned for more and in the meantime, I trust your own journey is going well.