Fierce with reality - saying Yes to your true self

"This is not the self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another form of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract code. It is the self planted in us by God who made us in God's own image - the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.

True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril.

The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down - down to ground on which it is safe to stand and fall - eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. When people ask me how it felt to emerge from depression, I can give only one answer: I felt at home in my own skin, and at home on the face of the earth, for the first time.

Florida Scott Maxwell put it in terms more elegant than mine: "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality." I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

Some may say that this embrace is narcissistic, an obsession with self at the expense of others, but that is not how I experience it. When I ignored my own truth on behalf of a distorted ego and ethic, I led a false life that caused others pain - for which I can only ask forgiveness. When I stand attending to my own truth, more of that truth became available in my work and my relationships. I now know that anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others.

Others may say that "embracing one's wholeness" is just fancy talk for permission to sin, but again my experience is to the contrary. To embrace weakness, liability, and darkness as part of who I am gives that part less sway over me, because all it ever wanted was to be acknowledged as part of my whole self.

At the same time, embracing one's wholeness makes life more demanding - because once you do that, you must live your whole life. One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that part of me wanted to stay depressed.

I had missed the deep meaning of a biblical teaching that I had always regarded as a no-brainer: "I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Therefore, choose life" (Deut. 30:19). Why, I wondered, would God waste precious breath on saying something so obvious? I had failed to understand the perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, or living our lives in authentic relationship with others.

I was finally able to say yes to life, a choice for which I am grateful beyond measure, though how I found that yes remains a mystery to me."

Let Your Life SPEAK - Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker J. Palmer