What if salvation includes finally discovering who you are in the presence of God?  We often talk about salvation as something we acquire, rather than something we are transformed to be. 

There comes a moment, sometimes at twenty-five, sometimes at seventy-five, when you look into the mirror and encounter a terrifying possibility:

What if much of the person I have spent my life becoming isn't actually me?

What if I became what my parents needed?

What if I became what my spouse expected?

What if I became what my children interpreted?

What if I became what my church rewarded?

What if I became what my profession required?

What if I became what success applauded?

What if I became what failure accused?

And after decades of adapting, achieving, defending, pleasing, performing, surviving, accumulating, apologizing, explaining and proving,  what if I have almost forgotten the person God created?

That question may be one of the most frightening questions a human being can ask.

It may also be one of the most sacred.

Because perhaps one dimension of salvation is precisely this:

Awareness of who I am in the presence of God.

Not who I imagine myself to be.

Not who others insist I am.

Not even who my ego desperately needs me to be.

But who remains when I stand before God with nothing left to perform.

Now that is awakening.

WE ARE BORN, AND THEN WE ARE TOLD WHO TO BE

A child arrives without a résumé.

Without reputation.

Without theology.

Without political identity.

Without a bank account.

Without accomplishments.

Without an Enneagram number.

Without knowing whether the world considers him successful or unsuccessful, attractive or ordinary, important or insignificant.

He simply is.

And perhaps that is why Jesus repeatedly pointed toward children.

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
— Matthew 18:3

We usually interpret that as innocence.

Perhaps it is also unconstructedness.

The child has not yet built the elaborate architecture we adults eventually call myself.

But construction begins almost immediately.

Be good.

Don't cry.

Make us proud.

Don't embarrass the family.

Be successful.

Be strong.

Be attractive.

Be religious.

Get the degree.

Make the money.

Marry the right person.

Believe the right things.

Keep everybody happy.

Don't let anyone know you're afraid.

And none of these messages are malicious.

Most are delivered by people who love us.

That is precisely what makes them so powerful.

We learn which versions of ourselves receive affection and which produce disappointment. We adapt.

Eventually adaptation becomes personality.

Personality becomes identity.

Identity becomes ego.

And one day we can no longer distinguish between the person we are and the person we learned to perform.   

KIERKEGAARD SAW THE TRAGEDY

Few thinkers understood this better than Søren Kierkegaard.

For him, despair was not simply sadness. The deeper despair concerned the self, the failure to become the self one truly is before God.

That is an astonishing idea.

A person can succeed and still despair.

A person can be admired and still despair.

A person can become wealthy, respected, religious and accomplished, and still live at a profound distance from himself.

Because there is a form of despair that says:

I will become someone other than the person I was created to be.

And another that says:

I will construct myself without reference to the One who gave me existence.

Kierkegaard therefore brings us somewhere psychology alone cannot.

The question isn't merely:

Who am I?

It becomes:

Who am I before God?

That changes everything.

Because the self is no longer an invention.

It is a discovery.

AUGUSTINE HAD ALREADY BEEN THERE

Centuries earlier, Augustine opened his Confessions with one of Christianity's enduring insights: the human heart remains restless until it rests in God.

Notice what Augustine discovered.

He traveled outward looking for what could only be discovered inward.

Pleasure.

Ambition.

Intellectual achievement.

Status.

Philosophy.

Approval.

He kept looking for himself in things outside himself.

Then came the great reversal.

God was not merely somewhere beyond him.

The One Augustine had been searching for was intimately present within the very depths Augustine had avoided.

This is one of the great paradoxes of the spiritual life:

The journey toward God and the journey toward the deepest self eventually begin traveling the same road.

Not because we are God.

We are not.

But because we bear His image.

“So God created mankind in his own image.”
— Genesis 1:27

If that is true, then discovering the person beneath the masks isn't narcissism.

It can become stewardship.

I am trying to discover what God entrusted to me when He entrusted me to myself.

THE ENNEAGRAM: THE MIRROR THAT DISTURBS US

This is why I have never been particularly interested in the Enneagram as a personality parlor game.

I don't need another system telling me who I am.

I've had enough of those.

I need a mirror showing me who I learned to become in order to survive, how fear drives me, and how my nature longs for love. 

That is where the Enneagram becomes spiritually useful.

It exposes the strategy.

The achiever discovers:

I learned that I must succeed to have value.

The helper discovers:

I learned that I must be needed to be loved.

The peacemaker discovers:

I learned to disappear so everyone else could remain comfortable.

The challenger discovers:

I learned that vulnerability was dangerous.

The individualist discovers:

I learned to build identity around what seemed missing.

Different masks.

Same tragedy.

We mistake the survival strategy for the soul.

The Enneagram doesn't tell us who we are.

At its best, it helps reveal what is preventing us from seeing who we are - and being who God created you to be. 

That distinction is everything.

JUNG AND THE UNLIVED LIFE

Carl Jung approached the same mystery from another direction.

He understood that much of human suffering comes from the parts of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge.

We create a socially acceptable persona.

Then we exile whatever doesn't fit it.

Anger.

Tenderness.

Fear.

Desire.

Creativity.

Grief.

Strength.

Weakness.

Eventually we are divided against ourselves.

Jesus used remarkably similar language:

“If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
— Mark 3:25

Jung called the journey toward psychological wholeness individuation.

Christian language offers an even more profound possibility:

transformation.

Not becoming whatever I want.

Becoming increasingly whole in the presence of God.

MERTON AND THE FALSE SELF

Thomas Merton came extraordinarily close to the heart of what I am describing.

He distinguished between the false self - the constructed identity built around achievement, possession, reputation and separateness - and the deeper self whose existence rests in God.

This is why contemplation matters.

The false self loves noise.

Noise allows it to keep performing.

Silence removes the audience.

And something unsettling happens when nobody is watching.

The titles disappear.

The arguments disappear.

The accomplishments disappear.

The grievances disappear.

The explanations disappear.

Eventually there is simply:

you and God.

And perhaps this explains something I have come to believe deeply:

More happens in silence than almost anywhere else within the human experience.

Because silence doesn't ask you to become anything.

It asks you to stop running long enough to discover what remains.

AND THEN JESUS CLIMBS A MOUNTAIN

And this is where, for me, everything converges.

Jesus sits down on a hillside.

People gather around Him.

And He begins:

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.

We have often reduced these extraordinary words to virtues Christians should try harder to practice.

Be humble.

Be nice.

Be peaceful.

Be merciful.

But I have spent nearly twenty-five years wondering whether something vastly deeper is happening.

What if the Beatitudes describe the dismantling of the false self and the emergence of the person capable of living in the Kingdom of God?

Suddenly the sequence becomes breathtaking.

POOR IN SPIRIT

I finally admit:

I don't know.

The ego hates those words.

It wants certainty.

Control.

Superiority.

Explanation.

But awakening begins when I become empty enough to receive.

THOSE WHO MOURN

Then I grieve.

Not merely deaths and disappointments.

I mourn the lives I might have lived.

The people I wounded.

The years I performed.

The masks I mistook for myself.

The things done to me.

The things done by me.

And something mysterious happens.

Grief softens what achievement hardened.

THE MEEK

I no longer need to dominate reality.

I don't have to win every argument.

I don't have to control everyone's opinion of me.

Imagine the freedom contained in that sentence:

Other people are allowed to misunderstand me.

Because my identity no longer depends entirely upon their verdict.

HUNGER AND THIRST FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS

Once the false appetites begin weakening, another hunger appears.

Not:

How do I look?

Not:

What do they think?

Not:

Am I winning?

But:

What is true?

What is good?

What is mine to do?

MERCY

Then something astonishing happens.

Once I see my own contradictions clearly, I become less interested in condemning yours.

I know what it means to fail.

I know what it means to hide.

I know what it means to need grace.

And therefore mercy becomes possible.

PURE IN HEART

The divided person begins becoming whole.

What I say and what I am move closer together.

The public self and private self begin recognizing each other.

The mask becomes unnecessary.

Purity is no longer merely moral cleanliness.

It is singleness of heart.

And Jesus makes the extraordinary promise:

“They will see God.”

Perhaps because there are finally fewer things inside us obscuring the view.

PEACEMAKERS

Only then am I capable of genuine peace.

Not appeasement.

Not conflict avoidance.

Not pretending everything is fine.

Peace.

Because I no longer need another person to lose in order for me to exist.

AND FINALLY: PERSECUTION

And here comes the final liberation.

You may reject me.

Misunderstand me.

Criticize me.

Tell stories about me.

Exclude me.

And while those things may hurt deeply, they can no longer determine who I am.

Because identity has moved somewhere beyond the courtroom of human opinion.

I know where I stand.

Before God.

PERHAPS THIS IS WHAT JESUS MEANT

Then Jesus says something that may be among the most radical statements ever spoken:

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
— Matthew 16:24

For years I misunderstood deny yourself.

I thought Christianity meant suppressing yourself.

Distrusting yourself.

Erasing yourself.

Becoming less yourself.

But what if the self Jesus asks us to deny is precisely the constructed self that prevents the deeper self from emerging?

The ego.

The mask.

The performance.

The desperate demand to control how everyone sees us.

Then Christianity isn't the destruction of the person.

It becomes the resurrection of the person God intended.

Jesus continues:

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”
— Matthew 16:25

Lose it.

Find it.

There is the paradox.

The self I desperately protect must die so the self I never knew could live.  

“I AM WHO I AM”

Perhaps this is why the biblical story is filled with names.

Abram becomes Abraham.

Sarai becomes Sarah.

Jacob becomes Israel.

Simon becomes Peter.

Saul becomes Paul.

And Revelation speaks mysteriously of a new name known intimately by the one receiving it.

Scripture seems obsessed with identity.

And behind the entire drama stands God's mysterious declaration to Moses:

I AM WHO I AM.

God does not perform.

God simply is.

And perhaps spiritual maturity gradually teaches us the same posture at the creaturely level:

I do not have to manufacture myself.

I do not have to defend myself every waking moment.

I do not have to become the sum of everyone's opinions.

I can finally stand before God and say:

Here I am.

THE FIFTH SILENCE

But how do we hear any of this?

Silence.

Eventually we must become quiet enough that the voices begin separating.

The voice of my father.

The voice of my mother.

The voice of my spouse.

The voice of my children.

The voice of religion.

The voice of culture.

The voice of success.

The voice of failure.

The voice of fear.

The voice of ego.

And somewhere beneath the enormous committee meeting taking place inside the human head is another voice.

Still.

Small.

Ancient.

It does not shout.

It doesn't need to.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”
— Psalm 46:10

Contemplation is therefore not escaping reality.

It may be the first time we encounter reality without constantly editing it.

THE GREAT CONVERGENCE

And this is where the three great paths of The Soulprint Project meet.

The Enneagram is the mirror.

It helps me recognize the ego I mistook for myself.

Contemplation is the silence.

It allows the noise of the constructed self to become quiet enough that something deeper can be heard.

The Beatitudes are the path.

They show what a human life increasingly looks like when the false self loosens its grip and the image of God begins shining through.

Mirror.

Silence.

Path.

And beneath all three lies the ancient declaration:

“We all… are being transformed into his image.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:18

Not manufactured.

Transformed.

Not invented.

Recovered.

Not performed.

Lived.

WHAT IF THIS IS SALVATION?

I am not attempting to reduce salvation to psychology.

Christian salvation is vastly larger than self-discovery.

It is grace.

Reconciliation.

Redemption.

Resurrection.

Christ.

But perhaps we have sometimes described salvation so exclusively as something that happens after death that we have neglected the miracle God intends to begin before death.

Jesus said:

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
— John 10:10

Life.

Now.

Awake.

Present.

Free.

What if salvation includes being rescued from the person fear taught me to become?

What if sanctification includes the restoration of the image buried beneath the ego?

What if repentance  really does involve an extraordinary transformation of consciousness?

What if becoming like Christ somehow makes me not less myself, 

but more completely the person God imagined when He created me?

That changes everything.

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Maybe this is why some discoveries arrive late.

Life has to exhaust some of our disguises.

Success has to disappoint us.

Failure has to humble us.

Relationships have to expose us.

Grief has to empty rooms we thought would always remain occupied.

Age has to remind us that the clock was never negotiable.

Eventually we find ourselves standing before the mirror without enough energy left to perform.

And perhaps that is not tragedy.

Perhaps that is grace.

Because finally I can ask:

Who am I when nobody else's opinion is allowed to answer?

Then I become quiet.

And I stand before God.

No résumé.

No defense.

No reputation.

No argument.

No audience.

Just a human being carrying the mysterious fingerprints of his Creator.

And perhaps somewhere in that silence I finally understand what I have been searching for all these years.

I was trying to find God.

I was trying to find myself.

And eventually I discovered that these journeys were never strangers.

For I cannot truly know myself apart from the One whose image I bear.

And I cannot encounter God deeply without eventually confronting the person He created me to become.

Perhaps this is the hidden invitation beneath the Beatitudes.

Perhaps this is awakening.

Perhaps this is becoming.

Perhaps this is salvation beginning here.

To stand naked of pretense in the presence of God and finally recognize:

I am His.

I am here.

And, at last, I am becoming who I was created to be.

— J. Steve Bruner
The Soulprint Project™