3.

First, identity. By “identity,” I just mean who we experience ourselves to be. We all live from an identity or a sense of self, an interior perception of what makes us, us.

Christian identity formation is absolutely unique in the panoply of options on offer. In a globalized, multicultural world, there are all sorts of strategies by which people form an identity, but not all identities are created equal.

Let me simplify the various options into two buckets: modern and traditional, or individualist and collectivist.

Modern, Western identities are usually chosen by the individual based on their “authentic desires,” or who their inner feelings are telling them they really are (even if their inner self disagrees with their outer self, such as their body or family or duty). At its most crass, a person’s desires are unquestioned and unfiltered; they are assumed to be good, more: to be “the god within,” the most true and trustworthy guide to a happy life. In this religion (and it is a religion), the creed is simple: “Follow your heart.”

This is a starkly different take on desire than the Christian view, which sees our desires as incredibly important, but, at best, a mixed bag, if not dangerously misleading.

The Christian tradition has a highly sophisticated view of desire: We certainly believe that our desires matter, even more: that the Spirit himself is often desiring through our desire, as Paul writes, “it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”¹ Yet we also believe our desires are horribly warped by sin, and poisoned by the world around us. Left unchecked to guide our lives, they are apt to lead us treacherously off the path to happiness, and certainly away from love, which almost always demands that we deny our desires, to put the good of another ahead of our own.

To clarify, the self-constructed modern identities of Western culture aren’t all bad. They often free up great creativity, unlock an individual’s unique essence, and spark genius. “Think Different” was Apple’s slogan for years, and there’s a reason it’s the number one company in the world.

But self-constructed identities are incredibly fragile. They need constant emotional scaffolding, which is why they petulantly demand so much affirmation in the public sphere. Think of the way sexual orientation and “gender identity” have both become valid categories of personhood in the postmodern West. Note how it’s not enough for these self-chosen identities to be legalized, or even lauded by celebrity after celebrity; they have to be celebrated by all. Even a whiff of disapproval from others, no matter how gracious, undermines many people’s deepest sense of self — and that can feel soul-crushing to the individual.² Self-chosen identities simply can’t cope.

But the other major alternative the world offers us isn’t much better.

In more traditional, collectivist cultures (which still make up the vast majority of the human population³), identities are still chosen, but they are often chosen for you, not based on your “authentic desires,” but usually on the “authentic desires” and needs of the larger group — your family or tribe or clan. You’re expected to defer to the generation ahead of you, who need you, in good Confucian manner, to honor your elders, wait your turn, and pay your dues.

The beauty of this more traditional model of identity formation is: it’s low on anxiety (which is at an epidemic level in the West), and it’s much less fragile than the postmodern approach. You know your role, and you have a clear path to happiness — Play your role well in the community: be a good mother or father or husband or wife or son or daughter or employee or citizen or _____, and you’ll be a good person.

Honestly, this works fairly well for some people, maybe even a lot of people.

But when someone doesn’t fit easily into the preordained role, it can be suffocating, especially for women, the poor, or bell-curve outliers who don’t fit into the traditional archetypes.

But the way we do identity-formation as Christians is totally different from either option. Unlike in Western culture, identity for Christ followers isn’t something we choose, like what style of clothing we wear or car we drive or political party we “identify” with, or, increasingly, even what gender we identify as; nor is it something that is chosen for us, as it is in traditional cultures, by our family or tribe or station of birth. In many cases, we are forced to renounce the identities of our family or tribe — to rise above or go below the norms of our station.⁴ Jesus was speaking to a collectivist culture when he said, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”⁵ No one ever accused Jesus of mincing words.

For followers of Jesus, identity is something that we discover.

It’s a gift we receive from a loving Father.

It’s less architecture and more archeology; less something we design or build off a whiteboard, and more something we unearth from the ground of our being in God.⁶

We hear a lot of talk about becoming your “true self” in popular culture, and often that language is appropriated by Christians, with varying results,⁷ but as followers of Jesus, we don’t discover our true self by seeking it, but by seeking God.⁸ In seeking God, we encounter what Nouwen called “the inner voice of love”⁹ — the voice of God himself, speaking our true identity over us, with all our flaws and failings. Naming who we are, and who we aren’t. Offering us insight into our identity that we could never possibly get from an Enneagram diagram or a four-letter Myers-Briggs handle that lumps eight billion infinitely unique human souls into sixteen personality types.¹⁰

God’s voice is “an inner voice of love,” not shame or social pressure. God, who knows us better than our parents, better than our best friend or spouse or lover, better than we even know ourselves, knows us exactly as we actually are, and still utterly, completely pours his love into our hearts, and seems to genuinely delight in us as his children. This is sheer, audacious, unmerited grace.¹¹ “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”¹²

When we go into the quiet, we begin to hear God’s voice speak our true identity over us. Simultaneously, we get a little distance from other people’s voices over our (often false) identity — their love, or disdain, or disapproval, their expectations, or demands. We get a little mental/emotional buffer between us and all the other voices; we realize we are not what other people think or say about us; we are simply a child under the love of God.

The silly thing is, even the loudest voices in our heads are rarely thinking about us nearly as much as we think! The psychologist Thomas Gilovich at Cornell University conducted a hilarious study where he had young students walk around campus wearing a T-shirt with a large picture of Barry Manilow’s face on it (this was a while ago, when poor Barry was still well-known but not cool …). Most students overestimated by about double the number of people who would notice their quirky attire. Meaning, they were walking around campus feeling horribly embarrassed by their shirt, but hardly anybody even noticed. The research summary concluded, “People tend to believe that they stand out in the eyes of others, both positively and negatively, more than they actually do.”¹³

Or to quote a well-known proverb: Don’t worry about what the world thinks of you. Because it doesn’t.

As funny as this is, this deep, primal social dynamic causes us to perform a “false self” — to project a curated image to the world, often an image of who we genuinely want to be, or wish we were, or even are trying to be, but, in actuality, are not. Or worse: a completely fabricated self, designed for one reason: to get ahead. All of it, our attempt to be loved.

Yet research studies usually conclude what most of us naturally intuit: this morphing of the self into a kind of “brand”¹⁴ inevitably leads to stress, burnout, and even feelings of intense shame. (“Imposter syndrome,” anyone?)

Why? Because our “brand” self is not a real self. It’s not who we actually are. It’s why we’re both revolted by and can’t-help-but-look-at the paparazzi’s unflattering celebrity photos online. Tom Cruise on a beach, a bit overweight, his latest girlfriend glowering at him. Margot Robbie leaving Whole Foods on a bad hair day, her body swollen from her monthly cycle. It turns out, none of us are as cool or beautiful or toned or happy or confident as the (false) image we project to the world. Take away the lights and makeup and advanced filters and forty-eight-hour fasts before the photoshoot, and guess what? We’re all — even the most glamorous of us — just us.

When you look closely at the saints of church history — the most luminous of disciples of Jesus — you quickly realize an odd juxtaposition: those who were the most committed to death to self and surrender to God are not boring, dull automatons, just another cog in the machine; they are some of the most creative minds in human history. They are not slavish, Handmaid’s Tale-esque religious clones (which seems to be a generational fear-bordering-on-paranoia). Instead, they are some of the most unique, daring people to ever grace the earth.

Of course, there’s a reason a disproportionate number of the saints were martyrs. Many of them died for it. The world does not take lightly to those whose very lives violate the status quo. As Chesterton said, “The Saint … is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote.”¹⁵

It turns out, sin makes us all the same; we devolve back to the same base, animalistic impulses — fear, greed, ambition, ego. I’m convinced one of the reasons there’s such an obsession with fashion in our era is because people are trying desperately to stand out externally, for fear they will be found out to be painfully common internally.

But no one is more original than a saint.

The saints live from this deep sense of God-given identity, which often emerges from their time in the desert.

John the Baptizer (or Saint John the Baptist, as we now call him, who was later martyred) was a head-scratching conundrum to the religious leaders of the day. Wearing their matching phylacteries and performing their religious zeal, they could not make sense of this prophet, living out in the desert, wearing camel’s hair, eating wild honey and locusts, and preaching the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom.

So, they sent a delegation to find out more …

“Who are you?” they ask.

He immediately replies, “I am not the Messiah,” likely cutting off their false expectations at first beat.

“Okay, then, who are you? Are you Elijah?” (Another theory, as many first-century Hebrews were expecting the return of Elijah to usher in the Kingdom.)

But, again, John is blunt: “I am not.”

“Are you the Prophet?”

“No.”

“Finally they said, ‘Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’”

Then John replied with a prophecy from Isaiah: “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”¹⁶

Do you see how incredibly clear and firm and at peace John is with his identity? Unswayable, unmovable. His identity is grounded in something far older and larger than himself. It’s not something he chose, or that was chosen for him by his parents or clan. It’s who God created him to be, a unique light that lived in God’s mind and heart, centuries before John drew his first breath.

And it’s not just John, with his funky uniform and spartan diet. In story after story, the holy ones emerge from the desert with a new, God-given identity.

Jesus, too, comes out of the desert only to quote a different prophecy from Isaiah for his identity: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me.”¹⁷

Paul came out of his time in the Arabian desert saying, “I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher.”¹⁸

John was in exile on Patmos, a bare rock in the Aegean Sea, when he found the words to claim, “I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus.”¹⁹

This is what happens to those who spend time with God in the eremos — they discover who they truly are.

As God reveals to us our true identity, we realize there are many things that are true about us — our successes and failures, our desires and dreams and aversions and attractions and wounds and traumas and triggers — but those are not the truest thing about us.²⁰ The truest thing about us — what really makes us, us — is that we are “in Christ,” and our “life is hidden with Christ in God,” we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” our days “ordained for us before any of them came to be,” we have been “called according to his purpose” and we were “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do,” our destiny is glorious because we are incredibly well loved.²¹

And to be really clear: this is about God’s glory, his beauty and honor and love, not ours. As Saint Irenaeus of Lyons said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”²²

When we discover who we are in Christ, we come “fully alive”; we reflect and refract the radiant light of Christ’s face to the world. In fact, the second half of that sentence from Irenaeus is key: “And human life consists in beholding God.”²³ For Irenaeus, who was a disciple of the martyr Polycarp, who himself was a direct disciple of the Apostle John (yes, that Apostle John), the way we become a radiant, glowing “human being fully alive” is by gazing at the radiant person of Jesus, who is already gazing at us, in love. By “beholding.”

This is not “self-actualization,” not even close. This is Paul’s magisterial claim, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”²⁴ It’s “Christ-in-you-actualization.” This is Christ being formed in your inner person until you radiate out his love.

But we will not get this sense of self from an Enneagram number, or by reading a book, and certainly not by doomscrolling on Instagram or donning a killer fit to impress our friends or pulling out a credit card to buy another thing we don’t need or Facetuning a selfie to look better online than we are in real life or by giving our body away sexually in hopes of being loved or working eighty hours a week in pursuit of “success;” we don’t need to earn this identity or work for it or pay for it or merit it. It’s sheer grace — a gift.

To claim it, all we have to do is “behold,” just sit quietly, look at God, looking at us, and let him love us into who we really, truly are. Let the Spirit midwife our new self into being in God.

But for that to happen, we, like Jesus, must disappear into the eremos …