The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

Review #6 The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery by David Benner. This is one of my all-time favorite books!! It is very short but very deep and challenging. Benner makes the important point that there cannot be deep knowledge of God without deep knowledge of one’s self. We try to create uniqueness and a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ. But identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God (p.17-18). Genuine self-understanding revitalizes our spiritual life and leads to the fulfillment of our God-given destiny and vocation. Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience or reality. Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is disastrous to those we lead into the Christian life (p.22). Having information about God is no more transformational that having information about love. Theories and ideas about God can sit in sturdy storage canisters in our mind and do absolutely no good. Remember Jesus’ harsh words for the religious leaders who knew God’s law but did not know God’s heart. When knowledge about God is all objective but not personal, it is useless (p.24). Knowing about God’s love and forgiveness is not the same as knowing it as an experiential truth. The things that we know from experience, we know beyond belief (p.26). To truly know love, we must receive it in a vulnerable, undefended state. We must be willing to expose our whole self to God. This requires knowing the truth that the self that God loves is not the prettied-up pretend self, but our actual self (p.57). A genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self. (p.50) God loves us in our depth, complexity, totality, and sinfulness (p.56). A complete knowing of our self in relation to God requires knowing our self as deeply loved by God, our self as deeply sinful, and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored. (p.67)