Hidden in Each Other
What is the most important goal of your spiritual formation?
You might instinctively say love. Learning to love, practicing love. Good answer, but until we carefully define it, love may not help direct us. Rather than a feeling or behavior, love is simply identification with the beloved. When we identify—see ourselves in the other, a fellow imperfect human, an extension of us—whatever we do for them, we do for ourselves. To experience that identification is love. And vice versa. So…
…the goal of our spiritual formation is identity.
We need to be able to answer the question, who am I, and its twin, why am I here—or our lives will always be random with respect to our awareness and choices. And since love and identification are hopelessly entangled, a critical truth is laid bare: we will never find our identity in isolation, in the abstract, but always and only in connection with each other, with everything, with God’s presence.
We look for our identity as some separate entity, a package of roles, accomplishments, and attributes distinct from everything around us. But identity is meaningless in isolation, just a thought subject to change without notice.
Jesus is all over this. When he says we have to lose our lives to find them, he’s talking about losing our isolating thoughts about ourselves in order to come back home, to reconnect and identify. Clinical studies have now shown that when we experience awe—defined as encounters that are vast, beyond our current perceptual frames—our sense of self is diminished, a first domino creating a chain breaking down social barriers and increasing sense of meaning. Whether in nature, prayer, or relationship, our spiritual formation is nothing more than serial awe inducement…bringing us back to the vastness that takes us out of ourselves.
True identity can’t be conceived, named, or described. Soon as we do, we’re back in isolation, separated from the only place we’ll find it. True identity can only be experienced in moments of awe, pulled outside our thoughts to find it hidden in each other. If we’re looking for identity all by itself, we’re looking in the wrong spot.
