Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
LEWIS CARROLL
Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion.”
LUKE 8:30
The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel, you must break the shell.
MEISTER ECKHART
In March my thoughts turned more and more to the transformation that takes place within the waiting heart. What are the changes and growth I am being asked to undergo? What is the movement that is happening inside of me, and where do I begin?
WAITING SONG
These questions were on my mind one warm March evening as I sat on my daughter’s bed, braiding her hair into an intricate silky cord. Earlier she’d been teaching me her dance steps for the spring recital. We’d held hands, twirling gracefully around her bedroom, dancing to the rise and fall of our own laughing. Now we were silent as I wove her hair back and forth through my fingers.
Suddenly the wind chimes began to play a song from the patio. Ting, ting, ting. “What’s that, Mama?” she asked.
“Let’s go see,” I suggested. As we walked outside, I held onto her hair, afraid that all my efforts at braiding would unravel.
Purple shadows criss-crossed the garden. In the twilight four new daffodils were swaying in the breeze, moving with the melody of the chimes. I thought back to the December day I’d laid the bulbs in the earth, leaving them to wait. A novice in the garden, I’d buried the bulbs nearly a foot deep. “Good grief! A few inches would have been sufficient,” a gardener friend told me later. Knowing that, I had wondered whether the daffodils would even come up. But here they were, nodding at me.
As Ann and I gazed at them, I was struck by how extraordinary their feat really was—those delicate shoots breaking through the soil, through all the darkness I’d heaped on them. I wondered if that was the same mystery going on in the soil of my own life. Was there a truer, more whole self buried in me under layers of heaped darkness? Was I being asked to break through the layers of my false selves and let the True Self emerge?
The sound floated again through the dusk. Ting. Ting. Ting. “What is that, Mama?” Ann repeated. I smiled. I wanted to tell my daughter that it was more than she could ever imagine, this sound. It wasn’t just wind striking the chimes under the eaves. It was a waiting song, a song about what is deep and holy pressing to the light.
“Show me the dance for the spring recital one more time,” I said to her. I turned loose her hair and let all the weaving fall free. She took my hands and we spun round the purple edges of the garden, moving with the daffodils to the waiting song.
That night, when I kissed Ann goodnight, she said, “Mama, I liked that dance.”
“Me too,” I said. All night I could scarcely sleep. I kept hearing the soft tinging in the air.
THE TRUE SEED
Over and over again God calls you and me to the gardening of our own divine depths, to the cultivation of what Meister Eckhart called the “true seed” within us. God calls us to tend what lies seeded in the soul, this kernel of our truest nature—the God-image or True Self.
Eckhart identified the true seed as the living presence of God’s image implanted in the soul. “There is something in the soul which is only God,” he wrote.1 I can’t think of anything that creates such a feeling of awe in me.
He wasn’t saying that the soul is God, but that God is in the soul, that the soul is the holy soil in which the divine life of God is planted for us to cultivate and experience. He wrote, “God has sowed his image. . . . He sows the seed of the divine nature. . . . The seed of God is in us. If the seed had a good, wise and industrious cultivator, it would thrive and grow up into God.”2
Could it be that at the most fundamental level this is what it means to grow spiritually? Could it be that this is the meaning of the verse, “We are to grow up in every way into . . . Christ” (Eph. 4:15)?
After that March evening I began to get a new glimpse of the process of spiritual transformation: there’s a bulb of truth buried in the human soul that’s “only God”—God’s image and likeness. Throughout our lives we create patterns of living that obscure this identity. We heap on the darkness, constructing a variety of false selves. We become adept at playing games, wearing masks as if life were a masquerade party. This can go on for a long while. But eventually the music of the True Self seeks us out. Sooner or later (often in midlife), we’re summoned back to the garden. We’re called to soul-work.
About this time I discovered Hildegard of Bingen, a woman of the twelfth century who was an extraordinary preacher, theologian, doctor, scientist, artist, composer, and writer. She was a towering spiritual presence, all but forgotten now. Recently my daughter was watching a beauty contest on television. When the host asked the finalists which female figure in history they would most like to spend an evening with, answers ran from Marilyn Monroe to Betsy Ross. Ann asked who my choice would be. “Hildegard of Bingen,” I said, almost without thinking. When I tried to explain who she was, Ann rolled her eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. “You come up with some dingers,” she said.
I grinned, for it was true that Hildegard rang a clear, holy bell in me. She said that the soul was like a precious field from which we must “root out the useless grasses, thorns, and briars” in order to reveal the beauty of God’s image glistening in the soil. To Hildegard, sin was failing to care for the soul, failing to water it and give it what she called “greening power.” The saddest thing, to Hildegard, was a “drooping soul.”3
I began to get an almost stunning sense of how little attention we Christians have paid to the soul as the seedbed of divine life within us. We’ve mostly looked at it as something to save—an immortal essence in need of redeeming. How many souls have you won? then becomes the central question of Christian life. But the soul is more than something to win or save. It’s the seat and repository of the inner Divine, the God-image, the truest part of us.
I woke fresh to the knowledge that the soul is the place where we meet God. “Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground,” Eckhart wrote.4 When I began to see the soul in this light, the important thing became not saving the soul but entering it, greening it, developing the divine seed that waits realization. I realized that the heart of religion was setting up an honest dialogue with the uniqueness of one’s soul and finding a deeply personal relationship with God, the inner Voice, the inner Music that plays in you as it does in no one else.
I’m aware that, if it stopped there, religion would be in danger of becoming inward and selfish. That’s why Eckhart and Hildegard both insisted that the discovery and tending of the true seed must expand into compassion. As the seed branches out, one’s soul intertwines with others in loving, reconciling ways.
But the question here is whether we’ve been so busy saving souls that we’ve neglected the unfolding of the God-image within them. Have we suppressed our souls, imprisoning the True Self under layers of falseness, wounding, conformity, and even conventional religious practice? Is Christianity becoming a sanctum of drooping souls?
During those early spring days, as I contemplated the daffodil bulbs and the “true seed,” I turned a corner in my waiting journey. I began to sense God calling me to the primary spiritual experience of soulmaking. It was as if God were whispering to me, The soul wants to be acknowledged and nurtured. The True Self wants to bloom and grow. And the way to begin this spiritual flowering is to confront your false selves—the ego patterns you have created—and come home to who you really are inside.
WHITTLING AWAY
There’s an old Carolina story I like about a country boy who had a great talent for carving beautiful dogs out of wood. Every day he sat on his porch whittling, letting the shavings fall around him. One day a visitor, greatly impressed, asked him the secret of his art. “I just take a block of wood and whittle off the parts that don’t look like a dog,” he replied.
In down-home language, this anecdote describes the movement of growth I’m referring to. The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and—with all the love and discernment we can muster—gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.
Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for. I’ll be honest. As I began my own spiritual whittling, I often clung to my “block of wood” resistantly. After all, wasn’t I fine just as I was? Why should I embrace an art that could demand so much patience and be so difficult?
But there were also days when I felt drawn to try, when I yearned to discover how I was living falsely. At times it even seemed that I was pulled into a winding Pied Piper journey I couldn’t help but follow, because not to meant missing the most irresistible adventure of all: becoming real.
The writings of Thomas Merton encouraged me. He envisioned much of the spiritual life as whittling away the false self in order to become the True Self. He called the struggle for authenticity a “contemplative crisis” and insisted that no one can avoid it, that eventually we all “get the treatment.” According to Merton, “One’s actual self may be far from ‘real,’ since it may be profoundly alienated from one’s own deep spiritual identity. To reach one’s ‘real self’ one must, in fact, be delivered from that illusory and false ‘self’ whom we have created?”5
How real am I? I asked myself. What are the illusions I’ve created? What false selves do I need to pare away? Those are the whittling questions. Taken seriously, they’re tough and agonizing. “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves,” wrote Merton.6
Gradually I took time to probe and reflect. Bit by bit I encountered patterns of falseness, wounds, and cherished illusions that came together to form false selves.
THE SELF WITH A CAPITAL S
As I struggled to confront these selves (which I describe later in this chapter), I found valuable insights in the work of C. G. Jung. I want to pass on one or two of them because Jung’s vision offers us Christians a viable, revitalizing way of seeing our own lifelong process of spiritual becoming.
Jung demonstrated that there’s a True Self dimension of the human personality; he called this the Self with a capital S. It has been called his most profound and far-reaching discovery. Self is an unfortunate name, though, because it tends to mislead people. Self doesn’t refer to our narrow identity or our ego (as in myself) but to the Center, the image of God within us. It’s been compared to the inner kingdom that Jesus referred to (Luke 17:21).
If that isn’t exciting enough, Jung also believed that the foremost drive within the human is toward wholeness and realization of the Self. Along with Hildegard and Eckhart, he believed that we have an inborn tendency to uncover the God-image within us.
We can think of the Self as already within us, an imprint of wholeness and divinity that’s fully encompassing, but we must also see it as (to borrow Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst John Sanford’s words) a “potentiality striving to become realized in us.”7 I sometimes think of the True Self as a bulb buried in the dark ground of my unconscious, seeking to push into the conscious light above. You’ve perhaps noticed how window plants wind and grow toward the light, pressing their leaves against the pane. This turning toward the sun has a scientific name; it’s called heliotropism. Jung spoke of a “human heliotropism.” The True Self seeks the light, winding and growing toward realization, pressing against the window pane of consciousness.
I can’t tell you how this tiny glimpse of Jung’s psychology widened, deepened, and affirmed my spiritual journeying. Jung called this path toward wholeness in which the Self seeks realization “individuation,” since it means becoming a unique and completed individual—the person God created us to be. The question that began to resonate inside me was this: What would it mean for me to step onto the path of individuation? Where would I end up? I only knew in the depths of me that it was a holy, God-saturated path.
THE EGOCENTRIC EGO
I also grew aware of another center in the human psyche: the self with a lower case s, or the ego. To understand our false selves, we need to look closely at this dimension of ourselves.
The ego is the part of us with which we identify. It’s “the executive of the conscious personality,” writes John Sanford.8 A strong ego, aware of its boundaries, is crucial to wholeness and healthy functioning. In fact, the ego is like the window pane of consciousness toward which the True Self grows and expresses itself in one’s life. We can’t do without it.
The problem arises when the ego becomes egocentric, an unavoidable human condition. As we attempt to adapt to and protect ourselves from the wounds and realities of life, we each create a unique variety of defense structures—patterns of thinking, behaving, and relating designed to protect the ego. These egocentric patterns make up our false selves.
Throughout life these ego structures progressively harden, darkening the pane and thereby cutting the ego off from the Self. As a result, that vital connection with the True Self cannot be fully made. Jesus referred to this condition as hardness of heart (Mark 8:17).
The spiritual journey entails confronting these hardened patterns that we’ve spent a lifetime creating, patterns that oppose the life of the spirit and obscure our true spiritual identity. Overcoming them means allowing God to transform even our most prized illusions about ourselves.
As this inner picture of what happens deep inside us came together for me, I realized that a major pitfall of human life was believing that these rigid ego patterns or masks are who we really are, that there’s nothing beyond the ingrained patterns we live out every day. Is that what I had done? Had my masks gotten stuck to my face? Were facets of me living the cramped life of the ego, alienated from the wider, richer life of the Self?
When these insights began to sink in (and it took some time for that to happen), I began to see how my own spiritual stage had been set for this great and universal drama, a drama on which the curtain frequently rises at midlife. It was a drama in which the false selves of the ego and the true identity of the Self wrestle for primacy in the human personality.
The truth that I had begun to discover that evening in the soft light of the March garden was being affirmed to me: in order for the ego to relinquish its central position, my hardened structures must be cracked open. This process opens a way for the gradual shift of centers, a deep restructuring away from the ruling needs of the ego toward the Self, or the core of God within.
In Christian language, this is plain, old-fashioned surrender—giving up our conscious will and striving, and yielding instead to the inner kingdom.
The soul-work involved in this internal restructuring is, I believe, the deepest meaning of spiritual becoming.
NOT I, BUT CHRIST
These ideas were a great puzzle for me. How did they weave together with the Scripture? One night, as I sat up late reading in the Epistles, I saw more clearly how Christianity teaches that we have a True Self—a “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), an indwelling Christ (Col. 1:27, Phil. 1:21, Rom. 8:9–10), an inner Christ-self that’s unformed and unfinished (Eph. 4:13, 15).
As I read Galatians 2:20—“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”—I wondered, Could this be the sacred process of becoming a true individual and discovering the ground of 1 A.M. in one’s own soul? Is discovering and developing the “mind of Christ” the bending, curving journey toward the light?
I closed the Bible, feeling the deep click of truth that comes when God reaches out in startling ways from its pages. We seem to think that God speaks by seconding the ideas we’ve already adopted, but God nearly always catches us by surprise. If it’s God’s Spirit blowing, someone ends up having feathers ruffled in an unforeseen way. God tends to confound, astonish, and flabbergast. A Bethlehem stable, a Roman cross, an empty garden tomb. We might as well reconcile ourselves to the fact that God’s truth often turns up in ways we don’t expect.
Referring to the verse I just quoted from Galatians, John Sanford writes,
In this statement Paul tells us that his personality has been reorganized in such a way that it no longer revolves around his Ego, but around a larger center within himself that he calls the Christ within. This is the essential thought . . . that in the course of our lifetime our personalities are to be transformed and reorganized in such a way that the Ego, with its ambitions and goals, is no longer the main reference point.9
Through that statement I began to feel a convergence of all these varied thoughts—from Eckhart and Hildegard to Merton to Jung to Paul—that moved me at a deep level. With these insights casting new light on Scripture, I began to see the midlife soulscape in sharper focus. The words, “not I, but Christ” urged me to come home to myself more fully, to the petaled truth buried deep within.
NIGHT PRAYER
One night I put my reading aside and walked outside under the stars to sit on the grass. There’s something about a vast night sky full of blazing stars that spins life back into proportion and soothes the frayed and hurting places in me. St. Teresa pointed out that the door of entry to the soul is prayer and reflection.10 Night prayers, more than any others, seem to carry us over the portal. A night prayer is one said against a backdrop of darkness or beneath the shadow of pain. It’s in those circumstances that we most often find the honest feelings and searing words that can plunge us into change.
I opened my journal; and by the spill of light from the porch, the moon, and the stars, a prayer—a night prayer of both darkness and pain—came pouring from my heart. I wrote it down, hardly knowing what I was about to unleash in my life:
God, I don’t want to live falsely, in self-imposed prisons and fixed, comfortable patterns that confine my soul and diminish the truth in me. So much of me has gone underground. I want to let my soul out. I want to be free to risk what’s true, to be myself. Set free the daring in me—the willingness to go within, to see the self-lies. I’ll try to run away, but don’t let me. Don’t let me stifle myself with prudence that binds the creative revisioning of life and the journey toward wholeness.
I’m scared, God. Make me brave. Lead me into the enormous spaces of becoming. Help me cease the small, tedious work of maintaining and protecting so that I can break the masks that obscure your face shining in the night of my own soul. Help me to green my soul and risk becoming the person you created me to be.
Tomorrow I may regret these words, but tonight I speak them, for I know that you’re somewhere inside them, that you love me and won’t leave me alone in their echo.
I shut my journal and stared at the web of stars overhead. I wondered if this was how beginnings were made—in the momentary flarings of a scared but burning heart.
THE COLLECTIVE “THEY”
Change begins with the recognition that we’re not so much an “I” as a “they.” We may like to think that we’re individuals living out our own unique truth, but more often we’re scripts written collectively by society, family, church, job, friends, and traditions. Sometimes our life becomes a matter of simply playing the various roles for which we’ve been scripted . . . playing them out perfectly, in the right sequence, in full costume and mask.
Author Linda Leonard reminds us that “in trying to adapt to an image from outside projected by parents and society, we become reduced to an object, to an It. Our lives become mundane and banal, we become fascinated by trivial matters and mystery is lost—the mystery of our unique selves.”11
We need our outer roles and identities, of course, but we also need to live them authentically, in ways that are true to our unique and inner self. When we live exclusively out of the expectations thrust on us from without, rather than living from the truth emerging within, we become caught in the collective “they.”
I asked myself repeatedly, over the course of days and weeks, what seemed like the silliest question: Okay, Sue Monk Kidd, who are you? And I always heard the obvious answer: “I’m Sandy’s wife, Bob and Ann’s mother, Leah and Ridley’s daughter, a church member, a writer, a . . .”
One day, as I drove to the post office, that little dialogue started up in my head. A pressing question broke right into the middle of my rote response: So if all those roles were suddenly stripped away, what would be left? Who would you be then?
Now there’s a menacing question: Who would I be? The question sliced through the obvious, and suddenly I felt as if I were looking in a mirror at my original face, hearing my real name called for the first time.
As I parked the car at the post office, tears began pouring down my face. I am, I thought. That’s all. I was shocked by wonder at this unbidden and penetrating “knowing” of who I was. Inside I felt reshuffled, revisioned, widened, breathed into.
I look back at that experience with a smile. I mean, there I was, sitting in a parking space at the U.S. post office having an ontological experience, an experience of pure beingness. But that’s how such splinterings of God often pierce us. In an unsuspecting moment the scales fall off our eyes, the optical illusions vanish, and we’re standing before what Rudolph Otto called “the mysterium tremendum”—the bare mystery of simply being. (I never did buy stamps that day.)
We need to allow that question. As a matter of fact, lots of times we need questions more than answers. Questions such as these: Is there more to me than the roles I live out? Can I open up to my identity apart from them, to the knowledge that I’m more than the personas I create?
Philosopher Sören Kierkegaard wrote that the “ultimate thing” is “whether you yourself are conscious of that most intimate relation to yourself as an individual.”12 This “ultimate” recognition is a necessary part of growing up.
One day, crossing the street, I noticed a bumper sticker on a car that said, “I refuse to grow up.” In the spiritual life this is a deadly motto to follow. I looked through the car’s window at the driver, an adult woman. She looked safe and comfortable, and with a shock I recognized myself. A lot of days I didn’t want to grow up either.
“At some point, if we are to continue to grow, we must begin to differentiate ourselves from the roles we play. Often we do this when the roles that felt good initially now feel empty,” notes author Carol Pearson.13 A lot of my roles were feeling empty. Slowly, as I probed my life, I began to see how much of me was embedded in the collective “they,” how I tended to live out the scripting and expectations thrust on me rather than my own truth.
Author Sam Keen calls the appearance of the True Self from beneath roles the emergence of the “outlaw.”14 A daunting name, isn’t it? It’s used in the sense that one is growing beyond the confining “laws” imposed from without or from one’s history. He describes the outlaw quest not as rebellion but as a crucial stage of healthy inner growth in which the adult tills up the myths, masks, and ego defenses that were constructed during the first half of life. It’s the first movement away from the herd instinct toward the True Self, a struggle to pull oneself from the powerful suction of the collective “they” and become an authentic “I.”
NAMING FALSE SELVES
In the weeks that followed I began a process of “naming” my false selves, a process that spanned many weeks of looking within and reflecting on my life. By naming the inner patterns that imprison us, we come to know them more fully and obtain a certain power over them. God told Adam to name the animals as part of the process of obtaining “dominion over them” (Gen. 2:19). My false selves—these encrustations of my own weak and wounded ego—are not so particular to me. In sharing them with others, I’ve found that we human beings are more alike than different. In the “humus” of our soul, we find common soil, common seed, the same heaped darkness.
Nevertheless, our task is to dip our hands into the soil of our own lives and name the patterns unique to us. The patterns that follow aren’t meant to be comprehensive; neither are they categories into which we neatly fit. We may reflect various aspects of these profiles at different times, in different situations. They’re offered as windows through which you might catch a glimpse or two of yourself.
Little Girl with a Curl
A picture that hung on the wall over my bed when I was a child came to live on a wall inside me. It was of a black-haired little girl dressed in a delicate blue dress. She held a parasol and smiled a sweet, docile smile. It was often said that she bore a resemblance to me.
What fascinated me most about her was one black curl that dangled down into the middle of her forehead, a straying curl that had a mind of its own. I had one of those curls myself.
Whenever I looked at the little girl with the charming smile and straying curl who presided over my room, I thought of the nursery rhyme my parents often quoted to me:
There was a little girl who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very very good.
When she was bad she was horrid.
My parents’ voices soared happily when they recited the part about the girl’s goodness and sank when they came to her horridness. That was, after all, part of the drama of nursery rhymes.
I connected the “very very good” side of the girl in the picture with her sweet, docile smile and pleasing nature and the “horrid” side of her with the straying curl.
The message was powerful. Personify the good side of the little girl: smile sweetly, be pleasing, do what’s expected—no straying outside the lines. Suppress the mind-of-your-own dimension, which tends to sour everyone. In other words, when it comes to life, keep every hair in place.
It didn’t take me long to learn the “good” set of expectations for little girls growing up in the fifties. Be pleasing, demure, compliant, conforming, docile, and sweet. Obtain what you need or want through charm, not directness. Be poised on the outside regardless of the chaos on the inside. Above all, smile.
As I experienced the frowns and internal bruises that came from occasional deviation from these expectations, my ego learned the Little Girl with a Curl way of being in the world. I learned how to please, how to adapt myself to the expectations of others and live out their projections of what a “good” girl should do and be. I spent a lot of time opening my parasol against the onslaughts of disapproval and put on my sweetest smile even when I didn’t feel like smiling. I bent and spindled my soul trying to become what I perceived others wanted or needed from me.
The Little Girl with a Curl followed me right into adulthood. One day, over lunch, a prominent writer whom I admired expressed disdain for a social cause I supported. “I can’t imagine how anyone could support such a cause,” she said. “Can you?” I swallowed. My Girl with a Curl wanted very much to please her and have her approval. “No,” I said weakly, “I suppose not.” Later I felt sickened at how I’d compromised myself.
The Little Girl with a Curl is the part of us that says what we imagine people want to hear. She is, above all, a pleaser. In search of approval, she looks to others for her own validation.
When we give ourselves completely over to the idea and images of parents, husband, wife, church, social organizations, friends, or “prominent” persons, and silence our own voice of soul in the process, we allow others to create our sense of who we are rather than growing our own identity within ourselves. “Tell me what you want me to be and I’ll be it.”
It’s amazing how many women remain stuck at this girlish level of development. It’s understandable, though, when you realize how much around us encourages it. Everybody loves a pleaser. People who exhibit a mind of their own, straying from the status quo, are less welcome. Look at the life of Jesus. He wasn’t a pleaser. Rather than adapt to expectations, he lovingly dared to be his own person. You see where it got him.
The task of the Little Girl with a Curl is to “author-ize” herself, as Sam Keen puts it.15 With God she becomes the co-author of her own life rather than allowing herself to be authored by others.
Tinsel Star
When my daughter was small she got the dubious part of the Bethlehem star in a Christmas play. After her first rehearsal she burst through the door with her costume, a five-pointed star lined in shiny gold tinsel designed to drape over her like a sandwich board. “What exactly will you be doing in the play?” I asked her.
“I just stand there and shine,” she told me. I’ve never forgotten that response.
As I named my false selves, it occurred to me that her part in the play was like a scene from my own life. I’d spent some time standing around trying to shine.
The Tinsel Star pours herself into a long line of praiseworthy accomplishments. She’s the overachiever in us, the perfectionist, the performer whose outer radiance often covers an inner insecurity. Whether it’s being mom, career woman, PTA grade-mother, church volunteer, or committee chair, the Tinsel Star’s aim is to do it with dazzle and win accolades.
When we adopt this particular ego mask, we invest ourselves in the notion that those who shine the brightest are loved the most. This comes from the distorted idea that meaning and acceptance come from what we do, not who we are. We buy into the widespread notion that “light” emanates from our achievements, not from the divine fire within our soul.
Many years ago I hosted an afternoon tea in my home for a group of women. Aware how elaborate their own teas had been, I fussed for days over lace napkins, flower arrangements, china, silver, gourmet bread and butter sculpted into flower shapes (no, I’m not kidding). One guest said, “You’ve really outdone yourself today.” I think she meant it as a compliment, but her words nailed me to a sudden truth. I was trying to outdo, outshine everyone—even myself. I wasn’t motivated by hospitality and friendship but by the Star’s need to impress. When it was over, I went outside and sat in the garden, asking God’s forgiveness and trying to come to terms with my need to shine.
Accomplishments and achievements are well and good, but they need to flow out of a healthy motivation. Otherwise, when they cease we experience an empty darkness. The Star’s task is to discover her own inner light, the divine spark, so that she doesn’t constantly struggle to create light and warmth for herself by giving a lustrous performance.
Rapunzel
The story of Rapunzel, recounted in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, reveals a false-self pattern common to many of us at certain times in our life. Rapunzel was a damsel imprisoned by a witch in a tower without a door. The only access to the tower was through a solitary window at the top. When the witch wanted to visit, she stood below and called for Rapunzel to let down her long, golden hair from the window. Then the witch scampered up, using Rapunzel’s hair as a ladder. Year after year Rapunzel sat in the tower, singing sad songs and waiting for someone to come along and rescue her.
As I identified my false selves, I recognized Rapunzel in myself. She was the part of me that wanted Daddy, Mama, husband, or somebody else to come fix it, the part that languished in whatever struggle I found myself, singing sad songs and looking outside instead of inside for help.
Rapunzel is the helpless damsel waiting for rescue. Locked in a “towering” problem or difficulty, she waits for deliverance rather than taking responsibility for herself. Her waiting is negative waiting, not the creative, active waiting that initiates growth.
As I thought of Rapunzel, stuck all those years in a tower without a door, I wondered why Rapunzel couldn’t figure out a way to get out. After all, the witch had been ingenious enough to figure out how to get her in there in the first place. When I reread the tale—especially the ending, where the witch, in a fury, picks up a pair of shears and cuts off Rapunzel’s hair—I wondered why it had never dawned on Rapunzel to cut off her hair herself and use it as a ladder. The answer was there all along, only she was so busy waiting for rescue that she didn’t see it.
It’s important to be able to ask for and accept help, but not Rapunzel’s way. She chose to forego the contemplative experience of tapping her soul-strength, to bury her problem-solving potential and project it onto others. Struggling with the difficulties of life, we may adopt the idea that we’re too weak, too dumb, too busy, or too incompetent to take care of ourselves and extricate ourselves from pain and problems. A tape recording plays in our heads: You can’t manage that. You aren’t able to figure it out yourself. You’re too weak to do it on your own.
When that happens, Rapunzel makes her grand appearance.
The Rapunzel pattern reminds me of an insight that pastoral counselor and Episcopal priest Jean Clift received while watching the opening credits of the television program “Mystery” on PBS. As the credits roll, a cartoon-animated woman whose ankles are tied waves her hands in the air and cries, “Ohhh! Ohhh!” waiting for someone to come untie her.
“I watched that show for a long while before it occurred to me that the woman’s hands aren’t tied,” Jean said. “She could, if she were so inclined, bend down and untie her own ankles.”
That perceived helplessness is the sort of thing Rapunzel feels.
In the midst of my midlife pain, I wrote in my journal about a similar fairy tale motif: “Sometimes I feel like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the kiss that never comes.” Later I read that entry and saw that I mustn’t depend solely on others to bring the “kiss” to heal me. I had to do it myself, with God’s grace and Presence. I needed to embrace myself, knowing that sometimes God’s arms were my arms. I needed to seek help, yes; but I also needed to bend down and untie my own ankles. That’s Rapunzel’s task.
The Bible reminds us that “God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love . . .” (2 Tim. 1:7). Or, as Paul wrote, “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). We have a formidable Spirit within us that makes us strong even when our ankles are tied.
Little Red Hen
I heard a storyteller say that people sometimes grow up and live out their favorite childhood stories. That caused me to wince. One of my favorites was the tale of the Little Red Hen.
This hen “did it all.” She cooked, washed, made beds, swept, mended, hoed, raked, and mowed. She was a virtual whiz hen. One day she found some grains of wheat and asked her household companions who would help her plant them. “Not I,” said the cat. “Not I,” said the dog. “Not I,” said the mouse. “Then I’ll do it myself,” said the Little Red Hen. And she did.
That becomes the litany of the story. Each time the hen asked for help—when she asked who would help her cut the wheat, grind it into flour, and make a cake—she received the same answer. So, with efficiency and resignation, she did it herself. In many ways the Little Red Hen is the opposite of Rapunzel; she’s fully competent, with a self-sufficient exterior. Inside, however, she’s gritting her teeth.
The pattern of the Little Red Hen is that of a martyr. Long-suffering and driven, she never stops. She’s ruled by a duty-at-all-costs mentality and gives unceasingly—to the point of her own spiritual bankruptcy and mental exhaustion. Feeling the need to meet everyone’s demands, she abdicates herself and becomes the victim.
The Little Red Hen rarely comes out to play. Life for her is a relentless chore, with few moments of spontaneity and exuberance. She’s frozen her playfulness; no longer is she that delighting and delightful inner child who knows that sometimes a graceful wasting of time invites a holy encounter and puts one in touch with the true Center, the place where, as Eckhart observed, God and the soul are “eternally at play.”
The martyr structure in my life was most evident in my role as the dutiful wife, sacrificing mother, and ambitious career woman. Even when the well inside was dust-dry, I usually kept on working and giving—sometimes through clenched teeth. In years past I had resisted the need to get away for a couple of days (or even hours) to replenish myself and listen to the unique music deep in my soul. I said such things as, “Go off on a retreat alone? But who would care for my family? Who would cook for them? They would surely starve. And what about the project I’m working on? I can’t leave it now!” In other words, “I’ll do it myself.”
A woman caught in the martyr pattern once told me, “We’re raised to be givers, even when it mutilates us. When it comes to giving to myself, my name isn’t on the gift list. If it ever turned up, it would be dead last.”
The Little Red Hen would have us believe that we should do our duty with silent contentment at the expense of ourselves. One of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons shows two cows in a pasture. One is saying to the other, “I don’t care what they say. I’m not content.” Dis-contentment comes when we sense a loss of our inner content. It isn’t a bad thing when it causes us to look within and seek our soul, however. That’s holy discontent.
In the story the Little Red Hen reached that state eventually. After planting the grains, harvesting them, grinding the flour, and baking the cake—all herself—the hen asked, “Now who will help me eat the cake?” Naturally everybody showed up. Suddenly something snapped in the Little Red Hen. “No, you won’t!” she shouted. “I’ll eat it myself!”
Inside every Little Red Hen something is seething. A friend of mine who’s an outwardly “contented” woman with a husband, three children, and a creative gift as an artist told me, “I get up at 6:00 A.M. and don’t stop all day just so that everything will go smoothly for my husband and children. Their needs are met to perfection, but hardly any of my own needs are met. I never have time for myself—to feed the creative spark in me. I give up everything, suppress everything inside me, for others.”
As she spoke I could feel the resentment rising in her veins; I noticed her fists tightening. “I need to do something about it, but I have voices in and around me that insist that the most important thing in life isn’t creativity or joy or even wholeness; the most important thing is duty!” Suddenly one fist came crashing down on the table. “I think one day I’m going to explode!”
I think you just have, I said to myself. Indeed, her hardened martyr structure was showing a few cracks. She was finally facing her own holy discontent. That encounter reminded me of something I read in a beautiful little book called Knowing Woman: “Duty and love are miles apart.”16
While speaking at a women’s retreat, I mentioned the story of my artist friend. A participant came up to me afterward and said, “But putting others first and oneself last is a woman’s calling in life. We’re supposed to always give and be servants no matter what, and I wish you wouldn’t tell me differently!” As she spoke, she raised her hands to cover her ears. It can be threatening to hear something that rubs against the grooves of the should’s and ought’s carved into our lives.
I believe that a healthy sharing of oneself is a holy call, but so is caring for ourselves and taking time for the beautiful mysteries God created within us. The important thing is balance. Being a martyr distorts the virtuous ideal of giving to others by crossing over into victim postures and a self-denial that squelches selfhood and the creative life of the soul.
The Bible summons us to self-love as well as other-love: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). How are we ever going to truly love others if we don’t cultivate self-love? (Not narcissistic love, but healthy self-accepting love.) The person who doesn’t love herself is usually the one who’s most preoccupied with herself, who’s most selfish.
The task of the Little Red Hen is twofold. First, she must learn to love herself extravagantly, which is the way God loves her. In order to free ourselves from the martyr mask we need to learn how to treat ourselves compassionately, to balance our giving. When I was wrapped up in my driven martyrdom, a teasing friend once told me, “If you treated others the way you treat yourself, you’d get arrested.”
Second, the Little Red Hen must learn how to come out and play. She needs to turn loose her grown-up stoicism and rigid control and say yes not only to herself but to life.
One day my friend Betty and I took a walk together. As we strolled along, we muttered about the demands and pressures of work and about how compulsive we sometimes become trying to do it all.
Suddenly we came upon a deserted playground. Our pace slowed, then stopped. We sat shyly in the swings and dangled our feet. I could sense the child in each of us trying to come out—the giggling little girl who used to swing so high that the soles of her tennis shoes seemed to skim the clouds.
We tossed each other a why-not shrug and shoved off. As we swang higher and higher, we laughed and sang, freeing something lost and precious inside. Time melted away; the moments disappeared into sacred bliss.
Today Betty and I recall that occasion with wonder, knowing that it reunited us with that part of ourselves that’s eternally at play with God and life. It helped heal the Little Red Hen in each of us.
Tin Woodman
One of the more destructive patterns we can take on is that of a person cut off from her feelings, from her heart. That pattern isn’t uncommon, as Djohariah Toor notes:
Many women are wounded at the heart level because our culture has generally diverted itself from feeling. We can be emotional, but this doesn’t mean we can recognize and articulate feelings. The fact is, a lot of women are afraid to feel. . . . Emotionally we are immobilized, bound to convention and a masculine penchant to keep a stiff upper lip.17
Many of us learned to be afraid of the feelings inside ourselves. Perhaps when we risked expressing them, we met with astonishment and admonishment, which led to embarrassment and vulnerability. So gradually we built an ego structure in which we separated ourselves from our feelings and avoided deep self-disclosure, even to ourselves.
While reading Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz with my daughter, I identified this pattern as the Tin Woodman—a character in the book who had no heart. He represents the part of us that’s cut off from our feelings.
In the story Dorothy found the Tin Woodman, completely rusted over, standing with his axe uplifted. She ran for an oil can and gave him a good squirt. Released at last, the Tin Woodman told Dorothy that he had once been a real person with a real body, in love with a young woman he planned to marry. The Witch of the East had enchanted his axe, however, causing him to cut off both legs. He replaced these with tin. Then he cut off his arms and again replaced them with tin. Finally his entire body had been cut away and replaced with tin. He was no longer covered in warm flesh but was trapped in an unfeeling armor.
This can be a familiar story in our lives. Whenever we come under the sway of those inner forces that censure and fragment us, we become progressively disconnected from how we really feel, from the passionate voice of our heart. We rust over. There comes a time in life when, like Dorothy, we need to run for the oil can.
Reading through my journal I came upon words that read like the voice of the Tin Woodman, like the voice of a woman searching for her heart:
I ask myself, When I glimpse a hummingbird in my tulips, can I call up my gladness and spend some time with it? And a stern voice in me says, How wasteful—what if you don’t get everything done? I ask, Can I allow myself to feel the pain of a relationship that needs rekindling? No, the voice says. Stifle it and pretend. Rocked boats tip over. So I ask, What about the anger inside? Can I feel it? And the voice says, It’s not nice to be angry. Then I ask, When I’m scared and hurting, can I open my soul and let someone peer way down inside? And it says, Keep a stiff upper lip. Bury it.
When I live with those answers long enough, I can no longer connect to my real feelings. I lose my ability to relate to myself and others from a genuine place. I lose myself.
Such a split of the head from the heart is common in our culture. Along with this goes another painful splitting: the severing of our body from our soul. As we separate from our feelings, we tend to separate from our bodies as well. Gradually they are cut away. When this happens, we become alienated from our earthiness, our sexuality, and the connecting relation that knits our soul to our body in a wholesome way.
In this separation we see our sexuality in a narrow way. Yet sex isn’t merely an act; it’s a wide and natural range of energies, instincts, and responses to life. It’s a vast, creative current of life energy that flows inside us.
Unfortunately, a lot of us learned to fear and mistrust sexuality. Growing up, I tended to polarize my sexuality and my instincts from the rest of me. I knew they were there, but I wasn’t terribly connected to them.
In the Church especially we’re inclined to incorporate a view of matter as sinful and the body as a fallen creation. In the Bible the word flesh is used negatively, to be sure. But we’ve misread things by connecting that word to our sexuality. The word, as used in the Bible, doesn’t refer to skin and bones and the beautiful weavings of the human body. John Westerhoff tells us that it refers to the power of sin and death, which encompasses both body and soul. He says that to live in flesh is to live a life that denies our bodies.18
I meet lots of women who’ve been wounded in this area. Because of this woundedness, a lot of us have split off our bodies, our sensual, sexual side and pushed them away. We’ve made these parts of us orphans. We can do that in a number of ways, according to Djohariah Toor: by acting promiscuously, by fleeing into our spiritual and intellectual lives, or by cutting off our instincts altogether.19
At times I tended to ignore my feeling, sexual side by living in the airy spaces of spirit and intellect. Believing that the workings of my mind were superior to my feelings, and that my spirit was much more important than my body, I tended to live in my head. Yet God didn’t prioritize the parts of me. God created my emotions, my instincts, my senses, and my body as well as my spirit and my mind—and pronounced them all “good.”
I was more able to accept the value of my physical self when I realized that incarnation occurred in connection with the body, that Mary birthed Christ through her flesh, portraying a marriage of matter and spirit. It was a dazzling idea to me, a healing idea.
In increasing ways I began to learn that we birth the True Self, the Christ-life, in communion with the whole of ourselves. Eckhart proclaimed, “The soul loves the body,”20 and Hildegard sang of the joy that comes from bringing the two together in mutual reverence. Yet many of us negate this part of ourselves—the heart-in-the-body part, that dancing, feeling, sexual, sensual part. Part of our healing involves rediscovering the great life-energy we’ve locked up. Then we can learn to adopt this part of us back and relate to it in healthy, God-given ways.
I recognized that my waiting would involve calling up this repressed part of me and healing my separation. It would mean learning to live my journey in a circle of oneness—in thought and emotion, soul and body, spirituality and sexuality. I sensed that a part of being whole in the spiritual life meant acknowledging the feelings trickling, pouring, and sometimes raging through my heart, as well as integrating the music and instincts of my body.
I’m discovering that a spiritual journey is a lot like a poem. You don’t merely recite a poem or analyze it intellectually. You dance it, sing it, cry it, feel it on your skin and in your bones. You move with it and feel its caress. It falls on you like a teardrop or wraps around you like a smile. It lives in the heart and the body as well as the spirit and the head.
The task of the Tin Woodman is to welcome back her feelings, embrace her body, and discover God in all of herself.
Chicken Little
Another way some of us cope with the slings and arrows that threaten our fragile egos is to construct a Chicken Little defense. Chicken Little, you’ll remember, was ambling along when an acorn fell on her head. Her fear exaggerated the acorn into a piece of the sky and she scurried into a cave crying, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
This is the pattern of retreating from life and protecting ourselves from rejection and uncertainty by finding a cave of safety in which to hide. When we wear the Chicken Little mask, we believe the sky is always about to fall. Albert Einstein said that the most important question was whether the universe is friendly. Chicken Little has answered that with an unequivocal no. She withdraws in fear and avoids situations that present risk—inner or outer. Obviously there are times when it’s best not to risk. But she’s the part of us that dares too little, especially on the inside.
Chicken Little, like all the other false selves, has been wounded on some level and has created her pattern as a way of coping with her pain and protecting herself. Perhaps she was overprotected; perhaps she had experiences that taught her that life couldn’t be trusted. Chicken Little, with her egocentric pattern, is similar to what Fritz Kunkel called the “Turtle.”21 This is the person who, believing that her needs are being neglected and that life doles out disappointments, restricts herself and pulls into a shell from which she peeps out at life.
We all have a touch of Chicken Little at times. Growing up, I thought I wanted to be a nurse. When I made this decision public, I began to get biographies of Florence Nightingale and little nurse kits for my birthday. If someone cut a finger, I got called in as the designated bandager. I became a candystriper at the hospital, earned my B.S. degree in nursing, and worked in the field for many years before I acknowledged that deep inside of me was a writer, not a nurse.
Immediately I became Chicken Little. I thought that if I gave up my safe, prescribed role as a nurse and risked being a writer, the sky would fall. I went around muttering, “What if I make a fool of myself? What if I fail? What will my family think if I leave a perfectly good career? And for what? To be a writer, for pete’s sake. How absurd!” It was just another way of chanting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
Now and then, in the search for your True Self, you have to find the courage to enter a great absurdity. Kierkegaard pointed out that courage isn’t the absence of despair and fear but the capacity to move ahead in spite of them.22 The task of Chicken Little is to move ahead in spite of her fear by affirming the world as a loving, beautiful, safe place and God as her beloved companion in it. She must claim the mystical knowledge of Julian of Norwich, who said that (no matter what) “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Chicken Little needs to trust that the sky isn’t all that precarious and let an acorn be an acorn.
There’s a verse in the Bible especially for Chicken Littles: “He commanded the skies above, and . . . he rained down upon them manna to eat” (Ps. 78:23–24). What we need to envision falling on us from the sky is God’s nourishment, that’s all. This means leaning out into the unknown spaces of faith and risk.
THE EMBRACING
There are some memorable lines in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall that speak to the dilemma of the false selves:
I had the same dream each night—that I had a child, and even in the dream I saw that the child was my life; and it was an idiot, and I ran away. Until I thought, if I could kiss it . . . perhaps I could rest. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible . . . but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms.23
In naming the many patterns of our false selves, that’s exactly what we need to do: bend down to the broken, horrible faces in ourselves and kiss each one.
That’s the necessary act. For in such tender but powerful acts of self-communion, we make a way for the true seed to break through the folds of darkness. Only by confronting the false selves and embracing them can we liberate the True Self.
That spring I received a card from a friend. She had stuck a slip of paper inside with a quote on it by Mary Howitt: “He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower.” I immediately thought back to the daffodil bulbs in my garden, to the wisdom God had offered me through their yellow petals. And yes, it did give me cause to be happy.