The call to holiness is a call to discover who we really are in God’s creation and to learn how to reject any false sense of ourselves. If we are convinced of our lovability in our formative years, we will be able to spend the rest of our lives discovering our true selves and using our potential to contribute to life. But, to the extent to which we were taught we were unlovable, we now have a false self that Jesus wants to – and needs to – heal. We must always remember and hold on to the fact that whatever God creates is good and, in the case of humans, also lovable. We have been created out of the love that God has for us.
Our false selves have also been nurtured in our adolescence and adulthood by certain brands of spirituality. We must realize that not all spirituality leads to spiritual growth, and only that which is totally centered in Jesus can bring us into the truth and help us discover our true selves. Our own fears, laziness and lack of courage and self-confidence can provide rather strong psychological barriers to our desire to discover the truth and to follow Jesus. Often we have been easily fooled by spiritualities that tell us we do not have to find our true selves.
The entire idea of metanoia in Eastern Spirituality – personal transformation – is all about discovering our true selves, the selves that God intended when He created us.
One of these spiritualities, for example, says that if we do something well, humility demands that we never do that thing. Thinking realistically, however, we know that if humility means acknowledging the truth about ourselves, it means that we acknowledge this capability and that we also go further and accept the whole truth: that this quality does not originate in ourselves but rather is a gift from the Creator. He Who created us in His image calls us to use our gifts to give Him praise, acknowledging that the gift is from Him and giving Him thanks for it. This is one of the reasons why our worship of God is seen as Eucharistic, that is a sincere act of Thanksgiving!