A midwife in Albuquerque tells mothers that there are three things they need to know about labor. “It’s hard work, it hurts a lot, and you can do it.”1 That’s good advice for any type of birthing, especially those desiring to cooperate with God in their growth on the Christian journey. The birth of the true self into the world requires concentrated effort and openness to God’s grace.

Thomas Merton writes about the human condition in terms of the false self. He describes a self-conscious and superficial self, saying, “The ‘I’ that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions, and talks about itself is not the true ‘I’ that has been united to God in Christ.”2 Many of us are only aware of our superficial selves–the part formed by our unconscious motivations, the values held in our subconscious, and the roles we play in society.

Consisting of the desires of our own ego, the false self remains alienated from God and aloof from others. The problem is that we have many superficial selves competing for attention without being integrated or “organized by a single mastering Life within us. Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves.”3 Our motivations are mixed and often unknown even to us. Our loyalties are divided; we feel pulled in many different directions at once.

At the same time, we each have a true self, a deeper identity that lives in the heart of God and is already united to God in Christ. The true self contains the full potential of God’s image, the imago Dei, realized within us. It is the pearl of great price4 for which we must strive. The true self is birthed into the world when our superficial selves integrate into a single Life within, through the love and peace of Christ and our cooperation with that love. This process of birthing our true self involves disciplined effort, grace, and patience.

With the birth of the true self, we lose our old life and find a new life in Christ.5 While we all bear God’s image, the Christian journey includes an invitation to grow into God’s likeness, becoming like God in order to love as God loves–unconditionally without hesitation. In this new life, we become free to love God, others, and self as Christ loves. With a clear understanding of our own failures and limitations, and with an equal awareness of the power of God to complete our deficiencies, we exhibit the virtue of humility. When Christ calls us to follow, he invites us to journey inward to the true self.

The Christian scriptures describe the movement toward our full potential with several images: coming to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit,6 of having the “mind of Christ”7 and of growing “up into him [Christ] who is the head.”8 The Desert Fathers and Mothers called this process theosis, the transfiguration of the individual into the likeness of Christ.

Theosis is a birthing process. As in the birth of a baby, birthing the true self necessitates hard labor. The labor of theosis is a commitment to the deep soul work exhibited by the Desert Fathers and Mothers.

The stories of those desert dwellers reveal their fidelity to Christ, their serious attention to the inner life and the very difficult psychological work reconciling competing values and motivations in the dismantling of their false self. These desert ascetics worked at incarnating the peace of Christ in order to change the world. They succeeded in knowing the love of Christ so they could become the love of God for others. They believed that “love and humility provide human beings with a realistic and powerful way of disarming such a violent society as theirs and ours.”9

In the desert solitude, those fourth century Christians encountered the things that divide the heart and diminish the ability to love. Each encounter with a habit, belief, emotion, or false identity that stood in opposition to love was an opportunity to invite God to reign over those broken places within the human heart. The ensuing struggle for dominance, between their desire to be like Christ and their behavior or state of being, was a spiritual birthing process. The pain inherent in the labor and struggle was as real and palpable as a woman’s relentless contractions in the birth of a baby. In the end, they gave birth to their true self, embodying Christ’s love in their heart through their disciplined spiritual practices and the overwhelming grace of God.

Birthing is an appropriate metaphor for the transfiguration that occurs when all the competing desires and motivations come under the dominion of God. Giving birth is difficult; so too, is the work that leads to the transfiguration of the individual into the likeness of Christ.

Through the metaphor of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, Thomas Keating emphasizes the labor required in birthing new life. Without struggling to be free of the cocoon, the butterfly cannot fly because the struggle quickens the butterfly’s physiological development.10 Any attempt to pronounce what God is doing in the midst of laborious struggle and suffering can sound shallow, incomplete, and arrogant. In the end, we only know by faith where God was in the midst of the labor and pain; and we only know with hindsight if the struggle results in life or in death.

Baptism calls us into just such struggles.11 In Christian baptism, God initiates a process of birthing the true self of the newly initiated. It is a long labor, one in which the baptized must cooperate with God in his or her own transformation, as well as work with God toward the transformation of the world. The ancient baptismal rite, adopted in varying forms by many mainline Protestant denominations, invites those presenting themselves for baptism to “renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and to repent of … sin.”12 They are asked to affirm “the freedom and power God gives … to resist evil, injustice, and oppression”13 in all their guises. These vows are not only meant to direct our attention to the brokenness of the world around us, but also to the brokenness and sin found within us.

Evil, wickedness, and sin can manifest in our world through us with our active or passive participation. Blind to our own faults,14 it is our nature to project our shadow side onto others, However, if we are to remain true to the vows made at our baptism, we must resist, not ignore “spiritual forces of wickedness”15 within and beyond us. The Desert Fathers and Mothers are our guides in this area. They provide the church with birthing classes on how to claim the freedom and power of God necessary to repent of sin and “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”16 The desert Christians affirmed the power of God to manifest the divine reign of love on earth as in heaven every time they entered into the contemplative prayer known as the prayer of the heart.

George Maloney writes that the prayer of the heart is “basically an affective attitude that seeks to transcend the limitations of human words and mental images to reach an inner ‘still point’ where God and . . . [the praying person] meet in silent self-surrender.”17 Just as birthing children requires surrendering control of the body, this kind of prayer entails yielding control before God. In a society that values control and violence, this desert prayer offers a subversive way to transform culture through the transfiguration of the individual.

Surrendering to God’s love allows the false self that is in need of integration, to come to the surface of consciousness for healing. Continued participation in contemplative prayer leads to the realization of the full potential of God’s likeness within each of us, the birth of the true self. From this true self we are free to love the enemy, to pray for the persecutor and “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”18

Notes

1. England, Pam and Rob Horowitz, Birthing from Within (Albuquerque: Partera Press, 1998),120.

2. Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Books, 1961),7.

3. Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 91-92.

4. Matt. 13:46.

5. Matt. 16:25.

6. Gal. 5:22-23.

7. 1Cor. 2:16.

8. Eph. 4:15

9. Roberta Bondi, To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 10

10. Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation (New York: Continuum, 1992), 81.

11. I am indebted to my colleague, Dr. E. Byron Anderson, for his fine scholarship in “Apotaxis and Ethics: The Baptismal Renunciation and Christian Discipleship,” Studia Liturgica 42.1-2 (2012): 197-216.

12. The United Methodist Hymnal: Book of United Methodist Worship (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 40.

13. Ibid.

14. Matt. 7:1-5.

15. Ibid, The United Methodist Hymnal

16. Ibid.

17. George Maloney, S.J., Prayer of the Heart: The Contemplative Tradition of the Christian East (Notre Dame: Ava Maria Press, 1981), 65.

18. Ibid, The United Methodist Hymnal.

About the author

Karla Kincannon wrote one article for this publication.

The Rev. Dr. Karla M. Kincannon is an artist, author, teacher, spiritual director, and United Methodist minister. She serves on the faculty at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where she is the Director of Field Education, Vocational Formation and Church Leadership and the artist-in-residence. Karla founded SpiritArt Ministries to help individuals and congregations encounter the living God through creativity. She is the author of Creativity and Divine Surprise: Finding the Place of Your Resurrection as well as numerous articles about the spiritual journey. Karla has been a liturgical designer of sacred space at national gatherings and in local church congregations.

• Blog