Become Who You Are

This article will probably get me in trouble...

People often ask me what faith looks like after deconstruction. I don’t have a prescriptive answer. You might find yourself in a new Christian community, pleasantly agnostic, or in a new faith tradition altogether. Whatever is next for you is up to you. However, I do believe we all eventually end up at the same final destination. No matter your path, no matter how many lifetimes it takes, all authentic spirituality leads to human deification.

If that line didn’t freak you out already, I can assure you this post will raise eyebrows. Not because it is wrong, but because it is too right. The truth might ultimately set you free, but before it does, it will scare the shit out of you. Whenever you take seriously what the great spiritual teachers like Jesus took seriously, people will dismiss you as a heretic or blasphemer. I’ve been called worse. The very thing spirituality is all about is the most threatening thing of all, quips Father Richard Rohr.

And what is it all about? You learned the answer in Sunday School. It was just dumbed down and misinterpreted through the lens of purity culture. At the risk of burying the lead, I’ll tell you.

You are the Temple of God. Your raison d'etre is Christification. “What happened in the life of Jesus is what is happening to you. Allowing and exemplifying the exquisite combination of human and Divine that you are is clearly your greatest task and your supreme vocation,” continues Rohr. Your real nature is Divine and the chief end of your life is to be transformed fully into the image of Christ. As Byzantine monk Peter of Damaskos wrote:

“This is the beginning of salvation; by our free choice we abandon our own wishes and thoughts and do what God wishes and thinks. If we succeed in doing this, there is no object, no activity or place in the whole of creation that can prevent us from becoming what God from the beginning has wished us to be: that is to say, according to his image and likeness, gods by adoption through grace.”

This primal reality is best expressed in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (That art thou). “The completely illuminated human being knows that God is present in the deepest and most central part of his own soul,” writes Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy. Our task is to uncover, cultivate, and live into our Truest Self, which is God in us. Hindu Swami Prabhavananda concurs. “Christ did not preach a mere ethical or social gospel but an uncompromisingly spiritual one. He declared that God can be seen, that divine perfection can be achieved.” Or, as Saint Catherine of Genoa explains, “My me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.” Persian Sufi Bayazid of Bistun even proclaimed, “I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O thou I!’”

Father Brendan E. Williams introduced me to this reality a few years ago. Similar to what you might be feeling, I was taken aback. It sounded like New Age mumbo jumbo. Decades of being told I was a sinner since conception, did not line up with the idea God is happily already alive in me at the deepest level of my soul. Known in Orthodox theology as “Theosis,” or the full human participation and union with God, this profound reality reflects the hidden meaning of salvation in Christ. Salvation isn’t about believing the right things or even exchanging your human nature with a divine nature, but doing the necessary work to uncover and reveal your true self hidden all these years in God. As he said on Holy Heretics this season:

“All things eventually will come into union with God. All beings will be saved…Which means that in the final long view, in God’s view, there is nothing that will not be redeemed. Each sentient being might be on its own long harried trajectory, but eventually all things will come to fullness, back to wholeness, which they originally arose from. This was very problematic for people who wanted to utilize Christianity as a political weapon, because it is hard to set up an exclusivist kind of system if you have that kind of view.

The path of wisdom is…the path of consciously refining the quality and depth of one’s soul toward the ultimate aim of reunion with Divine ground, with God. Which is Theosis, that’s what we call deification or divinization or sanctification. Perfect sanctification means Theosis.”

So, why haven’t you heard this before? If deification is the true end of the spiritual journey, why weren’t you in on the secret?