L.J. Milone shares a reflection on the Easter Sunday Gospel from John, chapter 20.
Who am I? This question about my deepest identity is answered by the Resurrection.
No matter how secular, how opposed to religion, how bored with the spiritual our society becomes certain deep questions linger in our hearts and minds. What happens after death? Why are we here? Is there a God? It is as if transcendence, the holy and numinous reality beyond yet within our world, haunts our secular age. One of these deeper, spiritually haunting questions is about our identity. Who am I? For Catholic tradition, we might say, this is linked to another deeply haunting question: who is God? Yet, for perhaps the majority of people – non-believers included – the question about identity grabs hold of us. It is a question answered by the Resurrection of Jesus.
We might assume our identity is an easy enough thing to name. In fact, we would probably start with our names or our social roles like being a parent. We might then move on to our gender, ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, or nationality. We might also describe ourselves by age, disability status, or socioeconomic status. In identity theory there is an idea called the “self-concept,” which is the sum of an individual’s knowledge of self through physical, social, and psychological attributes.
A crucial point of the good news is that neither our self-concept nor the various labels we might use to describe ourselves tell the whole story. Our identities go much deeper than all of that. Jesus finds his identity in Abba, which is his intimate and familiar term for the Holy Mystery transcending all existence. Identity is so crucial to the Gospel that is the secret to overcoming death itself. Our identity is rooted in and one with the Holy Mystery.
In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.” Our lives are “hidden with Christ in God.” Our identity is found in God, as Christ. When Christ, our life – our truest self, appears, then we also will appear with Christ in glory. The Risen Jesus reveals who we really are. The whole of the Christian life is a journey of transformation, of becoming the person hidden deep within who is always already one with God. When Christ appears, that is, when the Resurrection happens in us and to us, our real self emerges. That real self is Christ. Each of us is the unity of the divine and the human that Christ is. It is God’s great gift.
Awakening to who we really are in God is to experience the Resurrection. This is our Christ-Identity or Christ-Self. Like Jesus, we, too, are one with God even as we are still fully human. The early church referred to this process of claiming oneness with God as divinization. The whole point of Jesus, the ancient saints concluded, was that God became human so that humanity might become God. It is a deep mystery. The mysteriousness of the Resurrection is reflected in the Gospel story of Peter and the Beloved Disciple discovering an empty tomb. It highlights the incomprehensibility of the Resurrection, grounded in the incomprehensible mystery of God. Even more the empty tomb story transmits, by faith, our real identity as grounded in the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings.
The nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings is a name Meister Eckhart, a medieval mystic, gives to God. God is not a thing, but the transcendent nothingness who is our light and our being – the enlightenment and reality of all things. Not our idea of God, but the utterly strange and mind-bending mystery of God is our deepest reality, our truest identity. We assume identity is finite and that is defines itself by exclusion: “I am not you” is how I know who I am. We compare the self to others and define the self against others – I am white not black, I am man not woman. God, though, is infinite. That means that in the light of the Resurrection, my identity – by God’s grace – is infinite, too.
Still, we are human, and everything that makes up our self-concept is also a part of our identity. Not everything about us is divine. Our identity as the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings is infinitely deeper than all the normal ways we define ourselves. To unearth this Christ-Self and experience the power of the Resurrection, a significant practical step to take is to meditate. To sit with God in silence, without engaging mental chatter, is to awaken to the divine I AM as our own I am. It is to know the revelation of the Risen Jesus: my deepest identity is found in the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings. Or, my real self is “hidden with Christ in God.”