Just Be True to Yourself?

Recently I was with a wonderful group of younger women who were cheering each other on amidst the various challenges of life—challenges related to parenting young children; whether to remain in a long-term relationship or not; whether to pursue a different profession that would require a move to a different city… the kinds of things that can create friction between us and others in our lives.  And as so often happens in these conversations where advice and encouragement intermingle, a phrase kept popping up: “Just be true to yourself.” 

I’m sure you’ve heard it before.  It has probably been said to you at some point in life.  Maybe you’ve said it to another.  I know I’ve received it as advice in the past, and also given it as advice to the young people in my life.  “Just be true to yourself.” 

There is so much I like about the sentiment, “Just be true to yourself.”  When I hear the phrase, I hear my own mom talking to me as a teen: “Do the right thing; not what everyone else around you is doing.”  I hear it as affirming friend, “You are a unique person; don’t try to be someone you’re not.”   I hear the voice of a treasured boss and mentor, “Are you sure that this is what you want to do?  Make sure you are being honest with yourself.”

But, I’ll also admit, as the phrase was circulating the room at this recent gathering, I got a bit uneasy.  Because “Be true to yourself,” can also mean other things. Even though it sounds like something that comes right from the Bible itself, like something Jesus would have said, it actually comes from Shakespeare—spoken in Hamlet by the self-serving character Polonius who speaks these words advising his son to watch out for his own interests first.  His first loyalty should be to himself.  And, as we casually toss about the phrase today, I think it often does carry some of these original Shakespearean undertones.   On the library shelf of popular phrases, “Be true to yourself” often sits right next to the phrases:

• “Listen to your body and go with your gut.”
• “Don’t stay in relationships that aren’t meeting your needs.”
• “You do you, and don’t care what others think.” 

Listening to your gut and being confident in your own assessment of things is not necessarily bad advice.  But neither is it consistently good advice.  Not the most fool proof way of making a significant decision where other people are involved.  “Don’t care what others think” can morph into, “Don’t care how others are impacted.” 

The opening pages of Genesis reveal that each of us is made in the “image and likeness of God” but also that we live out our days in a world that is “fallen,” a world that continues to participate in damaging and far-reaching patterns of sin.  In baptism, our path is re-set and firmly established.  We will model our lives after Christ—who St. Paul calls the ‘New Adam’—but it requires an ongoing struggle with that self that St. Paul calls the ‘Old Adam’.   It is not as if we have a fixed and forever true self that we simply must discover and remain loyal to.  In this world, we are all in a journey of ongoing conversion toward a self we have not yet totally become.   

For each of us, there are aspects of our personalities and dispositions, values and habits that we should remain faithful to because they are leading us toward the person God dreams us of becoming. But there are also aspects of our personalities and dispositions, values and habits that we should be ready to let go of, turn away from, not listen to, deny. 

Ultimately, the foundation of Christian discernment is less about being true to ourselves, and more about seeking to know and acknowledge the truth about ourselves. The good and the not so good. The New Adam still entangled with the Old Adam.  The fuller, complicated picture of self.  The one that God sees. And then asking for God’s help in making our decisions. 

Today’s Gospel presents us with the well-known parable of two men who both arrive at the temple in Jerusalem to pray but with very different degrees of self-knowledge. 

The first Jesus identifies as a Pharisee—a deeply religious man publicly committed to living God’s commandments.  (Quite possibly Jesus chose to make man a Pharisee because he himself might have been part of this group or at least had a lot in common with the Pharisees, so he felt free to rib them a bit.  Kind of like poking fun at himself.)  This Pharisee is a Pharisee par excellence.  Almost like a parody of a Pharisee.  He has gone above and beyond what even a Pharisee would expect. The law demands one fast a year. He fasts twice a week.  The law demands he tithe on certain foods and animals, but he tithes on ALL his income.  There is so much that he is doing that you’d want to affirm.  “You do you!” I want to tell him. 

But then there is also this gargantuan blind spot that this Pharisee has.  A huge aspect of his personality that he can’t see.  All his overt religiosity and over-the-top efforts have not managed to bring him into closer relationship with God or with his neighbor.  They’ve made him arrogant and pompous.  In one of the most wonderful lines in the parable, Jesus says that as the Pharisee stood in a prominent place separated from his neighbors, he “spoke this prayer to himself.”  It could mean that he’s mumbling the prayer under his breath, but it almost sounds like he’s become his own god.  He’s lost all sense of proportion about where he fits in the big picture of the world in relationship to God.  His picture of himself so insular that he’s just trapped inside his own head. Prayer has become about how good he is rather than how good God is.

The second man Jesus introduces us to is a tax collector.  Someone who has made a deal with the corrupt Roman empire to collect the taxes due to them with a good margin on the side for himself.  He is hardly the kind of guy you’d want to encourage to be true to himself because “himself” seems like not so great a person.  Indeed, in Jesus’ time, the paragon of evil.  The difference here is that he has a more honest and fulsome picture of where his actions have placed him in relation to God and his neighbor.  He gets that there is a God and he’s not it.  That he needs God’s mercy, I’m guessing so that he can change and be a different sort of person in the future, more like God dreams him to be.  He, too, stands apart from his neighbors, but one senses out of acknowledgment that he’s wronged them.  It’s a simpler picture we get with the tax collector; a shorter sketch; less time that he is on stage, perhaps because he doesn’t want the stage at all.  When we have a really honest, true understanding of ourselves, we tend to prefer not to stand in the spotlight.

And so Jesus ushers him quickly off stage left, simply announcing that the tax collector went home “justified”—another way of saying—the tax collector went home in right relationship with God, whereas the Pharisee did not.  It’s not praise for the tax collector or a sanitizing of his profession.  Just an acknowledgement that the tax collector had a better, more truthful picture of who he was and where he fit into the grand scheme of things than the Pharisee did.  How did he come to that awareness?  Not quite sure.  But his degree of awareness and honesty about himself put him on more solid ground for journeying onward with God than the Pharisee.

Everyone here today could probably name a decision they are wrestling with that—like the women I was recently with—impacts other people. It might be a decision about whether to remain in a friendship, or even a marriage.  It might be a parenting quandary or maybe a job change that would have consequences for your immediate community.  It might be a thousand other things.  There’s probably a voice of support nearby, or perhaps even in our heads, say, “Just be true to yourself. That’s all you have to do.”   That voice means well.  But for the hard decisions in our lives, it is not enough to go on. And, in the worst case scenario, it brings us into the insulated mind of the Pharisee where we become our own gods, our own ultimate authorities, unaware of how distanced we’ve become from the real God and neighbor.

Better we take as our inspiration the tax collector. Let us come before God this week seeking and acknowledging the truth about ourselves—that we are complicated people of good and not-so-good motives; that we might not even know ourselves completely.  And that we need God’s mercy, God’s help in journeying forward.   In the end, we might never know with certainty: Did I make the right decision here or not?  But we’ll know that we walked the difficult path of discernment on more solid ground than that of our own limited sense of “self” alone.