Search Me, O Lord
There is a strange danger in believing you know yourself.
We spend our lives constructing an image of who we are. We know what kind of person we believe ourselves to be. We know our virtues, our convictions, our intentions. We know the things we would never do and the kind of person we would never become.
But how much of ourselves do we actually know?
Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self begins with a disturbing possibility: perhaps the person I consciously believe myself to be is only a small part of who I actually am.
There are motives beneath my motives. Desires beneath my desires. Fears I don’t want to admit. Envy I disguise as criticism. Pride I disguise as conviction. Cowardice I disguise as prudence. Anger I justify as righteousness.
There are parts of me I would rather not discover.
And Jung argues that these undiscovered parts do not cease to exist simply because I refuse to acknowledge them. They move beneath consciousness, influencing the way I think, act, and see other people.
The danger is not merely that I don’t know myself.
The danger is that what I refuse to know about myself may eventually control me. The person I think I am.
Jung’s concern in The Undiscovered Self extends beyond individual psychology. He wrote in the shadow of two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism, and he was trying to understand how ordinary people could become swept into destructive movements.
His answer was, in part, that modern humans had become increasingly conscious of the world while remaining unconscious of themselves.
We had learned to organize societies, manipulate nature, build machines, calculate statistics, and develop political and economic systems. Yet the individual human being could disappear inside all of those systems.
Jung writes that:
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes.”
The crowd is powerful because it gives us an identity.
I can stop asking who I am and simply become:
one of them.
One of the political party.
One of the religious group.
One of the athletes.
One of the successful people.
One of the good people.
And once I become sufficiently identified with the group, I no longer have to examine myself very closely.
The group tells me who the good people are.
The group tells me who the bad people are.
The group tells me what to believe.
And perhaps most dangerously, the group gives me somewhere to put the darkness I don’t want to see in myself.
The Shadow
One of Jung’s most important ideas is the shadow, the parts of ourselves that our conscious identity refuses to acknowledge.
The shadow is not simply “evil.” It can contain qualities we have repressed because they don’t fit the person we think we should be.
But it can also contain the uglier things:
Jealousy.
Lust.
Pride.
Cowardice.
Hatred.
Selfishness.
The desire to be admired.
The desire to be right.
The desire to hurt someone who has hurt us.
The terrifying realization is that I can sincerely believe I am a good man while still carrying these things inside me.
And if I refuse to acknowledge them, Jung says, I will tend to see them somewhere else.
Projection. I see the pride in another person but not in myself.
I see hatred in another person but excuse my own anger.
I condemn someone’s selfishness while overlooking my own.
I become increasingly certain that they are the problem because I have never had the courage to look at what might be wrong within me.
Jesus spoke to this directly.
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
The remarkable thing about Christ’s words is that He doesn’t deny the speck.
He doesn’t say there is nothing wrong with your brother.
He says:
Look at yourself first.
That is one of the places where Jung’s psychology and Scripture stare at the same human problem from different angles.
“Search me”
There is a prayer in Psalm 139 that has become increasingly profound to me:
“Search me, O Lord, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
It is a frightening prayer if we actually mean it.
“Search me.”
Not:
“Tell me I’m okay.”
Not:
“Confirm the person I already believe myself to be.”
Not:
“Show me everything that is wrong with everybody else.”
Search me.
Show me what I don’t see.
Show me where I am deceiving myself.
Show me where pride has disguised itself as humility.
Show me where fear has disguised itself as wisdom.
Show me where resentment has disguised itself as justice.
Show me where lust has disguised itself as love.
Show me where I am serving myself while convincing myself that I am serving You.
David asks God to search the places David himself cannot see.
And that, to me, is one of the great differences between simply being introspective and actually pursuing self-knowledge.
Introspection says:
I will look within myself.
Psalm 139 says:
God, look within me, because I cannot see everything that is there.
The Christian Danger of Self-Righteousness
This is where Jung’s argument becomes particularly uncomfortable for Christians.
It is possible to build an identity around being a Christian without actually allowing Christ to expose you.
I can know Scripture and remain proud.
I can attend church and remain bitter.
I can talk about grace while refusing to extend it.
I can condemn sin while quietly nurturing my own.
I can become so attached to the identity of being one of the “good people” that I lose the ability to confess when I am not.
Jesus reserved some of His strongest words for precisely this kind of religious self-deception.
“You honor me with your lips, but your heart is far from me.”
There is a difference between having the language of faith and allowing faith to penetrate the inward parts of your life.
And this is where Jung’s criticism of religious identity is worth taking seriously.
Religion can become another collective.
Another mask.
Another way of saying:
“I know who the good people are, and thankfully I am one of them.”
But the Gospel leaves no room for that kind of confidence.
Paul writes:
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
The Christian life begins not with the declaration that I am one of the good people.
It begins with the confession:
I need Christ.
But Jung doesn’t go far enough. For all that Jung says, I don’t think his answer is sufficient.
Jung tells us that we need to become conscious of the darkness within ourselves.
I believe Scripture says yes.
But then Scripture asks:
What will you do with what you find?
If I discover hatred in myself, consciousness alone doesn’t redeem me.
If I discover lust, simply understanding where it came from doesn’t make me holy.
If I discover pride, recognizing that I have it doesn’t make me humble.
If I discover cowardice, naming it doesn’t make me courageous.
Self-knowledge is necessary.
But it is not salvation.
Jung’s answer is ultimately oriented toward integration, bringing the divided parts of the psyche into greater wholeness.
Christ points somewhere further.
It points toward transformation.
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.”
The goal isn’t simply to become comfortable with everything inside me.
Some things inside me need to die.
Paul doesn’t tell me to make peace with my sin.
He says to put it to death.
“Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.”
That is a much more frightening proposition than self-acceptance.
Because Christianity asks me not merely to discover myself, but to surrender myself.
Who am I?
This is where Jung and Christianity ultimately ask different questions.
Jung asks:
Who am I beneath the person I think I am?
Christianity asks:
To whom do I belong?
That difference matters.
I can spend my entire life searching inward for my “authentic self,” only to make myself the final authority.
But the Christian doesn’t ultimately say:
“I discovered myself, therefore I am free.”
He says:
“I belong to Christ.”
Paul writes:
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
That doesn’t mean the individual disappears.
Quite the opposite.
The person becomes more truly themselves precisely because they are no longer trying to construct themselves as their own god.
The question of identity becomes relational.
Not simply:
Who am I?
But:
Whose am I?
Bringing the Darkness into the Light
There is a strange paradox in all of this.
The more honestly I look at myself, the less impressive I become.
I discover that I am capable of things I don’t want to be capable of.
I discover motives that aren’t as pure as I thought.
I discover how quickly fear can make me selfish.
How quickly pain can make me cruel.
How easily pride can disguise itself as righteousness.
And yet Christ tells me that this is not the end of the story.
Because the purpose of bringing darkness into the light is not to leave me staring at the darkness forever.
It is so that the darkness can be surrendered.
John writes:
“God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”
And:
“If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.”
The Christian life therefore isn’t pretending there is no darkness.
It is refusing to hide it.
Confession is the opposite of projection.
Instead of saying:
“Look at what’s wrong with them,”
I learn to say:
“Lord, look at what’s wrong with me.”
Instead of defending my image, I surrender it.
Instead of protecting myself from the truth, I ask God to reveal it.
Instead of becoming obsessed with appearing good, I become concerned with actually becoming good.
And when I discover that I cannot make myself good enough, I discover grace.
The Undiscovered Self
There is a self within me that I do not completely know.
There are rooms in my heart I have never entered.
There are motives I have never examined.
There are sins I have renamed.
There are wounds I have built identities around.
There are desires I have buried.
There are fears I have mistaken for wisdom.
And there is a shadow I would rather believe belongs to someone else.
But Scripture gives me a prayer more powerful than simply asking to discover myself.
Psalm 139 again:
“Search me, O Lord, and know my heart.”
Search me.
Know me.
Expose what I cannot see.
And then, lead me.
Because self-knowledge without God can become another form of self-absorption.
But self-knowledge at the feet of the Father can become repentance. And repentance can become transformation.
Perhaps the goal isn’t ultimately to discover everything that is hidden within me.
Perhaps the goal is to become willing to let God uncover whatever needs to be uncovered, and then trust Him with what He reveals.
Not:
“Let me discover who I am so that I can belong to myself.”
But:
“Search me, Lord, and teach me who I am because I belong to You.”
That is a self worth discovering.
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Additional Reading:
Psalm 139:23–24
Jeremiah 17:9–10
Psalm 19:12
Matthew 7:3–5
Romans 7:15–25
1 John 1:5–9
Proverbs 28:13
Galatians 2:20
Romans 12:2
1 Corinthians 13:12
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