There Lies An Island - where is my identity?

Photo by Mo Baghdadi on Unsplash

A trick I am learning about life is that when you kill your illusions all your worries and anxieties begin to perish an there becomes more room in a day than you know what to do with. The very notion that you were complete to begin with is something to arrive at rather than attain. The great veil of our society would have you believe otherwise. The man that lives with his illusions is as far from himself as he can possibly be. He is stranded, and the angels can only point and whisper

"There lies an island”.

I have wanted to become many things over the course of my life: lawyer, politician, pastor, train conductor, safety inspector… and I am happy to report that I have become none of those things. To do so would have been dangerous to my own soul because I would have believed that my truest self had arrived. Nothing would be further from the truth. My credentialed self would have arrived, but my true self would have remained lost. To wrap one’s identity in that which is fleeting is the beginning of the illusion. The truest profession you can have is your own self, with all the joys and flaws that come with it.

I have been more an island than a man for most of my life. I’ve been left stranded by my own expectations and ideals more than once. Noble ideas and beliefs can make for the best illusions, and the long lasting ones. I have learned my lesson, but only just. A thing does not require God to be a part of it in order to be noble, but if a thing professes to aim at God and subsequently loses sight of him, then such a thing might as well be worthless. Recently I have tried living as something of an urban monk. This means more daily silence, less meals but better quality, stretching and body weight exercises. I fail at it more than I am successful but even if I did it perfectly would a more healthy body really mean a better relationship with God? Am I truly doing it for him?

It is fine to do things for one’s own benefit, but if you do not separate what you mean to do for God and what you mean for yourself, you are deluded.

The illusion can start from a place of goodwill and if it is not caught you may find yourself on a island. My New Monastic order has a group chat that is not nearly as active as it was in the beginning and sometimes I worry the group is drifting apart and that it has failed. Yet, when I examined my worry I realized it came to nothing because it was based on an unnecessary expectation. It is the holidays and so naturally people would be more occupied with their families than the chat. Some are enduring difficult hardships, even now as I write this. Even if it were true that the group was drifting part, several souls are no longer strangers in the world and what we have learned from each other will not easily be lost. In letting go of the illusion that the chat must be active in order to be successful I can come to appreciate its quiet and the room it leaves for God.

Perhaps the angels were never pointing toward some distant shore at all, but toward the moment when a man stops building rafts out of his expectations and learns to stand where he already is. When the illusions fall away, the island dissolves, and what remains is not arrival but presence. There is no credential for this, no proof to offer, only the slow unlearning of what I thought I needed to become. In the quiet left behind, God does not compete with my striving; He simply waits. And in that waiting, I am finally less concerned with where I am going, and more attentive to where I have been found.

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This article is written by Network Writer Stefon Napier, and is crossposted from his personal blog on substack! To learn more about Stefon visit his team page at https://www.kfmbroadcasting.com/team/napier-s. You can find his full library of writings on his Substack at https://stefonnapier.substack.com/