You will experience pain on your journey. How will you respond? That’s the question for you to face. Processing the pain in your life and discovering what you learn from it is a lifelong quest. This will force you to abandon the illusions of what you thought you needed to make your life work. But it can open a transformational journey that can uncover your true self, rooted in the mystery of God’s love.

All of us spend much of our lives constructing the protection we think we need to survive and thrive. These layers of defense work well until crisis hits and they start to crumble. At this point you face a choice: double down on the defenses, or open yourselves to the pain and discover the life that is waiting to be revealed to you. In a book by Kelley Nikondeha I first read this truth, “Only the pain we name is available for transformation.”

At those moments you are faced with a leap of faith from protection to surrender—a choice life puts in front of you time and again. It can feel like the difference between life and death. You fear the pain can destroy you. But at that hour of decision, you can find the courage, or cling to the hope, that embracing what has cracked your life open can lead to your healing and to the discovery of who you are called to be.

Here’s a true story from the Buddhist tradition that might illustrate this. In Bangkok, Thailand, there was huge clay statue of the Buddha. In the 1950s a combination of heat and drought caused it to begin to crack. Monks came to examine the damage. They looked at the largest crack, and then shone a flashlight on it. To their surprise, through the crack they spotted a reflection of gold. It turned out that a solid gold Buddha was embedded beneath the clay. Six-hundred years earlier layers of protective clay and plaster were used to cover up the gold Buddha and protect it from invading armies. The monks were killed, but the Buddha survived. Yet over time its identity was defined by its layers of protective covering, while its true nature was hidden from all.

Most of us are familiar with the Leonard Cohen lyric: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Facing the cracks, embracing the pain, and allowing the light to shine in, revealing your essence require that you develop what I call your holding space. This is your spiritual infra- structure, constructed using the tools, practices, and disciplines you’ve learned to embrace. That’s how you will navigate the troubled waters that may seem to engulf you. Your cleverness, or intelligence, or social connections, or determination, in the end, won’t suffice if you haven’t curated a holding space that slowly but persistently allows pain and grace to reveal their truth, liberating your emergent life.

During the lock-down silences of the beginning of the COVID pandemic I embarked on a project suggested by my

wife, Kaarin, of reading back through the personal journals I’d kept for much of my adult life—thousands of words scribbled on hundreds of pages in scores of journals for over fifty years. Through those years that’s how I processed what was happening in my holding space. I discovered a repeating pattern over decades of how God used pain and disruption to break up the protective facades I clung to, slowing nudging me away from a self-centered life toward a God-centered life. You’ll discover that same pattern in your own journey. It beckons you to a leap of faith. Sometimes the only assurance you have is that God is in the pain you are naming. No shortcut around the struggles is available. But grasping enough grace to enter into them is what leads to change. Step by step, you can embrace your true identity, secured in a love you can never control but always can courageously trust.

A Transforming Path

Early in our marriage, when Kaarin and I were part of Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, she experienced a paralyzing depression. A wise older companion came to accompany her and to offer counsel, born out of a similar trauma. “I know something of what you’re suffering and how devastating it feels,” she said. “But perhaps you can see this as dross being consumed in a refining fire. Your true self, held in God’s love, is there, wanting to emerge.” Over time, through grace and pain, that is exactly what I witnessed emerging in her life. A crack let in light, discovering gold, and in this time she—and we as we journeyed together— discovered gold.

This metaphor of uncovering the gold of one’s true identity is found in the Christian tradition as well. God is like “a refiner’s fire,” a text from Malachi (3:2) reads.

In ancient times gold embedded in rocks and dirt was crushed, washed, and then subjected to high temperatures in furnaces, removing impurities—the dross—and revealing its essence. When a metal is being purified, the goldsmith can know that its essence has been revealed when the image of his face is reflected back in the emerging material.

Destroying false protective coverings allows the emergence of what is true. Layers of dross hide your connection to being held in God’s love, reflecting back the image of God. You are kept isolated from this, just as the plaster and clay shrouded the gold Buddha. This creates the illusion of a separated self, living in deluded isolation. Thomas Merton called this the “false self.” Richard Rohr rephrases this as the “separate self,” capturing better perhaps the subtle nuance of this mistaken identity.

My journals over many years documented how my life would pivot around values, goals, and aspirations that in our culture, and even in the subculture of our churches, appeared to me as attractive and justifiable. I doubt it’s any different for you. Your self-sufficiency, your agency, your mastery, your success, your strength, your wealth, your reputation, your power—this all is the dross, the external layers that come to define your identity. Celebrity trumps character. But all this and more prospers by protecting your separation from your truest identity found through an abandonment to God’s love. The refiner’s fire liberates the image of God in you. An inward spiritual process that painstakingly removes layers of dross to liberate your true essence involves pain, time, and grace. Of course, that takes a journey. If you’re among those who have been to seminary, you might rehearse theological questions that pop up, maybe from old tapes. Here’s my brief take. I don’t believe that the trailhead for your journey, or mine, starts with being hopelessly mired in an original imprisonment of depravity that was not of our own doing. The conviction that we begin as being worthless and are always prone to prove our unworthiness, even after knowing God’s grace, breeds a spirituality dominated by the constant fear of failure.

There are other grounded ways of approaching this journey. The Orthodox theological tradition, for instance, with ancient roots in the earliest centuries of Christianity’s development, offers painstaking pathways in the spiritual journey to free the image of God, implanted within us, to blossom and flourish. We become true daughters and sons of God and are “participants in the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4). Our new self is “created according to the likeness of God” (Eph 4:24). That makes us fully human. The Orthodox call this process of spiritual growth theosis, also expressed as deification. St. Athanasios the Great, in fourth century Egypt, stunningly put it this way: “God became man so man might become divine.”

Sin and imperfection are seriously wounding; yes, there is a lot of dross. But not in ways so corrupting that God’s image is virtually irretrievable. Rather, this image of divine love, resting at the core of your being, yearns to be uncovered and embodied in your flesh, like refined gold.

Your true self dwells in an intimate and expansive connection to God’s love. Through that sacred portal you can be present in solidarity to all that God loves, and to the pain, brokenness, and suffering of all that seeks to resist the redemptive power of that love in the world. This is what it means to be “in Christ.” The intersection of the divine and human, of the spiritual and material, fully revealed in the

incarnation, is the place where your identity is discovered, where your life is beckoned, and where your belonging is secure. Your true self dwells in connection to this Life.

However, it’s no small task to discover this sacred connection amid the hectic normalcy of your everyday life. The cracks in your facade are easily repressed when you’re convinced that you are doing good work, even critical work. Like saving the planet, confronting racism, and stopping war. Unswerving, indefatigable commitment to a cause, with prophetic urgency, is the catalyst for social change. But if you allow such a cause to smother attention to inner motives, vulnerabilities, and ego needs, you will pay a personal price. In the end, the cause itself can be tarnished. As Richard Rohr says, “It’s possible to do the right things for the wrong reasons!”

Excerpted from Wesley Granberg-Michaelson’s The Soulwork of Justice: Four Movements for Contemplative Action, Orbis Books. Used by permission.