When the Sacred Identity Falls Away

On priesthood, the religious ego, and discovering the person who remains before God

“Wherever you go, have God before your eyes.”

— Abba Anthony

When priestly or religious formation begins relatively young and then extends across decades, it does not merely teach a person what to do. It gradually supplies a grammar for understanding who one is.

Clothing, title, community, obedience, liturgical place, relationships, expectations, even the way others look at us—all of these can become woven into the experience of self. If one has sincerely tried to give oneself completely to that life, the identification becomes deeper still.

There is nothing necessarily false about this. A vocation must become embodied. But precisely because it becomes embodied, when its familiar structures are stripped away the experience can be profoundly disorienting.

The question is no longer simply:

What am I supposed to do now?

It becomes:

Who am I when the things that taught me who I am are no longer there?

That is a much more frightening question.

The desert tradition has something extraordinarily important to say here. The Fathers repeatedly dismantled identities that had become supports for the ego—even religious identities. Arsenius had been a teacher in the imperial court. Others had been soldiers, scholars, wealthy men, clerics. The desert did not necessarily declare those former identities evil.

It made them insufficient.

The stripping revealed the distinction between vocation and identity, and beneath both, something more primordial:

the person standing before God.

Before priest.

Before monk.

Before teacher, writer, spiritual father, theologian.

Even before the story one tells oneself about having succeeded or failed in any of these things.

There is simply the human person before God.

And perhaps this is why such stripping feels almost like death.

The religious ego is particularly difficult to recognize because it has been constructed out of holy things. It can say, I am giving myself to God, while quietly drawing its coherence from being the one who gives himself to God.

Priesthood, asceticism, theological knowledge, obedience, ministry—all genuine goods—can nevertheless become part of the architecture through which the self knows itself.

When that architecture disappears, one initially experiences not freedom but a profound interior rupture.

The old mirrors have been removed.

One no longer knows what one looks like.

There is a temptation then to find another mirror quickly.

A new title.

A new community.

A new ecclesial identity.

A new explanation of oneself.

Even a new story about why the old identity disappeared.

But perhaps wisdom lies in resisting the temptation to answer too quickly.

There may be grace in allowing the question of identity to remain unanswered for a while.

The Jesus Prayer is particularly severe and merciful here because it requires almost no identity at all:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

It does not say what I have accomplished.

It does not mention my status.

It does not defend my history.

It does not establish my usefulness.

It does not even tell God who I am.

It invokes who He is.

Perhaps this is why the Name can become sufficient when everything else becomes uncertain.

And something else begins to happen in this stripping.

Ordinary acts that once might have seemed peripheral to the great work of one’s vocation become revelatory. Caring for another. Preparing a meal. Sitting beside someone who suffers. Cleaning a room. Remaining when one would rather flee. Repeating the Prayer when there is nothing intelligent left to say.

There is no religious identity to perform in such moments.

There is simply love.

Perhaps one begins to discover oneself outside one’s training precisely there—not by constructing a new self, but by noticing who remains when there is nothing left to perform.

The person who remains is not unrelated to the person who lived the former life. Stripping does not make the years that preceded it unreal. Whatever was truly given to God remains.

Prayer.

Scripture.

Sacramental life.

Ascetic struggle.

Failure.

Repentance.

The long education of suffering.

The slow learning of mercy.

These cannot simply be removed with a collar, habit, title, office, community, or canonical status.

But they may cease to be possessions.

And perhaps this is the deeper purification.

What was once identity becomes simply what has happened to the heart.

The exterior form has done its work when its truth has entered the person deeply enough that one no longer needs continually to see oneself reflected in it.

This does not make form unimportant. Christianity is incarnational. We need bodies, communities, sacraments, obedience, traditions, places, names.

But every genuine form ultimately points beyond itself.

The monastery must become the heart.

The Psalter must become prayer.

The commandment must become love.

The Name must descend into the depths.

And vocation must eventually become something deeper than the identity it once provided.

Perhaps, then, the question slowly changes.

Not:

Who am I if I am no longer all these things?

But:

Who is this person whom God has been forming underneath all these things?

And eventually even that question may become unnecessary.

There may come a time when one no longer needs to look continually inward to discover who one is.

One simply stands before Another.

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

For someone whose identity has been elaborately formed over many years, that may initially feel like almost nothing.

The Fathers might say it is very close to the beginning of everything.