Miroslav Volf on the Essential Questions to Ask (and Avoid) if You’re on the Path of Self Discovery

At Yale University, theology professor Miroslav Volf has inspired thousands of students to get introspective and ask some deep questions: 

What shape would a life worth living take? What would it look like for a life to be well lived? Are you succeeding in the art of living?

Professor Volf helped guide all of us through these questions and more in his bestselling book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. And this week, as I Am Maria hits bookstore shelves—Maria Shriver’s book of poems and reflections that grapple with identity, grief, love, loss, and healing—The Sunday Paper asked Volf about the essential questions to ponder when it comes to identity.

How might we go about dropping our identifying labels to get to the heart of who we really are? What should we consider as we think about who we’d most like to become? How can spirituality help us as we dance with these big concepts? Read on for Professor Volf’s insights.

A CONVERSATION WITH MIROSLAV VOLF

You’ve inspired so many of us to ask, “What makes life worth living?” Is there a benefit of asking the question, “Who am I?” as we think about what kind of lives we want to lead?

I think it is a mistake to ask the question who am I?

When we ask that question, we think that if we look inside—if we dig deep enough through all the layers of our roles and achievements—we will see an image and then say, “Yes, that is me.” I think it’s like peeling off the layers of an onion; there is always only more onion. And peeling off the layers is more likely to give you tears than joy. Each of us is unique and undefinable. This is the mystery of the self. 

That’s why I like the title of Maria’s new book, I Am Maria. The name identifies the self. And the self of the person is always greater, more significant, more beautiful than anything one has achieved. 

I love what Soren Kierkegaard says about identity and where its preciousness lies. He is commenting on Jesus’s invitation: “Do not worry!” He is not so much interested in the worry about necessities and superfluities of life. He is writing about identity, about the worry of comparisons with others, that we don’t stack well compared to others, and the effect it has on us. He is writing about a false inferiority or false superiority as a result. 

“Look at the lilies,” Jesus said, “how gorgeous they are … even the greatest of all the royals in all their glory is not as beautiful as one of them.” Kierkegaard does something very clever with the idea. If an unadorned lily is so beautiful, then an unadorned human—a human unadorned by roles, positions, achievements—is even more beautiful.

Human beings, Kierkegaard then says, in their sheer existence, are more beautiful than any king in all his royal splendor. Key to identity is the discovery of such preciousness of every human being. This basic sense of being loved unconditionally, and of therefore loving oneself unconditionally, releases us from the worry about identity. 

This is deep gladness—gladness over being who we and who others are. 

Any advice for those who might find it a tall task to love ourselves unconditionally?

I think it’s always an unfinished process, because loving itself is always in time, and there are things that constantly subvert that.

I introduced a speaker at an event recently, and before I did, I asked this person how to pronounce their last name. And then I mispronounced their name egregiously—and then got completely down on myself, thinking, You idiot!

This is a completely innocuous example of the kinds of destabilization that our love for ourselves undergoes. And that can’t happen if one thinks that my identity resides in how well I do, in what I do, in how others perceive me, or in how I perceive myself. If that’s where my identity lies, then I’m constantly at sea. 

I think that’s the point Kierkegaard makes. That in your sheer humanity, you’re actually more beautiful. You’re more valuable than in any of the makeup—the cultural or material stuff or whatever surrounds you. This is a beautiful, freeing thing.

I’m currently reading the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who writes about affirming the mere existence of the person as a form of love. This kind of love is not so much a feeling, an intense attachment or desire for another. Instead, it is more a quiet sense of I want you to be — to be as you are and as you are growing over time. We can love anybody in this way. And loving them in this way is the only way we can live together despite our differences. 

We can all get caught up in our various identities—as parents, partners, who we are at work, the list goes on. How might we look at dropping these “labels” to get to the heart of who we are?

We have an identity in the imagination of others. They measure us against some ideal—of beauty, of wealth, of power, of success, of fame—and then slot us into a box and hang a tag on it. If we are lucky, we will like what the tag says. 

We have an identity in our own imagination: We measure ourselves against some ideal, which is sometimes similar to the ideal with which others measure us, and then we put ourselves in a box, maybe a bit different box than others put us, but still in the box. We often feel bad about ourselves, and of course, we try to get out of that box. 

The key to our identity is not first to define ourselves, let alone let others define us. The key to our identity is to accept ourselves, to become comfortable with ourselves, to embrace ourselves, and to do so unconditionally. 

Think of a birth of a wanted child. Parents, relatives, and friends rejoice at the arrival of the child before the child has any of the qualities we so value and in which we strive to be better at than others. The child’s sheer existence is our joy; the child is loved just for being there, a unique specimen of humanity. To truly love someone is to rejoice in the fact that they are. To love ourselves is to come to relate to ourselves with just such joy.

To me these are among the most fundamental spiritual experience. To me that is the key to identity. 

Is there any benefit of these labels we give ourselves? And what is the benefit of stripping those labels away?

I think we do identify with roles, but I would say those are partial and temporary identifications, though sometimes they have long trajectories. They can be useful. For example, being a parent, or a writer. These come with a certain set of expectations. And while some of those expectations may be difficult, others might be really useful to slip into; we know what to do and how to be.

Recently, I was speaking at an event and mentioned this idea that in the in modern world, we often are in the hamster wheel. We have a certain role, and then every morning, we go into the hamster wheel, and we run our little feet around and around. In some ways, this is a disturbing image, right? Nobody imagines a good life in the hamster wheel.

After my talk, a woman raised her hand and said, “But I like my hamster wheel.” And I thought, Oh, sure! That too. The hamster wheel can help me in some ways, and it may help structure my life. But it’s important to remember this: I’m always more than any role that I have. It’s not that we don’t have roles, but that we shouldn’t let them define of our entire identity.

I Am Maria is prompting readers to think about how they see themselves—and how that might be different than how others see them. Can you offer any support or guidance for those of us pondering this?

We do have lives in the imaginations of other people, as I have noted. And we can hardly control our own lives, let alone how we live in the imaginations of others. I think part of our work is to free ourselves from being dominated by this. 

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t care what other people think of us. This would result in insularity, turn us into a self-enclosed monad. But I cannot let what others think control me, whether they think bad of me or good of me. Of course, what others think can be a corrective, help me in my own inner spiritual growth.

This is interior work. Today, we are in danger to neglect interior work. We are distracted and we live in a culture where from cradle to grave we compare ourselves with others and are being compared. That’s true of education, economy, sports, even the arts. There’s no domain of life where that comparison is not present. And we need to resist comparisons, find ways to stand on our own two feet.

As we think about what makes a life worth living—or what we’d like our lives to be filled with—we might consider who we’d like to become. Any advice for those of us pondering the question, “Who should I become?”

Perhaps the answer not so much in defining “who” but in describing “how.” The most basic answer is this: “Give to others the gift of joy over their sheer existence—and give it in ways that most seem right to you and in the ways that they are most likely to receive that gift. 

In some spiritual traditions, I am at my very best when I see myself as conduit of the “great and incalculable grace of love,” to borrow a phrase of Hannah Arendt. 

A friend of mine, Chrisian Wiman, is a poet. He says that he is at his best as a poet when he gets out of the way and when something else writes through him. He says that it was this experience that has led him to God.

I think that is true, in a sense, for all of us in our ordinary lives—when be become instruments of grace to others, we become, surprisingly, one with ourselves. In such moments we see that our identity is not something we can describe. It is each of our ways of relating to the world in love. Identity is expressed not in nouns, but in verbs.

Miroslav Volf (DrTheol, University of Tübingen) is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture in New Haven, Connecticut. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living. His new book, The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse, is out next month.