“Our culture is fascinated with identity — emphasis on the I. The church can be as well. We all want to know, “Who am I?” Or for some, “What’s unique about me?”
The process of discovery often looks like an attempt to climb inside our belly buttons and peer through any cracks to the innards. Maybe then we’ll know who we are and why we’re special. We think of ourselves like an onion with oh-so-many layers, and as we peel them back, we are as beguiled as Mr. Tumnus in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: “Yes, like an onion: except that as you continue to go in and in, each circle is larger than the last.” But rather than being in The Real Narnia beholding better glory after better glory, we’re utterly captivated by the navel-lint idol of self.
Even those of us who don’t like ourselves are often still captive to the fixation of self.”
