Article April 4, 2016 Issue

The peace in knowing who we are

Priscilla Harper

With all the talk about identity that society engages in today, it’s helpful to ask ourselves if our conversations are leading us to an understanding of our true identity. I’m speaking of the spiritual identity we have from God. This is the most precious possession we have, and only a solid understanding of this spiritual identity can give us permanent peace.

The confusion that results from identifying ourselves from a biological or psychological basis—in other words, as a product of matter rather than of Spirit, or God—is manifested in many different ways today.

You hear the catchphrase “authentic self” a lot in the media. “Be true to your authentic self,” people say. For me this has come to mean knowing and staying true to what God created us to be. In the first chapter of the Bible it says that God created man in His image and likeness, having the substance of Spirit, and then He saw, identified, everything that He created as like Himself and “good” (see Genesis, chap. 1). “Deity was satisfied with His work,” Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. “How could He be otherwise, since the spiritual creation was the outgrowth, the emanation, of His infinite self-containment and immortal wisdom?” (p. 519).