Me, Myself, and I –
We can blame Sigmund Freud for waking us up to the possibility that there is more going on inside us than we know. He gave us the subconscious, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, and set a great many people to rummaging around in the attic of the mind.
You probably remember the rough outline. The Ego is the ordinary self, the part out front, trying to manage things. The Superego is the internalized parent, schoolteacher, preacher, and policeman. It carries the rules, the expectations, the standards. The Id is the older, hungrier creature underneath – impulse, appetite, instinct, desire.
Over the years, that old three-part machinery has been revised, reworked, and dressed up in modern language. One of those newer phrases is “egoic,” usually pointing to the stories we tell ourselves, the false center we defend, the noisy little fellow in the head who thinks he runs the whole establishment.
There is truth in that.
But I want to come at it from another direction.
The one absolutely undeniable truth I know about myself and the world is this:
I Am.
Not: I think.
Not: I believe.
Not: I achieve.
Not: I vote, consume, win, lose, succeed, fail, or understand.
First and before all of that:
I Am.
We usually hear Descartes reduced to, “I think, therefore I am.” But that gets the cart ahead of the horse. Thinking does not create Being. Thinking requires Being in the first place. The “I Am” comes first. Thought is something that happens afterward.
The beginning of life is not philosophy. It is presence.
A baby does not begin with ideas. A baby begins with Being.
And here, since I am not above dragging in scripture when it earns its keep, I notice that in Exodus 3:14, God names Himself as “I Am.” Whatever else one might say about God, this much is clear: if God is, then God is not first a theory, or a doctrine, or an argument. God is the sheer fact of Being.
And if that is so, then what is deepest in us is not merely personality, not merely biography, not merely the nervous little ego trying to hold its own.
What is deepest in us is that same mystery:
I Am.
To keep wandering through the Bible a little farther, Jesus, in the Gospel of John, says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” The Church, nervous as churches often are, worked very hard to fence that off and make it safe. By the fourth century, the language had become carefully elevated, polished, and protected: Jesus is the only begotten Son. Fine. Say what you need to say.
But Jesus kept talking in ways that were much less containable.
“I am the vine; you are the branches.”
As a child in Sunday School, I remember the construction paper version. Jesus was the trunk. We were the branches. Thumb-tack your name on and try to stay attached.
But vines are not really trees. They do not have a trunk in that sense. A vine is a living flow, a shared life, a single aliveness moving through many branches. The branch does not invent that life. It participates in it. Cut off the flow, and the branch withers.
That suggests something larger than the tidy Sunday School lesson.
The life in the vine is the life in the branch.
The “I Am” in Christ is the “I Am” in us.
Some would call that soul. Fine. But even there, I would want to go a step further. We are not bodies that happen to possess souls like a wallet in the back pocket. We are living souls embodied for a while. And perhaps the soul in me and the soul in you is not two different lights, but one Light shining through many windows.
That is my own theological and mythological scaffolding. I am not trying to prove it. I doubt it can be proved. I am only offering it as something worth considering.
Before all your thoughts about yourself,
before all your success and failure,
before all your fear, your memory, your politics, your tribe, your wounds, your theology – there is this:
I Am.
And that may be holier than we have dared to imagine.
