Let Me Remind You Who You Are: Do You Live Out of Your Dignity?
I once heard a story of a mother who was having a hard day. Feeling defeated, she looked in the mirror, noticing only the dark circles under her eyes, and let out a big sigh. But when she turned around, she found her little daughter admiring her from the doorway with a big smile. “Mommy,” she said, “you have a crown on your head, you just don’t see it.”
Today, I want to remind you of your crown.
The section of the Catechism about living life in Christ starts out with these simple words: “Christian, recognize your dignity” (CCC 1691). Why? Because ever-present and consistent to your everyday experience… is you. Your body and soul created uniquely for a reason. So naturally, your sense of self colors the way you perceive and act in the world. The relationship you have with yourself matters. If we truly live out of an understanding of our immense dignity, our life will transform. Our life will look more like Christ’s.
First, we must recognize that our current understanding of ourselves has a story.
You came into existence within a family because that is where we learn who we are. From the moment we were born, we started to develop a sense of self, not from recognizing ourselves in the face of a mirror, but in recognizing the response we were worthy of in the faces of those who loved us. Unable to do ANYTHING for ourselves, we were taken care of simply for our own sake. We learned we were a being made for love. We learned that our existence was enough.
The matter-of-factness of our dignity is the sense from which child-like freedom springs. Perhaps you were the child who ran around completely naked, joyfully climbing into cabinets, and riding your aunt’s dog (or was that just me?). In a child’s heart, complete vulnerability is a default. What is there to hide when, no matter what, I am worthy?
But at some point, living out of that place of freedom and belovedness no longer became as natural as breathing air. We started to question if just being human was enough to give us value. Lies began to creep in. “I need to prove myself to be earn love,” we might have concluded when a parent wasn’t as responsive to us one day. “My brokenness is not welcome,” we might have gathered when a teacher chastised us for an honest mistake or for expressing a painful emotion. “If I’m not useful or beautiful than I’m worthless,” an advertisement might have whispered in our ear.
What happened? We started internalizing the way others responded to us as a reflection of our dignity. While looking to other people to understand our worth was essential in our early stages of life, as our interior life and intellect developed, we outgrew this method. In fact, continuing to look outside of ourselves at our world to calculate our value became dangerous because, although the only proper response to the human person is to encounter them with love and reverence, the reality is that our world is far from perfect. This love is not always extended as it ought to be, or, because our interior lives take on an inexhaustible complexity and mystery as we develop, those around us might simply not know how to express the love we are worthy of to the deepest recesses of our hearts.
For example, the teacher who chastised you, unaware of the delicate tremors of your heart, may have assumed you were acting out and was trying to love you for you the best she could. And yet, even still, we can so often make conclusions based on the responses of others about our worthiness, even attempting to problem solve what our deep defects must be when we are not delighted in as we so profoundly long for. Pile on the consistent messages about what our greater culture values (productivity, usefulness, looks, or even virtue, etc.) and we have a swamp of feedback to wade through and to judge our value by.
But when we look outside of ourselves for our dignity, it negatively colors the way we live. Our default becomes fear of our brokenness instead of freedom in our belovedness. We lose trust that our dignity is INHERENT, even as our dignity never goes away, defining our deepest hearts.
Then where do we turn to know who we are? In June of 1979, Pope John Paul II touched down in Communist-run Poland to answer that very question. In his visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp he boldly encouraged thousands of people to reject the lies about who they were that were being imposed upon them by a regime of evil. “You are not who they say you are,” he declared, “so let me remind you who you are.” He then preached about the incredible dignity God has bestowed upon every single human person, leaving a crowd empowered from the very depths of their beings chanting, “We want God! We want God!”
It is to God whom we turn. We learn who we are by learning whose we are. We learn who we are by looking at Him in us.
God, out of pure love, willed you for your own sake and made you in the image and likeness of Himself. So often we doubt that being human is enough. We insist that our worth must come from outside of us. But how can we look outside of ourselves for a sense of something so lovingly written inside our very DNA? It IS enough to just be human. Because, in fact, to be human is a gloriously big deal.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, “we share in God’s own nature” (CCC 1691). We belong to the body of Christ on earth. We are the children of a King. We are chosen. We are declared worth dying for by Christ. We are miraculously conceived into a body of biological splendor and a soul endowed with freedom, the capacity for love and life, and the spiritual POWERS of our intellect and will (CCC 1705). Even without an understanding of God, it is clear that the human person is uniquely transcendent in their capacity to find meaning, relate, and LOVE. There is something different and irrevocably valuable about the existence of every human life… of YOUR life.
Understanding our resplendent dignity doesn’t keep us from being humble, but quite the opposite. It’s hard to be selfish and prideful when you realize that your life is a pure gift – that your value doesn’t come from the fact that you are “making something out of yourself” but that you were made. That our dignity doesn’t come from our own effort, but is inherent in us, is one of the most liberating truths. This means we are worthy of being honored, respected, and valued, not because of anything we can do, but simply because we are. Each person is worthy of love, like an infant is, for their own sake. By Love, for Love, to Love.
Just like how we once looked at the faces of our family to learn who we were as a child, we can now look into the faces of our perfect Heavenly family to know the depth of who we are. Here we learn our dignity and belovedness. We have a Father that LOVES us enough to create the world for us to exist. A Father that has mercy on us. A Father who equips us and encourages us towards greatness, but who ultimately loves us for who we are, not for what we can do for Him. Who delights in us and simply wants us to be his. In the word’s of Pope John Paul II, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.”
Living out of the truth of our dignity is so powerful, that after Pope John Paul II’s declared this truth in Poland, the Communist Party was so startled by the impact this had on the cultural tides of the nation that they issued an assassination order against him. Don’t worry… evil didn’t win. And it doesn’t have to in your story either. How would your life look differently if you lived out of a deep sense of your dignity – if you lived like you knew you were a child of a loving God, Father, and King?
Here are 3 practical ways in which you can encourage the understanding of your incredible dignity to become a heart knowledge that penetrates and transforms your daily life:
1. Renounce the lies and claim the truths. Look through your story for the moments you accepted lies about where your value derives and shine truth into those places. Renounce the lies that enforce in you a sense of shame or that you are not enough, and correct any self-talk that labels you by your weaknesses. Then, replace the lies with the truths of who you are. Claim the truths that you don’t have to prove yourself, don’t have to live in fear, and are not alone! You can even claim these truths with your body language, sitting up straighter to allow your posture to reflect your dignity! It may take some time to untangle your story, or to believe some truths deep down. But trust in the Lord through it all because His fatherly heart so lovingly desires your wholeness. He’s with you in your journey of healing. Rest in the promises of Scripture. Look to Him.
2. Cultivate wonder for your body and soul. Since we live in a world where we are trained to label, judge, rank, or analyze, we can often hold a constant disposition of judgement towards ourselves without even realizing it. Even the neutral things we do can be followed by a thousand accusations in our own heads about how we could be better. Is that how you would encounter someone else? We can combat this tendency by learning to honor our own thoughts, feelings, and bodies… by encountering ourselves first with wonder instead of immediate judgment. Simply hold yourself in your awareness with a sense of curiosity, openness, discovery, and awe. Acknowledge the gift of your mind, body, and abilities with renewed gratefulness and joy. This will help you understand how God sees you: as first and foremost a person to be loved, rather than as a project to be fixed. One way I like to practice this is by expressing myself, whether through writing, music, dancing, or art, and then simply noticing, accepting, and appreciating what I create rather than rushing to judge the outcome. Not everything we do has to be ranked, and nothing can serve as a perfect reflection of our goodness! While it is important for us to notice the areas we need to grow in virtue, we shouldn’t be judging our worth by our need for growth or seeking to grow out of fear of being bad rather than out of the freedom of stepping fully into who we are created to be!
3. Live courageously. To live out of a sense of your dignity does not mean that you are the type of royalty that must remain protected and untouchably safe in an ivory tower like in so many storybooks. That is still living out of fear, not freedom. You have a whole kingdom to discover when you recognize that you can be fully you without fear, and, in fact, that is the gift that you were created to bring to the world. Embrace courage through taking healthy, virtuous risks such as charitably sharing a differing opinion and knowing that how you are received is not a reflection of your worth. Take the risk to do something new with the confidence that if you fail that doesn’t make you a failure. Dance even though someone called you an awkward dancer in middle school. Forgo makeup one day even though someone asked if you were tired the last time you went bare-faced (pro tip: don’t ask people that). Start the YouTube channel you are worried about people judging. Sing imperfectly. Reach out to someone. Go to counseling despite the stigma. Pray in a public restaurant. That is courage… to fight through the fear of being vulnerably yourself with the knowledge that, no matter the outcome or response, you are infinitely loved, good, and worthy. If you are anything like me, this takes practice, but it will open up your life to so many new possibilities and relationships. Over time, bringing your most authentic self to the table will become more natural. You will start to believe that there is a crown of dignity on your head, not only in your moments in triumph, but even in the moments of trial.
Your dignity is an untouchable truth.
