I want to thrive. I don’t want to die never having lived into who I really am. I don’t want to hide in fear or smallness. I don’t want to wear masks. I want to understand what drives me. I want to respond to what calls to me. I want to be strong and vulnerable, compassionate, boundaried, courageous, energetic, playful, determined, and focused. I want my outer life to manifest the pure gold of my soul. And I want this for those around me; I want this for everyone; I want this for all of nature. The wellbeing of everything requires it. Justice for everyone demands it. There is no wellbeing without flourishing, and there is no flourishing without justice.

Following the early fall eco-justice series (here and here), “Cooperation Not Exploitation: Finding Ourselves in the Great Web of Life,” I’m now teaching/preaching around the theme, “Flourish: How to Bring Out the Best in Ourselves.” The series is based on the New Testament text, Matthew 15.11 (Jesus said, “It’s not what’s outside you that brings trouble and ruin, but what spills out from inside you”) as well as the early Christian text, the Gospel of Thomas, saying 3 (Again Jesus said, “When you know yourselves, then you will be known. But if you do not know yourselves, then you will live in poverty”). Click here for the audio recording. Click here for the PDF of the Deep Self-Inquiry Questions.

Once upon a time there was a tigress, she was pregnant and about to give birth. One day, late into her gestation, she was out hunting and came upon a herd of goats. She was ravenously hungry, and sprung upon the goats who scattered in a frightened frenzy. In her pregnant condition, she was only able to catch the weakest and smallest goat in the herd. The stress of the chase forced her into labor. She died giving birth to a single cub.

Later, over their fear of being eaten, the herd of goats wandered back into the grazing area. There they found the dead tigress and her orphaned newborn cub. Goats, though not as elegant as tigers are very compassionate and loyal; they immediately adopted the little tiger as one of their own.

The tiger cub grew up among the herd of goats. He bleated like a goat; he ate like a goat; he smelled like a goat; he acted like a goat. He had so many goat brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. But inside him beat the heart of a tiger.

One day, an old tigress came upon the herd, chased them, and killed one of the goats. All the goats fled, even the young tiger—for he always did exactly what the other goats always did.

After devouring the goat she’d caught, the old tigress sauntered through the forest looking for the young tiger she’d seen eating grass like a goat. When she found him she couldn’t believe what she’d found. The young tiger smelled like a goat and walked like a goat, and when the old tigress tried to communicate with him, he bleated like a goat.

Concerned about this strange tiger identity crisis (something no self-respecting tiger would ever have if they could help it, for tigers are very proud to be tigers), the old tigress grabbed the young tiger by the scruff of the neck and dragged him, whimpering, to a nearby creek. There she forced him to look at his reflection in the water. The young tiger continued to whimper, clearly still unconscious about his true identity. So the old tigress dragged him back to the spot where she had goat for breakfast. The old tigress tore a piece of fresh meat from the dead goat and pushed it into the mouth of the young tiger. He spat it out, for he’d never eaten meat before. Determined to awaken the tiger in him, the old tigress pushed another piece of goat-meat into the young tiger’s mouth. She roared at him warning him not to spit it out again. Frightened by the roar, the young tiger who-still-thought-he-was-a-goat chewed and chewed and chewed, and finally swallowed the meat. It tasted better than any of the grass or plants he’d ever eaten. He wanted more. And then, suddenly, he roared.

Heinrich Zimmer tells this story at the beginning of his book, The Philosophy of India. He calls the young tiger’s roar, the “roar of awakening.” (Story adapted from Hal and Sidra Stone’s book, Embracing Our Selves)

“The roar of awakening” happens when we discover that we are more than we think we are. “The roar of awakening” happens when we discover that who we’ve become (or allowed ourselves to think we are) is not, in fact, who we truly are. “The roar of awakening” happens when something, often painful, frightening, and unwelcome happens to us, and through our suffering we awaken from what feels like a dream or a long season of living inside some other creature’s skin.

Most of us were raised as goats though within us beats the heart of a tiger.

In our families, among our friends, in our neighborhoods, schools, churches, and societies, we’ve been trained to think, feel, and see things in ways shaped by these external forces. These are not bad so long as they don’t fully define us, so long as we can learn to hold them loosely while on our journey to maturity and to the soulfulness that is our birthright and destiny.

Too often we go through life without ever inquiring about who we really might be apart from the masks we wear, the experiences that shape us, and identities given to us by others.

But we will not truly flourish until we learn to roar.

Now, know that lots of people prefer goats over tigers, and I don’t want to privilege one group of animals over another. So don’t take the story literally. Look to its meaning, it’s lesson. The point is, if you’re a goat but you’re living as a tiger, you need to reassess things. If you're really a goat, be a goat—or be a dolphin or an elephant or an eagle if that’s who you truly are. The point is for you to find a way to awaken your truest self.

Roar, bleat, sing or soar, but above all things, be your self.

Today, we begin a short series of sermons around the theme: “Flourish: How to Bring Out the Best in Ourselves.” The first way into a flourishing life is to “practice deep self-inquiry.” The second way into a flourishing life is to “practice gutsy vulnerability.” And the third way to flourish is to “practice authentic community.” These aren’t the only ways into a flourishing life, but they’ll move us in the right direction, they are essential practices if we are to thrive—body, mind, and soul.

Jesus said, “When you know yourself, then you will be known. But if you do not know yourself, then you will live in poverty.”

Long ago, Jesus invited those who wanted to flourish—to live wholeheartedly—to ask big questions about themselves, to know themselves. He wasn’t the first, nor was he the last. From Socrates twenty-four hundred years ago to Brene Brown today, the wise have said, “If you do not know yourself, if you know only who others want you to be, if you know only who your experiences have made you to be, then you will live in poverty (no matter how rich you are).”

How many persons have I known who’ve had all they wanted, but were bereft of what they needed most—to know themselves, not as a goat, but as the tiger they were made to be? And what a strange and difficult journey it’s been for me to walk the path of soul-discovery, learning to feel the weight and falsehood of the masks I’ve chosen or been forced to wear and instead take up my “one wild and precious life” no matter what others, and even the voices inside my own head might say?

I was raised to believe that I was never good enough, never right enough. I’ve lived for a long time as a goat, even though there is in me a heart that beats with the rhythm of a tiger. It is no easy thing to learn to roar when you’ve spent your life bleating like a goat.

Anybody know what I mean?

Again, Jesus said, “It’s not what’s outside you that brings trouble and ruin, but what spills out from inside you”—that is, from an inner life that’s darkened to the true beauty and goodness and power of the soul.

We can be rich. We can have multiple degrees. We can have power and beauty and influence. But if we do not have soul, if we do not live from our soul’s authenticity and depth, we cannot bring the gold of our souls into the world. To stay with our story, we’ll bleat like goats. The falsity of our lives, our inner contradictions and confusions and trouble will spill out from inside us.

This is the problem with so much of our world. Too few live from the divinity within them. Even religious people. This was Jesus’ great problem with religion. People strapped on an external piety, they played by the rules, they wore masks, they conformed and considered themselves righteous, godly, holy, but inside they were, to use the poet T.S. Eliot’s great image, not holy, but “Hollow Men.”

Without soul, we are hollow, no matter how we may we look on the outside.

In June my favorite interviewer, Krista Tippett, published her audio conversation with Jerry Colonna. Jerry Colonna is a former venture capitalist who now coaches CEOs so they can flourish personally and professionally. His new book is called, Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.

In the interview, they explored what it means to live from the depth of our souls. They talked openly and honestly about the challenges of trying to bring our truest selves into one of the most difficult places—the workplace. Can we really bring our whole selves to work? Can we really be ourselves in the place we often have to wear the most masks? And what do we do if our workplace life forces us to pretend to be a goat when inwardly we feel more like a tiger?

Carl Jung, the influential psychiatrist, once said: “I am not what has happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”

To learn to live that truth, Jerry Colonna had to step out of a work routine that was killing him in order to be able to look back through his life and see what his way of working was doing to him, what it expected of him, how he let his work life, and all those around him, define who he was going to be. He was, in the words of Jung, becoming what happened to him, not what he was choosing consciously to become. Not everyone has to leave their job to do that, but he did. It was all encompassing; it perpetuated so many of the unhealthy narratives of his upbringing. Colonna left JP Morgan when he was 38 or 39 years old. For the first time in his life he didn’t have a defined title that, in turn, defined him. “The world loved my doing,” Colonna says, “but the more the world applauded, the more something inside me ached. St. Augustine once said: ‘My life had become a burden, bruised and bleeding. I was tired of the man who carried it.’”

It was during that period that Jerry began to really inquire of himself: “What was work doing to me?” “What was my career doing to me?” “What was it that I believed about myself that was passed on to me from others; how was my past shaping, or better, mis-shaping me?”

New York magazine did an article on Colonna and his venture-capital partner, Fred Wilson. The magazine labeled them the “princes of New York.” They had it all. “But,” says Colonna, “I was coming to feel that it wasn’t working for the me I truly needed to be.”

He was a Hollow Man, a tiger-living-as-a-goat, but over time his questions taught him to roar.

“The roar of awakening” happens when we discover that we are more than we think we are. “The roar of awakening” happens when we discover that who we’ve become (or allowed ourselves to think we are) is not, in fact, who we truly are. “The roar of awakening” happens when something, often painful, frightening, and unwelcome happens to us, and through our suffering we awaken to the truth that we’re not yet living from our true identity, the depth of our soul’s goodness, beauty, and power.

So how do we practice deep self-inquiry—to know ourselves as we truly are, or as close to who we truly are as we can get for now?

The great German poet, Ranier Maria Rilke once wrote to a young person seeking a way to flourish when so many voices around him simply wanted him to comply.

Here’s what he said:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. Live the questions now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live some distant day into the answer.”

And so, here are a few questions I’ve come up with.

Live them (and others like them, things you can come up with yourself) and maybe you’ll gradually, without noticing it, find yourself living into the answers, maybe you’ll surprise yourself with a tiger-like roar when you’ve pretty much settled for a goat-like, baaaaaa.

Who am I, really?
How can I know?
What am I afraid of?
What do I want most, really?
What feels false in me, like clothes that don’t really fit?
Do I know what it’s like to roar or do I bleat like a goat?
Is there something I’ve wanted most of my life but I’ve neglected? Why do I? Why and when did I bury it?
How might the suffering and pain I sometimes feel but try to ignore actually help show me who I really am (and who I am not)?
What am I afraid of and why does it frighten me?
What gives me energy?
What drains away my enthusiasm?
If I could do anything, what would I do?
What keeps me from doing it?
Am I living someone else’s dream?
Did I lose myself somewhere along the way? And why?
Who or what might help me now?
Why do I give in so easily to that familiar and incessant voice, “Be practical!”?

Lastly, a question from that wise poet, Mary Oliver:

“What is it you plan to do with your one, wild and precious life?”