So many Christian writers endlessly discuss the True Self verses the small self. To me it congeals into the simple concept of ‘The will not mine be done.’ Implying that as we follow or attempt to follow God’s Will for our lives, we begin to glimpse of what our God given image looks like. We will of course repeatedly fall and fail to live up to our Creators version of our Self.
MacDonald’s writings have inspired so many great writers, Christian mostly but some who were not. Those writers include: Lewis Carroll, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walter de la Mare, E. Nesbit, Madeleine L’Engle, G. K. Chesterton, Elizabeth Yates, Oswald Chambers, Mark Twain and others.
Ironically it is in our vain attempt to ‘discover who we are’ that leads to our eventual surrender. Below is a quote from George MacDonald that sums up what I am trying to say.
“Self
“Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth (I love the dental allusion). There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self—God’s idea of us when He devised us—the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself…“but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.”
Excerpt From George MacDonald by C. S. Lewis