A father recently asked me to pray for his son who was “finding himself.” Indeed, in this day in age, it is not so easily done. The search for the self is exhausting and seemingly impossible since our society presents for us so many conflicting and erroneous messages about the nature of the human person. At one moment we are told that we are meat machines, completely subject in brain and body to the random quantum fluctuations at the bottom of all other physical causality. At another moment we are told to follow our dreams, exercise our free will, and throw off the shackles of restriction and oppression. At another moment we are told that family and friendship are intrinsically valuable and inviolable. It would take a moment of almost miraculous clarity for a product of that society to recognize the inconsistencies amongst the various messages. Without a firm conviction about the nature of the self, the most clever meme wins the mind’s assent... at least until a funnier meme shows up in the feed, i.e., the trough of social media.

As so many authors have been saying for centuries, ideas have consequences. One of the most important ideas we can have is the idea of the self, of the nature of the human person. Is the human a ghost that is ultimately separate from but lives in the body for a little while, an advanced purely physical self-sustaining and replicating information processor, or some type of body soul unity? The popular idea fluctuates between the first and the second, probably because they are the easiest to picture in the imagination, but those two ideas lead to insoluble difficulties. If we are merely made of atoms, then abstract rational thought is not possible. If we are ghosts in a machine, then something else is needed to mediate contact between the two. A human is a single thing, a body-soul unity.

While there are rational ways of deducing this conclusion (done so well by Aristotle, even without the guiding light of Revelation), there is another, more daring way of realizing this as well. More recently than when the above-referenced father asked me to pray for his son, I finished reading I and Thou by Martin Buber, a profound meditation on what it means to be a person. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons,” writes Buber. I do not find myself by removing myself; I find myself by entering into relationship with other selves.

The self is not found in isolated feeling-searching. “That feelings yield no personal life has been recognized by few so far; for they seem to be the home of what is most personal. And once one has learnt, like modern man, to become greatly preoccupied with one’s own feelings, even despair over their unreality will not easily open one’s eyes; after all, such despair is also a feeling and quite interesting,” says Buber. It is far too easy to live in a dream-world of my own making and convince myself that it is reality as long as I am separate and alone, especially in our digital age. That is not real life. “All actual life is encounter.” Experience does not necessarily bring wisdom, but encounter does.

In encounter with another person, I find that I am a person. In the encounter with the other self, I learn most deeply about my own selfhood. Not in an effort to dominate, dissect or destroy the other, but in that true meeting, face to face with the other do I find a You. “Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines — one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity — so it is with the human being to whom I say You. I can abstract from him the color of his hair or the color of his speech or the color of his graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately he is no longer You.” What I meet in the other and find in myself is a unity, not a pair of opposing parts or a mere composite of particles. I meet the most mysterious object in the natural universe: a human person.

It is in this self that we must lose ourselves to find ourselves. The more firmly we grasp our own ego, the faster the self will slip away. In that scary encounter with a You do I find myself. I don’t have to give up myself, only my ego, in order to truly encounter the other and thus know myself. And it is before the countenance of the Eternal You that I most clearly find out who and what I am. God did not just give us a book. He gave us another human You to reveal Himself, and thus ourselves. Our truest identity is revealed not as a proposition or equation. Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium, invites us all, “at this very moment to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ... I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day.” He also quotes his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI: “Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Nothing in life is more important than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.