Making Something of Ourselves

Have you ever watched someone hunkered over a workbench, brow furrowed in concentration, working with obsessive care on a project for weeks? They’ve been refining the edges, obsessing over the details, and perfecting the finish. But when they finally step back and invite you to see what they’ve done, you find yourself leaning in, squinting, trying to be kind—because, for the life of you, you cannot tell what has changed.

To your eyes, it looks exactly as it did when they started. All that sweat, all that precision, and the object remains stubbornly, fundamentally, what it already was.

I experience this regularly with my wife. She's a professional photographer. She'll take a photo shoot, show me the photo, and I'll say it looks nice. She'll spot something, though, and go to work. Then she'll show it to me again. "Does this look better?"

Most of the time, I can't tell the difference. And I'm stuck, awkwardly, staring at the image straining for an improvement I don't have the eyes to see. 

I think about this sometimes when I look back over the long road of my own becoming. The years of study. The careful construction of a self. The endless project of “making something” of one’s life. The temptations weathered, the ones not weathered. The falls. The returns. The small victories and the quiet humiliations. And when I tally it all up honestly, when I lay it out on the table and ask what I have actually made of myself through all this striving, the answer is startling.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

And here is the strangest part of all: that is precisely the point.

 

The Great American Project of the Self

We live in a culture that has elevated self-construction to the status of a sacred duty. From the moment we can speak, we are asked what we want to be when we grow up, as though the self were a destination one arrives at by sufficient effort. We curate our resumes, our online profiles, our personal brands. We collect degrees and titles and accomplishments the way some people collect stamps. The implicit message everywhere around us is that the self is a project, and a successful life is one in which the project is completed impressively.

There is nothing inherently wrong with effort. Scripture itself praises the diligent and warns against sloth. But somewhere along the way, the legitimate work of cultivating virtue and using one’s gifts has been replaced by something else entirely: the relentless, anxious labor of self-creation. We have come to believe that we are our own makers. And this belief, more than almost any other, is what keeps us from God.

Because here is what every contemplative eventually discovers, often after decades of trying very hard to be someone: we cannot make ourselves. We never could. The whole project was a mirage from the beginning.

 

The Wisdom of Coming Up Empty

Saint Paul puts it with characteristic bluntness: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Corinthians 4:7, NRSV). The question is rhetorical, but it lands like a hammer. Every gift, every grace, every breath, every moment of insight, every flash of love we have ever felt, every good thing in us, was given. Received. Not manufactured.

This is not false humility. It is simply the truth.

When the prophet Isaiah cried out, “We are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand” (Isaiah 64:8), he was not offering a poetic flourish. He was naming the basic structure of reality. The clay does not shape itself. The clay does not even know what it is becoming. The clay’s only work, if we can call it work, is to remain pliable in the hands of the One who shapes.

So what then are we to make of all our striving? All those years of study, of building, of trying? Were they wasted?

Not at all. But they did not accomplish what we thought they were accomplishing.

The years of study did not make us wise; at best, they emptied us of the illusion that we knew anything. The years of building up the self did not produce a self worth boasting about; at best, they revealed how fragile and contingent every self-construction really is. The temptations endured did not make us strong; they showed us our weakness. The falls humbled us. The returns to grace taught us that grace was always the protagonist of the story, never us.

In other words, all that work we thought was making us into something was actually doing the opposite. It was unmaking us. It was hollowing us out. It was, slowly and against our will, preparing us to become nothing so that God could be everything.

 

The Mystery of Spiritual Poverty

Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with what must be the strangest economic statement in history: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). The Greek word here, ptōchoi, does not mean merely those of modest means. It refers to the utterly destitute, the ones who have absolutely nothing, the beggars who exist entirely on what is given.

This is the spiritual condition Jesus calls blessed. Not the self-made. Not the accomplished. Not the disciplined builders of impressive interior lives. The ones who have come to the end of their resources and found themselves empty-handed.

Why? Because only an empty hand can receive. The hand clenched around its own accomplishments has no room for the gift God wants to give. And the gift God wants to give is nothing less than himself.

St. John of the Cross, in his teaching on the night of the spirit, writes that the soul must be brought to a place of profound emptiness, “naked and stripped of itself,” because anything we cling to as our own becomes an obstacle to union with God. He calls this nada, nothing. The soul’s path to todo, all, runs straight through nada.

This is not a dreary or pessimistic teaching. It is, in fact, the most liberating thing anyone can hear. Because if I am not the one making myself, then I do not have to bear the unbearable weight of being my own creator. If the project of the self is not actually my project, then I can let it go. I can rest. I can finally, after all these years, simply be.

 

What the Psalmist Knew

There is a moment in the Psalms that captures this with breathtaking honesty: “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me” (Psalm 131:2).

A weaned child. Not an infant clamoring for milk, anxious and demanding. A weaned child, who has learned to be with the mother simply for the sake of being with her. Who is not there to get anything anymore. Who has discovered that presence itself is sufficient.

This is the soul that has stopped trying to make something of itself. It is no longer nursing at the breast of its own accomplishments, no longer demanding to be fed by its own achievements. It has become, finally, capable of simply being held.

And what does the psalmist conclude? “O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore” (Psalm 131:3). The end of self-making is not despair. It is hope. A different kind of hope, a hope that does not depend on what I can construct, a hope rooted in the One who is faithful.

 

The Surrender That Is Not Defeat

I want to be very careful here, because there is a kind of false surrender that masquerades as humility but is actually just exhaustion or self-loathing. That is not what we are talking about. The recognition that we have made nothing of ourselves is not a confession of failure; it is a recognition of the truth. And truth, as Jesus said, sets us free (cf. John 8:32).

True surrender is joyful. It is the surrender of a heavy burden we were never meant to carry. It is the relief of finally laying down the impossible task of self-creation and admitting that we were always being created, always being held, always being shaped by hands far more skillful than our own.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in her own way, understood this perfectly. Her “little way” was not a way of accomplishment but a way of acknowledged smallness. She knew she could not climb the staircase of perfection by her own strength, so she asked Jesus to be her elevator. The little soul does not pretend to be great. It does not pretend to have made anything of itself. It simply lifts up its emptiness to be filled.

 

Practical Wisdom for the Empty Hand

How does any of this translate into the practical reality of our days? Let me offer a few suggestions, gentle ones, for those who find themselves resonating with this strange wisdom.

First, practice the examen of receiving. At the end of each day, instead of asking what you accomplished, ask what you received. What gifts came to you today, often without your noticing? What graces? What small kindnesses? Train your attention to see your life as a stream of given things rather than a list of achieved ones.

Second, let go of one project of self-construction. Just one. Pick something you have been laboring at to make yourself impressive, or strong, or admirable, or holy, and consciously surrender it. Not the activity itself, perhaps, but the inner agenda of self-creation behind it. Do the work, but let God be the one who decides what it makes of you, if anything.

Third, spend time in silence without trying to produce anything from it. Not even prayer in the productive sense. Just sit. Be a weaned child in the presence of God. Resist the temptation to evaluate the silence, to make it good prayer, to come away with something to show for it. Simply be there. Let the nothing be.

Fourth, receive correction and limitation as gifts. Every time we are humbled, every time we discover we are not as wise or strong or capable as we thought, that is grace at work, hollowing us out so that God can fill us. Stop fighting it. Stop resenting it. Let it teach you.

Fifth, consider that what feels like failure may be your most fruitful ground. The places where you have come up empty after years of effort, those may not be the wastelands they appear. They may be precisely the places where God is most able to work, because there is finally room for Him there.

 

The End That Is Beginning

So yes, after all the years, after all the study, after all the rising and falling and rising again, we may find that we have made absolutely nothing of ourselves.

Thanks be to God.

Because now, perhaps for the first time, we are ready to be made into something we could never have made ourselves: a soul that belongs entirely to Another. A clay vessel shaped by the only hands worthy of the work. A weaned child resting against the heart of the One who has been holding us all along.

Nothing, it turns out, is exactly the right place to begin.