What Were You Made For?

Before the Barbie craze fades, we need to talk about a secret message in Greta Gerwig’s incredibly subversive, stick-it-to the patriarchy film. When you step back from all the pink, all the girl power, all the absurdity of having to be female in a patriarchal world, there was also an element of existential self-discovery that I found to be just as amazing.

Remember that penultimate scene between Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ruth Handler (Rhea Pearlman) when Barbie asks her creator if she can become human? Let me play it back for you…

Barbie: “Do you give me permission to become human?”

Ruth: “You don’t need my permission.”

Barbie: “But you’re the Creator, don’t you control me?”

Ruth: “I can’t control you, anymore than I can control my own daughter.

Barbie: “So, being human is not something I need to ask for or, even want I can just…It’s something I just discover I am?”

Yes. The answer is yes. In fact, you should be asking your Creator a similar line of questions. As a human, can I become divine? Can I be like you? Can I also make meaning instead of only being the thing that was made? Again, the answer is yes. Becoming fully human and fully divine isn’t something you need to ask for or even want, it’s something you discover you already are.

Let me explain.

Barbie needed a covert conversation with her creator to awaken her full, transformative identity. The same is true for us. Thankfully, we now have access to the “secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke” to his disciple Didymus (twin) Judas Thomas that provide a path toward our becoming. Although these direct sayings of Jesus do not appear in your Bible, they are contained in the Gospel of Thomas, only recently found in an Egyptian cave, hidden for almost two centuries.

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant ventured into a cave in search of fertilizer, finding instead a rather large clay jar. Inside was a collection of 12 ancient books that came to be known as the Nag Hammadi library. This find is still considered the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century, primarily because among the books was the lost Gospel of Didymus Thomas. Scholars believe it documents the oldest and most authentic sayings of the historical Jesus. 

It’s fitting that these ancient teachings lay hidden for centuries and unavailable to the greater Christian world because, in large part, they’ve been a secret ever since Jesus first uttered them.

In Thomas 3a and 3b, Jesus says, “The Kingdom is within you, and it is outside you. When you understand yourselves, you will be understood. And you will realize you are Sons of the living Father.” Later on, Jesus is even more explicit: “He who will drink from my mouth (accept my teachings) will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.” Later on Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

These sayings reveal the clue as to why this secret gospel was called “the gospel of the twin,” because Jesus is saying in not so uncertain words that when we discover who we were really made to be, we will be just like him. We will be his twin.

Like Jesus, we all came from God and will return to God. We possess the same Divine image, the same sacred spark, the same inner light. “Being Sons of the Father is to be like Jesus himself, a status one does not attain anew but that one realizes one has always had,” explains author Stevan Davies. 

In the Book of Thomas the Contender, another ancient book discovered at Nag Hammadi, the historical Jesus addresses Thomas (and by implication, the reader) as follows:

“Since you are my twin and my true companion, examine yourself, and learn who you are…Since you will be called my twin, although you do not understand it yet…you will be called ‘the one who knows himself.’ For whoever has not known himself knows nothing, but whoever has known himself has simultaneously come to know the depth of all things.”

The task set before us is to begin the journey of self-discovery, to seek and find the treasure of our true selves, hidden all these years by ego, lies, pride, and sin. Like Barbie, who believes she is infinitely different from her creator, we suffer from the same self deception. But finite humanity and infinite divinity are fully joined in Christ, the very same Christ that lives in you. As stated by Cyril of Alexandria, “We are made partakers of the divine nature and are said to be sons of God. . . not only because we are exalted by grace to supernatural glory, but also because we have God dwelling in us.” Or as Athanasius of Alexandria put it, “The Son of God became man that we might become god.” Princeton University Professor Elaine Pagels writes, “the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made ‘in the image of God.’ The ‘image of God’ is hidden within everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence.”

This idea of deification or divinization of the human person is known in Orthodox theology as “Theosis,” or the full human participation and union with God, and it reflects the hidden meaning of salvation in Christ. Salvation isn’t about believing the right things or even exchanging our human nature with a divine nature, but doing the necessary work to uncover and reveal your true self.

So, how do you do it? How do you discover your true identity? In short, it’s a mystery, but Jesus offers some clues. For starters, everything you need is already inside you. According to Pagels, “Jesus comes to reveal that you and he are, if you like, twins.... And what you discover as you read the Gospel of Thomas, is that you and Jesus at a deep level are identical twins. And that you discover that you are the child of God just as he is.”

The clue to your enlightenment is the discovery of what lies hidden within you. And what is hidden deep inside you is your original nature, your true self, the direct image of God stamped on your soul, which can never be taken from you. It might be marred and dirtied by years of living into your false self, but it’s still there. The task before you is to go on a spiritual quest to discover who you really are. And what you will finally discover is that you are a child of God, just like your twin Jesus.

Before I close, I have a confession to make. It took me a few weeks to put this down on paper. Partly out of ignorance and mostly out of fear that these secret sayings would be interpreted as unadulterated blasphemy. Yes, we are Holy Heretics but isn’t this just a bridge too far? Maybe. It also reminded me of another story in Thomas’ gospel when Jesus took him aside privately and told him three secrets. Upon returning to the other disciples, they asked him what Jesus told him. Thomas said, “If I tell you even one of the things he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; and a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”

To put it less blasphemous, Jesus is asking us, like Socrates, to “Know thyself.” To know your ultimate divine identity and to live completely into your true self. Otherwise, like Barbie remaining plastic, we remain in poverty. As Jesus said, “If you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

Gary Alan Taylor