The story goes that someone came upon Michelangelo staring intently at a block of marble, weighing well over six tons, and asked what he was doing. After a long pause, the artist replied that he was envisioning the sculpture that lay hidden within the stone, and was seeing all that was not part of the finished piece that he would need to chip away.

Two years later, the masterpiece was unveiled for the world to see—David, one of the most iconic pieces in all of art history. How? In simple terms, Michelangelo removed all the stone that was NOT David, so that the true image could emerge to match what had always been in his vision.

The work of the artist was to “release” David from its stone prison.

This is much like what God does with us.

The Artist comes to release us from the prison of our False Self identity, and free our True Self to emerge. The stone prison is mainly unknown to us, lying deep within our subconscious mind, but God will never lose sight of Their vision of who we’ve been created to be.

This is our “un-becoming.”

But God does not come with hammer and chisel. Instead, They come to us disguised as our own lives, using our own experiences (whether good, disastrous, ugly, painful, or glorious) as the means by which They can release our Real Self from our mind-prison.

We are in process of becoming who we already are. Perhaps it’s better to say that we are un-becoming all we are not.

We are not known by our birth certificate, our childhood memories and photos, our current job, our family situation, or the image that stares back at us in the mirror.

I am more than my name, my stuff, my thoughts, experiences, sensations, beliefs, or feelings. Maybe most importantly, I am not a dirty, rotten sinner who is separated from a holy God because of my sin.

Who I truly am was established before any of these things, and will outlast all of them into the ages to come…

Excerpt from Mo’s book “Into the Abyss.”