What does it mean to be an “authentic” person? What does it really mean to be “real,” to be who we truly are?

For instance, a reader of this blog comments that “we think we are authentic when we go along with the plans of others, not wanting to offend or say no to an invitation or whatever the occasion might be.”

Is it authentic to go along with the plans of others? Is it real to not want to offend people or disappoint them?

All of these things can be authentic. It depends where, in us, they are coming from.

A few weeks ago, my son Julian, 25 years old, was in the Phoenix area staying with me for a few days. We went out to a local pub and, while we ate, watched the New Orleans Saints. I’m not a football person, having grown up on soccer and cricket. In fact, I’ve only ever been to one football game in my life, which was to watch LSU play in Baton Rouge when Julian was a student there. The reality is, I have little interest in football.

So, was I authentic when we went to the pub to see the Saints play? Absolutely. Though I wouldn’t have watched myself, I had a mild interest in this particular game, given that I spent the best part of 20 years living in and around New Orleans. But primarily, it was a chance to enjoy an evening with Julian, doing something he loves.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I didn’t watch the Superbowl. Neither Jennifer nor I were interested—although we did check on the internet to see how the Saints were doing. My son was watching with friends, since he is visiting Baton Rouge right now—and he called me after the Saints won, exhilarated. I enjoyed his exhilaration.

If I go to an event pretending to like it when I don’t, that’s not authentic. But if I’m honest with myself about how I feel about it, and choose to go because it’s important to someone else who matters to me, then this is authentic.

Being real doesn’t mean I don’t do things to please others. It doesn’t mean I never do anything I don’t particularly like to do. It means that in pleasing others, I don’t betray myself—I don’t pretend to be something I’m not, portray myself in a way that isn’t me.

Suppose two people begin dating. One likes football, the other doesn’t. If, because you like the person and want to be with them, you act like you enjoy football when you don’t, that’s inauthentic.

But if you choose to go to the games with them, or watch on television, because you like to be with them—and they understand this—then this can be authentic. It’s a matter of where we are coming from.

Basing our identity on the likes and dislikes of others is inauthentic. Having our own identity, but choosing to do things others like, is different.

A lot of the time, authenticity isn’t so much what we do, but why we do it.

If you haven’t seen the current movie The Young Victoria, it’s a treat. Not only is it well filmed and acted, it illustrates the difficult journey we take to become who we really are.

The world around the young princess wanted to shape her and mold her. With her father dead when she was a young girl, she was at the mercy of her mother and those in league with her mother.

The trouble was, they didn’t really understand Victoria. Neither did they necessarily have her best interests at heart much of the time.

So Victoria, when she ascended the throne at age 18, found herself free at last to do largely as she pleased, which was to be a bit of a rebel.

I think many of us have trod this path in our quest for who we really are. We see others molding us, imposing their expectations on us, demanding that we live up to their vision of who we ought to be. If we don’t cave into this, we become a rebel.

To be a rebel isn’t to differentiate ourselves for who we really are. It’s just the flip side of acquiescing.

Victoria’s path ran her into trouble with her government and her people. For the first three years of her reign, she encountered considerable difficulty—including an attempt on her life and a risk of a storming of Buckingham Palace.

With the help of Prince Albert from Germany, with whom she fell in love, she was able to move out of the rebel mode and actually began to realize her potential to do much good for the people of Britain.

Prince Albert, too, began to differentiate himself, freeing himself from the European royals who wanted to define and control him.

We are so often defined by what others have expected of us—or the reverse, defined by our refusal to be what others expect of us.

To be authentic is to neither be what others want us to be, nor rebel against the expectations of others. It’s to find our real identity beneath all of this surface tension.

Our true being, our essence, consists of a quiet “inner knowing” that lies beneath both the voices and images in our head and our churning emotions, all of which usually revolve around either acquiescence or defiance.

Go see the film if you have chance. You’ll recognize your own struggle in it.

You’ll also see how loving someone can be such a benefit—while, simultaneously, we can become so dependent on another that we can’t function without them.

Becoming dependent on another for our identity and sense of wellbeing isn’t being our true self either, as the movie that shows what happened to Queen Victoria when Prince Albert died reveals. If you haven’t see it, it’s entitled Mrs. Brown, starring Judy Dench as the older Queen Victoria.

Two men were walking along a road and found an ancient lamp. One of them picked it up and rubbed it.

A puff of smoke emerged, and when it cleared, a genie was standing before them. “I can grant you one wish,” said the genie to the first man.

“I want to be the smartest man in the world,” said the man.

“So be it,” said the genie.

“And what is your wish?” the genie asked the second man.

“I want to be smarter than the smartest man in the world,” said this second fellow.

“So be it,” said the genie.

And the genie made him into a woman.

It’s time for our male-dominated world to wise up. Our era needs the feminine principle, once encapsulated in the image of the goddess as source of all matter, to come to the fore at this time in a balance with male energy.

Our world is crying out for the concept of divinity as transcendent to be balanced with the immanence once associated with the Great Mother, the goddess, who is expressed in and through nature.

What we don’t need, however, is a return to primitive ideas of the divine, and the rituals that accompany them—either male or female. Stepping back in time in our beliefs and practices is the opposite of the arising higher consciousness that is taking place presently.

It’s discovering the divine in ourselves, since all of us are in the divine likeness, that’s crucial.

When women and men both know themselves to be manifestations of the divine Presence, the way we relate to each other will change—and the way we treat our world and our fellow travelers on this planet will be transformed.

Regarding the Earth like a machine is endangering the future of all life on this globe. Such a mechanistic approach originates in a male-oriented idea of the divine, with males seeing themselves as divinely appointed to dominate the world.

Our one hope for the wellbeing of Earth, and of ourselves and our fellow species, is that a sense of divine Presence arise within all of us—male and female alike.

Only then will we move into a compassionate, caring, nurturing frame of mind, instead of plundering, polluting, and exploiting in the manner countenanced by several thousand years of patriarchy.

With the coming of the agrarian revolution some 10,000-12,000 years ago, how humans in the Middle East in particular, the known world of the time, understood the divine underwent a huge change.

A male deity in the sky appeared on the scene. Far from being the body of the universe as the Great Mother had been, this deity was entirely separate from nature, above and beyond.

He was epitomized by the Hebrew imagery of the “lord of hosts,” with the word “hosts” meaning “armies.”

Read parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, and there is plenty about this commander of armies, convulsing nature with earthquakes and tornadoes, and raining down thunderclaps and lightning bolts, as he marched into battle against his enemies.

The Storm God, the God of War, was conquering the world.

Divinity had lost her skin, for no more was earth the body of the goddess. God was altogether other, removed, remote, a spirit enthroned on high.

As a result, skin—no longer associated with the goddess—became a commodity, a means of escaping aloneness by using and abusing through barter, battle, and bed.

Earth, too, became a commodity to be exploited, the property of an absentee landlord to be dominated and plundered in an attempt to fill our emptiness.

Female skin, a reminder of the goddess, especially had to be controlled, and the priests of this patriarchal religion railed against the groves and mountaintop shrines, castigating all who valued the Earth as “heathen, pagan,” and branding feminine beauty and softness and sensuousness as witchery.

We have all been harmed by the God of patriarchy.

As Sallie McFague, a theologian at Vanderbilt University, observes: “A society that allows thousands of homeless people to roam the streets with no protection for their bodies; that spends, on the average, more for the last week of a dying elderly person’s hospital care than for the medical needs of the first ten years of a child’s life; that refuses in international congresses to join other nations in protecting biodiversity and limiting chemicals that contribute to global warming; this society hates the body, human bodies, and all other animal and plant bodies that make up the body of our planet.”

The theology of domination that accompanies a God who is a distant potentate, and who will whisk us off to the blue beyond when we have made a mess of things here below, not only allows but sanctions destruction of the web of life.

As a world, we are desperately in need of a change in our understanding of the divine. More on this tomorrow.

A little boy called out after being put to bed, “Mommy, I’m afraid of the dark.”

His mother replied, “There’s no need to be afraid, son. God is with you.”

To which the little boy responded, “But I need someone with skin on.”

There was a time when God had skin. The divine was understood as present in matter—a truth that has largely been forgotten for several millennia.

The word matter comes from the Latin term “mater,” meaning mother. Nature was imagined as a goddess, giving birth to all that is.

As a result, before the agrarian revolution, we had a respect for life as it poured forth season after season from the Great Mother, which meant we were essentially peaceful as a species.

If you didn’t get along with a neighboring tribe, you just moved across the hill into the next valley where there were all the nuts, roots, and fresh meat you wanted. There was nothing to defend, no reason to fight.

That’s not to say no one ever clubbed anyone, but we now know that the portrayal in Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 A Space Odyssey of early humans as violent apes wielding clubs is grossly inaccurate.

But with the dawn of the agrarian revolution around 12,000 years ago, our sense of connectedness to everything and to each other began to weaken.

As people ceased being hunters and gatherers and settled down to dig wells, plant crops, and construct dwellings, there was now every reason to fight when disagreements broke out.

With the coming of property and ownership, the culture of warfare developed.

That’s when masculinity came to the fore, with its brute strength, and patriarchal civilization was born.

What happens among humans gets projected into the sky. Maleness was now writ large in the heavens, as the divinity swapped her nurturing face for the conquering image of a divine warrior in the sky.

We are seeing the consequences of this switch to a male-dominated theology at the time of the agrarian revolution all around us—a topic we will take up again tomorrow.

It’s time that, as a species, we rediscover the God who is incarnate in human skin.