By Rod Benson
Brandi Carlile’s Returning to Myself, her first solo release in four years, was recently named Song of the Year at the 2026 Americana Honors & Awards. It is not explicitly a Christian song, yet my friend and Baptist theologian Steve Harmon’s description of it as a work of “theological anthropology” is perceptive. In just four minutes, Carlile’s song raises profound questions that occupy large portions of Scripture and Christian theology: What is a human being? Do we belong fundamentally to ourselves or to others? Is freedom found in detachment or relationship? Does self-discovery require turning inward, or does the self finally become intelligible only through love?
The song’s theological power lies in its refusal of two opposite errors. It rejects the dissolution of the individual into the expectations of others, but it equally rejects the autonomous self as the goal of human existence. Its governing thesis may be stated simply: we become ourselves neither through autonomous self-possession nor through self-erasure, but through receiving, discovering, relinquishing and giving the self in relationships of freedom and love. Returning to oneself is necessary; remaining enclosed within oneself is not. The inward journey must become a round trip.
The theological resonances explored here need not represent Carlile’s conscious sources or intentions. Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Aquinas or Barth need not have been hovering over the writing desk for their anthropology to illuminate what the song evokes. The task is interpretive: to place Carlile’s poetic intuitions within a much older Christian conversation about what it means to become human.
Created for relationship
This intuition resonates strongly with biblical anthropology. Genesis presents humanity as created in the image of God, yet immediately refuses to imagine the human person as an isolated individual. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). Whatever else the image of God means, Scripture consistently portrays human flourishing as relational: relationship with God, other human beings and the created world. The biblical self is embodied, dependent and situated within networks of belonging. Covenant itself presupposes relationship. God calls Abraham into a people, liberates Israel as a community and gathers the church as a body whose members belong to one another.
Carlile asks a deeply theological question when she wonders why it should be considered heroic “to untether” and why being alone should become a “holy grail.” Influential strands of modern Western thought have associated maturity with autonomy. Yet autonomy itself is not the problem. Respect for conscience, agency and freedom from coercive communities has been one of modernity’s important achievements. The difficulty begins when autonomy becomes self-sufficiency, as though dependence were necessarily weakness and obligation necessarily oppression. Paul offers a different grammar: Christians are “members one of another” (Rom 12:5). Personhood involves distinction without isolation.
Irenaeus: unfinished humanity
Irenaeus of Lyons provides an important early Christian perspective on Carlile’s imagery of pilgrimage and return. He portrays human beings as created good yet capable of growth. In Against Heresies, humanity appears as needing to grow, be strengthened and advance toward maturity. Human perfection is not simply a static possession given in completed form from the beginning; creaturely life is ordered toward development under God.
This makes human existence essentially developmental. To be human is not merely to uncover an already finished self beneath social pressures. It is to become what one has been created to be. Carlile’s “return” to oneself therefore need not mean recovery of a pristine inner essence. It can be understood as discernment within a larger process of formation.
Irenaeus’s theology of recapitulation deepens this point. In Christ, humanity’s distorted history is gathered up, renewed and redirected toward its intended fulfilment. Salvation is not escape from creatureliness but its restoration and maturation. Carlile’s insistence that pilgrimage acquires meaning when one returns to hold another’s hand fits this developmental anthropology well. Maturity is measured not by self-sufficiency but by an enlarged capacity for communion.
Augustine: the restless heart
Augustine supplies one of the clearest theological lenses through which to read Carlile’s suspicion of self-enclosure. The Confessions begins with the conviction that the human heart remains restless until it rests in God. Human beings are creatures of desire. The problem is not desire itself but disorder: finite goods are treated as ultimate, and the self seeks in itself what can finally be received only in relation to God.
This helps illuminate Carlile’s critique of “kneeling at the altar” of the self. Augustine does not condemn inwardness; few theologians have explored interiority more deeply. Yet the journey inward does not terminate in the self. It points beyond the self toward God. Christian introspection differs from narcissism precisely because the self is not its own creator or final horizon.
A later Augustinian trajectory, developed especially in Luther, describes sin through the image of homo incurvatus in se, humanity curved inward upon itself. The phrase is not Augustine’s, but captures important features of his account of pride and disordered love. Carlile senses a similar danger. Returning to oneself can be necessary, but if the journey ends there, self-discovery becomes self-worship. The healed self must bend outward again toward God and neighbour.
Gregory of Nyssa: always becoming
Gregory of Nyssa adds another dimension. For Gregory, human beings are created in the image of an infinite God, and therefore growth into God can never be exhausted. His theology of epektasis describes spiritual existence as unending movement into divine goodness. In works such as The Life of Moses, perfection is not static completion but continual progress. This makes Carlile’s language of pilgrimage especially suggestive. There is no final autonomous self waiting to be uncovered beneath the accumulated debris of social existence. Human identity is dynamic. We are always becoming. To “return” to oneself cannot simply mean retrieving some fixed interior essence.
Gregory’s anthropology also prevents inwardness from becoming confinement. The divine image opens the person toward infinite communion rather than enclosing the self within private consciousness. Spiritual progress expands the capacity for love. Carlile’s “round trip” therefore provides a suggestive contemporary analogy to Gregory’s conviction that growth toward God enlarges participation in divine goodness.
Aquinas: rightly ordered love
Thomas Aquinas offers another way of understanding the song’s central paradox. Human flourishing requires relationships, communities and ultimately participation in the life of God. Human beings seek happiness, but no finite created good—wealth, honour, pleasure, power or comparable possession—constitutes perfect beatitude. Complete happiness lies finally in the vision of God.
Aquinas does not oppose self-love and love of others. Proper self-love is good. A person should desire genuine flourishing for themselves because the self is a creature made and loved by God. The problem arises when self-love becomes disordered and private advantage becomes the supreme good.
Charity restores the order of love. In loving God, human beings learn to love themselves and their neighbours within a larger communion of good. Aquinas’s account of friendship and charity understands love of others in relation to properly ordered self-love. Carlile’s recognition that returning to herself becomes returning “to you” fits this framework well. Authentic self-possession and authentic self-giving are not opposites.
Christ as the measure
Christian anthropology is not finally constructed from a general theory of human nature and then supplemented by Christian doctrines. The New Testament presents Jesus Christ himself as decisive for understanding humanity. Colossians calls him “the image of the invisible God,” and Christian theology has long understood his humanity as disclosing what human life ordered to God looks like.
The issue is not only what Jesus teaches about human beings, but what his humanity reveals. His life is neither self-enclosed nor self-annihilating. He withdraws into solitude yet returns to community. He receives love and gives it. He possesses a particular identity without turning that identity into a fortress. His freedom is ordered toward love of God and neighbour.
Paul’s teaching in Philippians 2 sharpens the point. Christ’s self-emptying is not the destruction of personhood but the form taken by loving freedom. He does not cease to be himself in giving himself. Christian self-giving is therefore not disappearance but the offering of a real and particular self in service of others.
The incarnation also guards against an excessively interior anthropology. Human salvation is not escape from embodiment. In Christ, God assumes bodily existence, social relation, vulnerability and mortality. The resurrection does not discard embodiment but transfigures it. Christian hope is therefore not the perfection of an inward self but the renewal of embodied life in communion.
Bonhoeffer: responsibility for others
Dietrich Bonhoeffer pushes this relational anthropology into sharper ethical form. Across his theology, and with particular force in the prison writings, human existence is interpreted in relation to Christ and responsibility for others. His late language of Christ as “the man for others” gives vivid expression to this trajectory. Human identity is not secured by retreat into private authenticity but discovered through responsible participation in the lives of others.
Bonhoeffer was deeply suspicious of forms of religiosity that turned Christianity into private interior experience. His earlier ecclesiology already understands the church as a community constituted in Christ, while Life Together deliberately holds solitude and community together. The two correct one another.
Carlile’s song traces something close to this dialectic. Returning to oneself is necessary but lonely. The pilgrimage acquires meaning only when the traveller returns to hold another’s hand. The self, encountered in solitude, discovers responsibilities that can only be exercised in relationship.
Biography behind the round trip
Carlile’s own life gives this theological movement concrete texture without determining the song’s meaning. Her relationship with Christianity has been marked by both attraction and injury. She has spoken publicly about wanting baptism as a young person and being refused by a pastor because she was gay. Yet she did not simply abandon Christian language or spiritual questions. That history makes the song’s concern with belonging especially significant: communities can confer recognition, but they can also wound.
Her wider biography reinforces the song’s concern with relational identity. Carlile has repeatedly written about family, friendship, exclusion, forgiveness and chosen community. Earlier songs such as “The Joke” and “Party of One,” together with the themes surrounding By the Way, I Forgive You, explore the dignity of people denied recognition, the fragility of intimate relationships, and the difficult work of living beyond resentment. Across this material, the self is shaped through relationships that can both injure and heal.
The same pattern appears in her reflections on marriage, parenthood, artistic collaboration and success. Carlile has spoken about the danger of becoming dispersed through too many opportunities and commitments, and about the need to recover a creative and personal centre. A person can lose herself not only through isolation but also through excessive availability to others. Self-enclosure and self-avoidance are opposite dangers.
Carlile’s biography reinforces both sides of the theological argument. Belonging may save us from isolation, but belonging may also become coercive and destructive. We need others in order to become ourselves, yet we also require sufficient inward freedom to discern whether what we offer others is genuinely our own. Mature personhood requires communion without erasure.
A feminist corrective
That distinction matters because Christian language of self-giving requires careful qualification. Calls to surrender, obedience and self-emptying have not always been heard equally. For people whose social or religious formation has already taught them to suppress their agency, ignore their needs or endure coercive relationships, exhortations to “give yourself away” may reinforce harm rather than produce holiness.
Feminist theology has therefore repeatedly interrogated Christian language of sacrifice and kenosis, although there is no single feminist verdict. Sarah Coakley resists simply abandoning kenosis and argues that vulnerability before God need not mean passivity or powerlessness; rightly understood, it may become a source of transformed agency. Kathryn Tanner similarly takes feminist and womanist criticisms of sacrificial interpretations of Christ’s work seriously while seeking constructive accounts that do not glorify victimhood. The crucial distinction is not simply between self-assertion and self-emptying, but between coerced diminishment and freely given love.
Carlile’s song provides an important safeguard. The journey outward follows the journey inward. She does not say that mature humanity begins by abandoning oneself. She insists on returning to oneself first. A person who has never been permitted to possess a self may need recovery before surrender, speech before silence, and boundaries before embrace. Theologically, self-giving is most faithful when it proceeds from freedom rather than coercion. The Christian goal is not self-negation but transformed agency: a self that is sufficiently secure to freely give, receive, resist, forgive and love.
Buber: I and Thou
Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue gives perhaps the most immediately recognisable philosophical expression to Carlile’s final insight. In I and Thou, Buber distinguishes between two fundamental forms of relation: I–It and I–Thou. In I–It relationships we encounter things, events and often people as objects of knowledge, use or description. In I–Thou encounter, by contrast, the other is received as genuine presence.
I–It is not in itself evil or illegitimate. Human beings necessarily engage the world through classification and practical use. The danger arises when I–It becomes exhaustive, so that persons and ultimately the world are encountered only as objects.
For Buber, the “I” itself differs according to the relationship it inhabits. The self is not fully constituted in abstraction from relation. Carlile’s discovery that returning to herself means returning to “you” could almost serve as a poetic gloss on Buber. The self does not disappear in encounter with the other; it becomes more fully itself. Genuine relationship is neither absorption nor domination. “I” and “Thou” remain distinct precisely so that communion can occur.
Barth: being in encounter
Karl Barth develops this relational insight into a specifically Christian theological anthropology. For Barth, the humanity of Jesus Christ reveals what true humanity is. Christ is not an isolated religious individual. His existence is fundamentally relational: obedient to God and turned toward other human beings in grace, reconciliation and service. Humanity therefore cannot be adequately defined in terms of solitary consciousness or autonomous self-possession.
Barth characteristically develops human existence in terms of “being in encounter.” In Church Dogmatics III/2 he treats relationality as essential to creaturely existence before God. His discussion of humanity as male and female is one way he develops this claim, although aspects of his account of sexual differentiation have attracted substantial criticism. The broader point remains significant: human beings do not exist properly as isolated selves.
This lends particular force to Carlile’s rejection of untethered existence. An absolutely autonomous person would not be more fully human but less so. Yet encounter does not mean fusion. True relationship requires mutuality, differentiation, speech, listening and responsibility.
Zizioulas: personhood as communion
John Zizioulas takes relational anthropology into explicitly Trinitarian territory. Drawing on his interpretation of the Cappadocian Fathers, he argues that personhood cannot finally be understood apart from relation and communion. His reading of patristic ontology has been influential but remains contested, so it should not simply be treated as the undisputed meaning of the Cappadocians.
Within his own theological framework, however, the claim is clear: personhood entails particularity without isolation and freedom within communion. Carlile’s rejection of “untethering” resonates strongly here. Absolute independence would not constitute the perfection of personhood. Freedom is not merely freedom from relationship but freedom for relationships in which love rather than coercion determines belonging.
The Trinitarian analogy must nevertheless be used carefully. Human relationships are not replicas of divine relations, and appeals to the Trinity should never be used to naturalise social hierarchies. Its significance lies at a deeper level: Christian faith does not imagine ultimate reality as solitary self-sufficiency. God is confessed as Father, Son and Spirit. Communion, not isolation, belongs near the centre of Christian reflection on ultimate reality.
Volf: embrace without erasure
Miroslav Volf adds an important safeguard against romanticising relationship. Communion can become oppressive if belonging demands the surrender of difference. In Exclusion and Embrace, Volf develops the metaphor of embrace to describe reconciliation. An embrace requires opening the arms, waiting, closing them around another and finally opening them again. The other is welcomed but never absorbed.
This is crucial for interpreting Carlile. “Returning to myself” must remain a genuine return. There are relationships and communities capable of crushing individuality, enforcing conformity or turning belonging into control. Theologically mature communion therefore requires boundaries as well as openness. Volf helps explain why Carlile’s pilgrimage begins with self-recovery before it reaches communion. A person who cannot stand as a self cannot genuinely offer themselves to another. Love requires distinction. Yet distinction exists for embrace rather than isolation.
Mortality and finitude
The song’s image of life as a stone “skipping for a time” deserves more theological weight than it first appears to carry. It introduces not simply death but finitude. Human beings are temporary, dependent creatures. We do not originate ourselves, determine the duration of our lives or control the conditions under which we exist.
Biblical anthropology repeatedly insists upon this. Humanity is formed from dust and returns to dust. Psalm 90 asks God to teach human beings to number their days so that they may gain wisdom. Ecclesiastes confronts the limits of human striving. Finitude is not itself a defect to be overcome. It belongs to creaturehood. Some contemporary ideals of self-optimisation can function as attempts to evade or master limitation. Carlile’s skipping stone offers a different image. Human life is movement rather than possession. We are here for a time and then gone.
This need not produce despair. It can produce gratitude, humility and responsibility. Because our time is limited, relationships matter. Because we cannot possess ourselves indefinitely, self-protection cannot be the final meaning of life. If life is brief, the question is not simply whether we have discovered ourselves but what we have done with the selves we have received.
A gospel without words
Carlile’s desire to break herself apart and scatter herself to the birds introduces another strand of Christian anthropology. The image can reasonably be heard as carrying a Franciscan resonance, though it should not be treated as evidence of deliberate allusion unless Carlile herself confirms that intention. Francis of Assisi’s spirituality famously placed humanity within a wider fellowship of creatures. In the Canticle of the Creatures, sun, moon, water, fire and earth belong to a community of praise before God.
Carlile’s aspiration to become “the gospel without words” similarly shifts attention from the self one explains to the life one embodies. Christian anthropology is inevitably ethical. If human beings are creatures constituted by gift and relationship, then genuine humanity appears most clearly in practices of generosity, mercy and care.
The self scattered to the birds is therefore not annihilated. It becomes fruitful. The image stands close to the gospel paradox of the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies so that it may bear much fruit (John 12:24), and to Jesus’ wider teaching that life is found not by grasping it but by giving it away.
Returning, not remaining
Taken together, these perspectives reveal how densely theological Carlile’s metaphor of a round trip can become. Irenaeus understands humanity as unfinished and growing toward maturity. Augustine insists that inwardness must finally lead beyond the self. Gregory of Nyssa reminds us that personhood is an unfinished pilgrimage into divine goodness. Aquinas shows that healthy self-love reaches fulfilment in rightly ordered friendship with God and neighbour. Bonhoeffer locates identity within responsibility for others. Buber shows that the “I” becomes itself through encounter with a “Thou.” Barth describes humanity as being-in-encounter. Zizioulas interprets personhood through the grammar of communion, while Volf insists that communion must preserve difference. Feminist theology warns that self-giving becomes destructive when detached from agency, consent and freedom.
Carlile’s biography adds an important but subordinate confirmation of this pattern. Religious rejection, chosen community, family life, artistic collaboration, forgiveness and the pressures of vocation all illuminate the same tension: human beings need others in order to become themselves, yet they also need sufficient inward freedom to ensure that what they offer others is genuinely their own. Mature personhood is neither permanent withdrawal nor permanent availability. It requires rhythm.
Christology gathers these insights into a specifically Christian centre. Jesus reveals a humanity that is neither self-enclosed nor self-erasing: embodied, relational, receptive, free and given in love. Trinitarian theology widens the horizon by refusing to imagine divine perfection as solitary self-sufficiency. Finitude reminds us that our lives are received, temporary and never entirely under our control.
Carlile’s description of the inward journey as a “round trip” distinguishes between two very different things: returning to oneself and remaining with oneself. The first may be necessary for truthfulness, healing and agency. The second becomes another form of captivity.
Our real selves
Christian anthropology ultimately insists that the self is real, particular and precious, but never self-sufficient. We are creatures rather than our own creators, pilgrims rather than finished products, neighbours rather than isolated units, embodied beings rather than disembodied consciousnesses, and persons whose freedom finds its fullest expression not in escape from relationship but in relationships governed by love.
The deepest insight of Returning to Myself lies in its final reversal. The journey toward the self unexpectedly discovers another person. Returning to oneself becomes returning “to you.” For Christian theology, this is not the failure of self-realisation but its fulfilment. We become most fully ourselves neither by losing ourselves in others nor by protecting ourselves from them, but by becoming persons capable of receiving and giving love freely.
Sometimes we must return to ourselves. But when we arrive there, we may discover that the self was never meant to be the final destination. It is a gift entrusted to us so that it may be known, healed, inhabited and offered again in love. The inward pilgrimage finds its meaning when the road turns outward, when another hand is taken, and when the person who has recovered the word “I” discovers that its deepest grammar also includes the words “you” and “we.”
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
Image source: Peggy Sirota, Variety
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