By Jim Nichols

It appears to be a child’s toy, small pieces that seem to relate a story that you get to make up as you play. “Invented” in the 1890s in Japan, they were adopted by Russian society soon and are often known as “Russian dolls” or “Matryoshka dolls” today; a more descriptive term is “nesting dolls.”

Originally made from wood, they consist of a series of figures of assorted sizes that one opens to reveal other dolls inside. The largest doll opens to reveal a smaller doll inside, continuing down to a solid innermost piece. Historically, these have been a series of identical (though smaller) people stacked together, in other words, the same person but progressively smaller toward the inside. In modern times, the concept has been modified to involve not just people, but cats, dogs, ocean animals, politicians, even the Holy Family.

Although the concept is charming, one wonders if there is not a more serious, even spiritual, potential meaning. Does this nesting concept illustrate that life builds in such a way that each successive age carries with it a collection of all previous ages? That is, at my current age today, is my six-year-old self still present inside me? My twenty-five-year-old self? My sixty-year-old self?

Do you ever wonder “what is the basic me?” (or you?)

Personally, I feel like a fake sometimes. I confidently act and speak (and write) things I am not at all really sure about. That is basic dishonesty and I suggest that you and I are each caught in that trap. Sometimes we treat life as if it were a masquerade party and we each have masks that we have chosen to wear because we are not pleased with who we appear to be. We are playing party games.

As God followers, we can believe that there is a “God-image” inside each of us. We have each accumulated years of masking that image so that we look like someone we want to be, but that may well not be who God designed us to be. 

Have you ever watched someone who was excellent at whittling wood? Starting with an unshaped block of regular wood, they seem to envision something buried in that crudeness and, with an amazingly sharp knife, begin to shape the formless block into what they know is hidden. It is clearly a form of sculpting and something my training in Cub Scouts failed to impart to me.

Perhaps there is something like spiritual whittling that occurs. There is a transformation from my falseness into something more intended by God all along. It was there, but I was successful at masking it, so no one saw it. Now something is triggering me to find ways to shave off extraneous pieces and re-purpose them into something loving and Godly. Something that was hidden for years now becomes visible. The basic me as created by God can now break into visibility.

As aging causes me to accumulate years and physical losses, there may be realizations that are becoming apparent; they have been there all along, but we had too many masks. If we had parents who were wise about God, they slipped into us pieces that may still be there and are just scratching themselves to the surface. Maybe we had other family members, friends, or teachers who injected goodness that has been dormant. What we see as new wrinkles and rearranged body fat is actually accompanied by positive spiritual whittling.

Perhaps this whittling gets easier with age, similar to breaking through our current image and recovering a more basic image of ourselves, like the nesting dolls.

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain