Thanks, Doug, for your comment. These questions are significant for various reasons...some are more life-long quests, others are important only for the small part they play in the larger story of my life. But here they are, in order according to when they first arose in my mind during our holiday.
Who am I? Hopefully not being asked in the sense that I need to be committed to a home, but in the sense that I was revisiting my sense of self-understanding.
My first thought about how to answer this question was: I'll read the Bible and make a list of every passage that says something about who I am. So the answer to "Who am I?" would look something like: I'm a child of God, an heir of the king, a sinner, a saint, deeply loved by God, etc. Then I wondered - Am I just a list? Isn't there something more to how I understand myself? I realize that many of those things in the list are profound truths and contain important elements about my relationship with God and other people, but in the end, it's still a list without any reference to my specific life. I mean, those things are true of every person who follows Jesus.
So I started thinking about the pomo preference for story/narrative. The idea that story communicates truth better than generic lists. I like this, though it means the answer to "Who am I?" is currently 26.4 years long, and getting longer every hour. I wonder if there's a way to condence the story of my life into a manageable format - like give little snippets that accurately reflect who I am, though without ever completely answering the question. Kinda like what John did with Jesus, where he says that many more things could be written, though they would fill many volumes, and that what he did write was written so that his readers would follow Jesus.
I guess maybe that's partly what this blog is all about - sharing glimpses of my life. So thank you, for reading and so helping to answer the question "Who am I?" I'll try to tell more stories in the future.
4 comments:
Hey Dan!
Sorry to be so pitiful at keeping in touch, but your last blog intrigued me and got me thinking.
I was wondering if the question of "who am I?" is a particularly recent and western question. The reason i wonder is because i am reading a book called Bangkok 8 in which the main character is a Thai policeman working with an American FBI agent. He seems baffled and bemused at Western emptiness and a need to consume. It seems like a Thai prostitute does not wonder at who she is.
One of my favorite authors, Walker Percy, seems to think that dislocation of self in the modern world is a symptom of our ever-increasing knowledge of the universe, that the more we understand the cosmos the less we understand ourselves. We effectively become ghosts wondering around in a world we so perfectly understand.
I do feel the western longing to know who i am and wonder if the church as i know it now is prepared to help. Because like you said, if we offer plattitudes like "you are a son/daughter of God" we are saying good things, yes, but we are not realizing the true diversity and wonder of the human condition. I wonder sometimes if what we as a church say to questions of identity is in effect damaging our selfhood by forcing us to all fit the same mold.
One final thought: jesus says that if we want to gain our lives (psyche or self, it think) we must lose them. So in subsuming our selfhood to the person and work of Christ can we then finally be freed to be our true selves, not an automaton copy of what we think Christ wants us to be? Maybe our stories are a narrative of how God is teaching us to do just that. We can't be defined by lists because we are not yet fully who we really are, so the best we can do is tell people how we are learning to be ourselves.
Me again. I really like the idea of defining ourselves in terms of our story/stories. I suspect that as you do this you will find that your story is actually about intersecting stories (i.e., relationships: your story as it connects to other people’s stories). You might also end up telling your story as it is part of larger story. For example, I can’t speak fully about myself (my story) without also talking about how I am (my story is) embedded in and only make sense in larger stories. I.e. you don’t really know me without understanding the way my story is embedded in the Australian story, or my larger family’s story, and so on. So my story is not just about me. It’s about me in relationship to other people’s stories and teh larger stories in which my life is embedded.
This narrative approach to personal identity also strikes me as a good way of talking about myself as a Christian, because I now define myself not in terms of an independent (i.e., individual) story but a story embedded in God’s grand narrative that has climaxed and will climax in the story of Christ and his people. I am who I am because my story bound up in the Jesus story.
Well, that all sounded more profound in my head than it did in writing (isn’t that always the case!).
Doug
Yeah, these are good things...keep the thoughts flowing guys.
One other thought I had as I read your comments: I realized I tell a lot of stories about myself to my English co-workers. I was actually feeling kind of stupid earlier today because I had just told a totally pointless story about something that happened to me 10 years ago (pointless, except that it was meaningful for me at the time). I wonder if I'm feeling the strain of not being known by anyone here. People here know lots of facts about me, but like Doug said, nobody here had intersected with any of my story until three months ago. So I think my story-telling is a way to try to make myself known to them.
for some reason i've been thinking a lot recently about something that josiah bancroft said once. his dad used to say that when Christ returns he's going to call us each by our real names and for the first time we'll know exactly who we are. i absolutely love that thought. all of the beauty and fullness of who he created me to be... revealed.
-mm
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