Becoming You

One of the most unique aspects of human life, to me, is that our identity often begins pre-birth when someone else gives us the gift of distinctiveness in the form of a name and grants us belonging in the shape of a home.  Yet, as people grow and develop in the different stages of life we often deconstruct and reconstruct our identity sometimes for ourselves and often we receive it again from others.  Because of that our identity will take different shapes for better and for worse, especially if others have been at the heart of disfiguring it.

Nevertheless, identity is essential among communal creatures.  Think of what it is like, perhaps your inner desire, to have a place of familiarity where others gladly affirm your belonging. Think of the loneliness in its absence. Think of how it feels, the part of your brain that perks up, when someone says your name.  Think of what happens inside when you hear how you are being talked about, good or bad.  It shapes our self-awareness and how we relate to the world around us. It can aid in forming a fractured self-image in need of attention and healing, or it can build a healthy self-image that is not afraid of letting go of ego because our worth is rooted elsewhere. I say this to make the point that our identity is important, but again it is first and foremost a gift that we must receive, not some ideal projection of our making to aggressively pursue and protect. 

But, the conversation changes when those around us seem better at offering flighty labels to our personhood, which can either be an unattainable high ideal or belittle us as a person. The truth is people who struggle with their own identity also lack what is necessary to see the true identity of all the other people around them. So if we ourselves struggle to find it and all struggle to see it we must ask, who then should we trust to give the decisive say to our identity?  

Yes I am obviously going to say God, but here’s why.  If we stay attentive to the relational turmoil throughout the whole Biblical narrative we will see identity is a regular struggle for precisely these reasons. For instance, the Hebrew texts reveal the ups and downs of the formation of human identity and Israel gaining an identity and God trying to reclaim the world’s identity. In the Gospels there is a dichotomy between how Jesus indentified and related to others and how his traumatized, angry and retreating community identified and treated them.

The main point I want to draw from, however, comes from Ephesians. Here salvation is being reoriented for the church of Ephesus as a divine creation and gift that no one had any power to make happen, just as our own lives were never by our contribution (2:1-9). Verse 10 peaks by saying that the salvation of people is God’s workmanship, like an artful masterpiece, created in Christ to carryout God’s goodness in the earth as our way of life because our identity and location was always found within Himself. In fact the entire cosmos is located in YHWH. To be disconnected from this is to lose our origin and our ability to understand ourselves, others and the universe in the right context.  

When Ephesians says that we are God’s workmanship/masterpiece, I found John Berger helped me (indirectly) relate here.  Berger (art critic, novelist, artist, poet, prophet), in his 70’s BBC broadcast “Ways of Seeing”, made an interesting observation about the art we observe. We usually see art in the context of museums, art exhibitions, photographs, televisions and so forth which is fine supposing the art-piece is good in its own right, but we also need to remember that it is always outside of its original setting.  When an art piece is experienced outside of its original setting its meaning gets lost. This is because most art was never arbitrarily created, but was commissioned for a certain purpose within a specific architectural setting (e.g. churches, castles, government buildings, etc…). It was part of a story, a history.  Berger said, “With art, each image captures some memory from the interior life from the place it was made for, thus everything around the image was part of its meaning. Its uniqueness is part of the uniqueness of the single place where it is; everything around it confirms and consolidates its meaning.”[1] What a profound statement and a frightful one for those who interpret art amid a world that desecrates its meaning for the sake of things like advertisement!

            It is worth mentioning that Berger saying this then leads into a deconstruction and critique of the manipulating that can and does occur to art after being severed from its context.  He shows it did in fact form new interpretations of art (not to be confused with better) that come from manipulating its identity and giving it new surroundings, invented location. So if it is not already obvious this falls in line with what I am saying.

            We are at the epicenter of where God begins to set things right. God locates our identity in Jesus and in His incarnation reveals what we were always supposed to be; genuinely human (Isa. 2; Matt. 5-7). But with this God insists on giving us a new name (as opposed to the empire which assigns a number) as part of our new creational identity (Compare Rev. 2:17; 22:3-4; with 13:16-18).  See, like art we have been intentionally formed within a universe where our surroundings confirm and consolidate our meaning and in our new identity we take part in confirming and uniting with the universe’s meaning because it all belongs.

Therefore, this is an identity we do not get to make up, though we can perceive it and live in it, and we certainly do not get to demean another’s identity to prop ours up as more significant. It cannot be validated by our own accomplishments, rightness or ego because that’s a different game.  Truth is you are enough as you are and you cannot earn an identity which you were already given. All we can do is accept it as a gift and stop trying to actualize it through our rigged point systems. If we let the humbling call of God (who is love) define our identity (which He insists is in His likeness) we might just find ourselves within the loving wholeness of belonging.  

             

[1] John Berger. Ways of Seeing: Episode 1. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk May 10, 2017.