Identity [jenna]

A young guy I once knew from Anacortes--one John Van Deusen--used often to sing a song he'd written, three lines of which have haunted me over and over again.

"You're so damn lovely / Don't give your innocence away / Do you know who you are"

I have thought of those words in reference to children on the reservation I used to visit, to high school students that came through the youth ministry I worked for, to friends that had a bit of a hell-bent to them, and occasionally even looking in the mirror (and without thinking of my looks).

My boyfriend recently wrote "Today, we define adulthood less by the acceptance of responsibility than by self-definition through individual choice ..." He was right. We've all heard that "Nobody really figures out who they are till they're [insert number over 25 here]." The struggle for self-definition rules us, consumes us from adolescence until we have an image we feel good about.

The importance of an understanding of one's identity is real; I will not take issue with that here. What worries me is the terms on which we define ourselves. It has become much more of an image thing, an interest in discovering how our personalities would translate into a fictional character or a celebrity. For instance, I tend to define myself according to the kind of personal description I wrote for my various blog profiles: I write constantly and detest poor spelling. I like books, dogs and chocolate. Expertise: loads of random trivia about the Bible and Harry Potter, wearing the wrong shoes for an outfit, daydreaming. I prefer green to purple and Austen to Steinbeck. You could make a movie about this girl. All you need is a plot.

Those things, while superficial in and of themselves, may at least comment on my nature; they may tell you that I am shy and optimistic and that I value loyalty. But the layers of identity run much deeper than that. Those minute individual descriptions, by themselves, are very lonely things.

A deeper identity involves something more than little narcissistic me. Some of it is relational--I am a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, a friend. Some of it puts me in touch with great heritage. I am a Christian, an American, a woman.

It is that heritage that seems most missing in our modern self-definitions; it is the loss of tradition that I feel most. As a Christian, for instance, I have two thousand years of particularly rich history--something that could stand to be rather more widely taught. I did not find it until I found the Catholic church. Christianity lived almost entirely inside the Catholic church for the first thousand years until the Orthodox church split off, and mainline Protestantism came several hundred years later. Whether those separations occurred rightly or wrongly--a debate outside the realm of this article--at least the first half of Christian tradition is found in the annals of Catholicism. John Eldredge and Brent Curtis said in The Sacred Romance that "One of the reasons modern evangelicalism feels so thin is because it is merely modern; there is no connection with the thousands of years of saints that have gone before. Our community of memory must include not only saints from down the street, but also those from down the ages. Let us hear the stories of John and Teresa from last week, but also those of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, to name only two." The legacy of the saints is of grace and community, of great faith and of love for Christ and man.

As an American, I am a part of a great tradition as well. We "mutts" of Western civilization tend often to define our heritage as Scottish or French or English or Spanish or Indian--all older countries--but we are American, and that means something. I, personally, hate hearing America demonized by the spoiled great-great-great-grandchildren of men who fought and died to give them freedom--not the freedom to raise hell, but the freedom to choose what is right. It is one thing to criticize politicians, who as men may have little or no moral principle; it is another to badmouth the country itself. We have a great country. It is being gradually destroyed by selfish ambition, lack of respect, and lack of virtue; but most of the time, most of us can still freely choose good without getting jailed for it.

Being a woman might not seem like heritage exactly, but femininity has its own culture--a culture shared with the wives of Jacob and the Virgin Mary, with Esther the queen and Rhoda the servant-girl, with Marilyn Monroe and the heavy, hardly-functional gal pushing a Wal-Mart shopping cart. There is an innate understanding of relationships, a sensitivity to beauty, and common romantic and motherly sensibilities across the world and throughout time. Femininity also gives me my relational roles, for I play all of them as a woman. My ideas, of course, do not go as far as feminism--few ideas have been as hard on womanhood as feminism. And it bears mentioning that masculinity has great traditions of its own, a heritage no less noble than that of woman.

These connections outside of my own individuality, this being a part of something greater than myself, frees up personality to be the decorative accent it ought to be. I like this line of James Thurber's: "Why do you have to be a nonconformist just like everybody else?" Individuality without heritage and tradition is meaningless.

Finally, if my identity is never self-effacing--if love for God and others never takes me outside of myself--then, as 1 Corinthians 13 says:

"... If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."