I attended a funeral today. I did not know the man who was being remembered very well. My contact was through his family members. The service, in a large church, was packed and the remembrances were inspiring and humorous. Multiple speakers mentioned how loving and generous and compassionate the man was, how he pretty much gave his life away to those around him. These same speakers also mentioned that the man who died had not always been like that. He used to be, the speakers implied or said outright, much less compassionate, much more ready for a fight, even a physical fight.
This morning, in reading the news, I came across a story that had to do with a major political issue. The article mentioned a few people with large followings online. Invariably each of these people described themselves online by various tags, things like, “Jesus follower” or “avid outdoorsman” or “boy mom” or similar.
How do you tell the world who you are?
Or do you?
How do you determine what you would say, what tags you would use? What tags might someone else use to describe you?
I recently purchased some vintage coffee cups for my office. I like them more than I thought I would. So can I now say “vintage coffee cup enthusiast”? I guess I can’t.
Tonight I am headed to a lecture by Professor Hartmut Rosa from the Friederich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Friday night fun!). Rosa is a sociologist who has written about “social acceleration” and its effects. Things move so fast that there is impact even on our very sense of self. Rosa, in quoting another writer calls such online self- labelling “a theatrical presentation of the self”. It’s all very wordy and can be somewhat academic, but you know what is meant by such a term. You’ve seen such presentation.
Here is a wordy quote about social acceleration impacting sense of self;
“the liquefaction of previously stable structures of the self to a more open, experimental, fragmentary and above all else, transitory form of selfhood that reflects the dynamic of restless global flows.”
In other words, you change who you are, who you are is changed, and maybe you don’t have a stable sense of who you are.
It is a good thing, I think, that we have moved away from divisive religious figures TELLING us who we are with pointed finger, placing us within some kind of societal or religious hierarchy.
It is not however, only blessing, that we now have to determine who we are at every turn, or that we are told who we are by trends or cultural ideas that are marked by instability.
Hopeful Christian faith seeks to articulate both an open sense of self that does not come from coercion or demand or condemnation, but that also seeks to flow from the reality that the most stable of all things is the love and benevolence of God for all people.
What might it mean that our identity, good and bad (our human judgments), comes from the gift of being known by ultimate love and goodness?
There was a moment in the service today when a friend of the man who had died (this friend spoke for a long time - it almost it seemed as a final loving jab to his friend who demanded brevity at his service) told a story of when he himself suffered great loss and his friend drove well over an hour in the middle of the night just to see him. He said that his friend did not say a word, but simply embraced him. “He shouldered me,” the man said, “He held me up with his strength when I had none.”
I saw Christ-likeness in that description. He held me with his strength and love. He knew me, even then.