Identity - Who are you, really?

When I bake, I prefer using PURE vanilla not vanilla imitation.  Have you noticed how many food items have been substituted at the grocery store?  I always get a kick out of the Pillsbury dough section.  The cans of dough claim to have croissants, biscuits and cinnamon rolls inside, yet all the varieties taste like the same Pillsbury dough cut into different shapes with added imitation flavors.  This isn't real food.  My grandmother's biscuits taste nothing like this junk, and the French would be offended at the sight of a Pillsbury croissant.

We should also be offended by the substitutes and imitations we have accepted and exchanged for the REAL thing.  This opens up discussions about identity - who we TRULY are verses all the cookie cutter roles and personas available to us.

Below are a few personas our society endears us to (especially as women).

The Stepford Wife - Always polite, perfect, in control, clean house, clean hair, never makes mistakes.  Kids are perfect, husband is perfect, cupcakes are perfect, etc.  You get the point.

The Bombshell/Sex kitten - Being desirable and wanted gives her a false sense of security and worth.  Confuses sex and love.  Never thinks she is good enough.

Self-rejected and confused:  Admits to not knowing who or what they are.  Tries everything in search of fulfillment.

The Abrasive persona:  Prickly and aggressive, puts up walls to avoid intimacy.  Often domineering, bossy, intimidating and confrontational.  Inside they are cowardly and afraid.

The intellectual:  Achievement oriented and scientific.  Well-read, well educated, and prides oneself in being smarter and more enlightened than others.  Feels superior to others.  Is often snobbish and boring.

Too cool for school - Easily influenced by others. Will follow trends - smoking and drinking to look cool, using drugs to feel accepted by the crowd, getting into debt to wear the right clothes and drive the right car.  Will do whatever it takes for social acceptance.

I know a young woman who grew up in a small Kentucky town, both of her parents are southerners with the accents to prove it, yet she has adopted an identity from the BET network.  She dresses and speaks in "rap culture" wearing a certain style of dress and using rap slang.  She has become a thug.  I have yet to ask her is she is a blood or a crip, east side or west side, but I have been meaning to.  The point is she is confused.  I have known her since she was a little girl, and have no idea when she decided she was to be Lil' Kim of the south. I have even contacted my former social research professor to tell her someone should be researching this phenominom that is happening in small country towns - young people identifying with rap culture and adopting these false personas.  

To be transparent, I must admit that, I too, developed a false persona in my early 20's while living in South Beach, Miami and being surrounded by influences that were not healthy for me (think bombshell persona).  Even though I had acquired everything I thought would bring me happiness - I was empty, lonely, and completely detached from my heart.  I lost myself.  Thankfully, I left that life and exchanged it for a new one where I discovered I was loved and accepted unconditionally in Christ.  I also found a deeper-rooted community of friends who encouraged me to live from my heart and shed off the falsehood of my former persona.

Lately I have been reading Tim Keller's book, The Reason for God, Belief in an Age of Skepticism and he has much to say on the topic of identity.

Keller quotes the Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, "Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God....Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently before God."  Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.  Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.

Keller continues, "What does this mean?  Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something.  Kierkegaard asserts that human beings were made not only to believe in God in some general way, but to love him supremely, center their lives on him above anything else, and build their very idenities on him.  Anything other than this is sin."

Most people think of sin primarily as "breaking divine rules", but Kierkegaard knows that the very first of the Ten Commandments is to "have no other gods before me."  So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just doing the bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things.  It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose and happiness than your relationship to God.

Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death.  He begins it by noting that a child's need for self-worth "is the condition for this life," so much as every person is deperately seeking what Becker calls "cosmic signficance."  He immediately warns the reader not to take the term lightly.  Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially "deify".  We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think of ourselves as highly irreligious.  He uses romantic love as an illustration:

The self-glorification that (modern man) needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner.  The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one's life. Spiritual and moral needs now become more focused on one individual.

Becker is not saying that everyone looks to romance and love for a sense of self.  Many look not to romance but rather to work and career for cosmic significance.

But all this only sets the stage for continual disappointment:

No human relationship can bear (this) burden of godhood...If your partner is your "ALL" then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you...What is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to this position?  We want to be rid of ...our feeling of nothingness...to know our existence has not been in vain.  We want redemption-nothing less.  Needless to say, humans cannot give this."

Keller later writes, "An identity not based on God also leads inevitably to deep forms of addiction.  When we turn the good things into ultimate things, we are, as it were, spiritually addicted.  If we take our meaning in life from our family, our work, as cause, or some achievement other than God, they enslave us.  We have to have them.

St. Augustine said , "Our loves are not rightly ordered."  He famously said to God, "Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee!"  If we try to find our ultimate rest in anything else, our hearts become dislocated, "out of joint."  The good things that enslave us are good things that deserve to be loved.  But when our heart loves become inordinate, then we fall into patterns of life that are not unlike substance addiction.  As in all addiction, we are in denial about the degree in which we are controlled by our god-substitutes.  And inordinate love creates inordinate, uncontrollable anguish if anything goes wrong with the object of our greatest hopes."

Keller concludes the chapter with these two paragraphs:

You may say, "I see Christianity might just be the thing for people who have had collapses in their lives.  But what if I don't fail in my career and what if I have a great family?"  As Augustine said, if there is a God who created you, then the deepest chambers of your soul simply cannot be filled up by anything less.  That is how great the human soul is.  If Jesus is the Creator-Lord, then by definition nothing could satisfy you like he can, even if you are successful.  Even the most successful careers and families cannot give the significance, security, and affirmation that the author of glory and love can.

Everybody has to live for something.  Whatever that something is becomes "Lord of your life," whether you think of it that way or not.  Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and if you fail him, will forgive you eternally. 

(Now I invite you to check out the below video from John and Melissa Helser's blog linking identity, worship and creativity together).