If I asked, "Who are you?", how would you respond? I imagine some answer might come immediately to your mind . . . but then you might end up walking back that initial response as you consider the question more deeply. I find myself circling around the question quite often . . . reflecting on it from different angles, coming at it from different directions.
Am I a role or a function? Am I what I do for a paycheck? Am I my vocation . . . in the larger sense of how I speak (vocare) into the world? Am I this or am I that?
What does it mean to be me in the world? What does it mean to be me in connection with God . . . others . . . the world?
While the exercise might seem self-serving, it really is the most fundamental kind of conversation we can enter into. And where we land with the question will speak volumes about how we see ourselves in connection with God, self, others, and the world. It will determine how we are in the world and then work its way into what we do in the world.
To my mind, the question concerns our essence, our being, rather than what we do or how we function. "Who am I?" does not invite a litany of positions I hold, tasks I perform, or a spreadsheet that details how I spend the hours of my day. The "being" -- or "essence" -- question gets to the core of my very self.
I have several reasons for raising these issues today. Among them, I've reflected quite a lot lately on Jesus, at 30 years old, going to the Jordan River to be dunked in the water by John the Baptizer. ("Dunked" is what the Greek word for baptism literally means.) The event signals the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, the short 3 year span in which he would proclaim a new way of being in the world (he called this new life-stance or framework for living the "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God") through his ministry of making people whole through story-telling, acts of mercy, and invitations to live God-centric lives.
At this Jordan River moment, though, something happens that wasn't on anyone's radar. As he comes up out of the baptismal waters, the Heavenly Voice says, "This is my son, my beloved one, and I am well-pleased with him." It is an astonishing, pivotal moment. For Jesus, it establishes who he is right here at the beginning of his public ministry, a ministry that would be fraught with conflict and charges. The Voice speaks now, before Jesus performs a single miracle, before he does anything at all which would tempt him to believe he is God's beloved Son merely because he does good things, performs miracles, or heals the sick. God said, "You are pleasing to me" before Jesus did a single thing in public ministry.
In other words, Jesus did not earn this affirmation of his identity in God. It was not bestowed upon him because he was worthy of it. It was simply a statement of what is, apart from what he did or would do.
I know many people who, if asked, "Who are you?" would respond, "I am a beloved daughter of God" or "I am a son of God, loved all the way through." Many of those same people, though, know that truth only at the level of their mind and their lips. They may be able to believe the affirmation in some ways, and speak to it when asked, but then act as if who they are is totally dependent on what they do, how they perform, or how well they fulfill their function.
Truly, one of the most difficult things in life is to hear the Voice who speaks to each one of us, speaking into the deep, inner recesses of our lives, telling us about our identity as the beloved of God. It seems as if we can't quite believe who we are, given what we know of our own darkness and shadows, given all the dirt we have on our own selves. It seems we cannot believe we could be loved so thoroughly, so without merit.
In fact, most of us doubt the reality of our belovedness until we hear the words deep in our core, in our most inward heart. (I do believe that our souls know the truth of our identity . . . but other voices so drown out the quiet nudges of the soul that we live mostly unconvinced until we finally, one day hear the words in our deepest hearts, words the soul has known all along.)
For many of us, it takes a life-time to hear fully this affirmation of who we are. We get glimpses of it in another human who seems to know too much about us, yet still is committed to us, despite the mess of our lives.
Or we sense a bit of it in the simple, loyal connection we have to a pet who wags a tail and is overjoyed to see us, regardless of whether we have done well or acted badly.
As Matt Linn once suggested on a retreat . . . if you think of the person or the animal who seems to love you most in this world, who seems to have the most positive regard for you no matter what your life looks like . . . if you can sense how much that person or animal loves you, you can be sure that God loves you at least that much!
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