"Who Are You?": It's Not as Simple as You Might Think

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!

Discovering Your Voice

In the world of Hebrew prophets, Jeremiah was a particularly angst-ridden God-messenger. Conscripted as a youth by Yahweh to speak harsh God-words to his own people, Jeremiah resisted his God-vocation continually.

It tore him up to say difficult things to those close to him, though he must have known they were true. The people around him paid homage to everything imaginable -- everything except God -- and Jeremiah saw the dead-end street they traveled. All he could do was warn them in speech and symbol. Still they wouldn't heed his warnings.

Several times he seems to have wearied of this lonely vocation. During one period of public ridicule and mockery, Jeremiah said, "I give up. I just won't speak about God any more. All it does is bring me reproach and insult." Then, after a so-brief pause, he went on, "But if I quit and promise not to speak of God any longer, or vow never to speak God's word again, I can't do it. God's word becomes like a fire in my heart that I cannot hold in. I cannot help but let it out!" (Jer. 20:7 - 9)

Rilke wrote a poem about Jeremiah, playing on this idea that the prophet spent a lifetime speaking words he didn't want to speak, words sourced in God and not within himself. And near the end of the poem, Rilke puts into Jeremiah's mouth the desire to hear his own voice again. After years of speaking with God's voice, he says, I'd like for once "finally to hear my own voice again."

Jeremiah

Once I was as tender as young wheat,
yet you, you raging one, were able
to inflame the heart held out to you
so that now it boils like a lion's.

What a mouth you demanded of me,
back then when I was almost a boy;
it became a wound; out of it now
bleeds year after doom-pronounced year.

Each day I sounded with new afflictions
which you, insatiate one, devised,
and none of them could kill my mouth;
consider now how you will quiet it

when those we devastate and crush
are finally lost and driven far away
and have perished in the danger:
for I want then amidst the rubble-heaps
finally to hear my own voice again --
which from its first moments was a howling.

(trans. by Edward Snow)

Rilke captures Jeremiah's intensity, I think, and his anxiety. And this desire to hear his own voice again stays with me.

"I want my voice back!" is a bold prayer, a brazen thing to insist before God. I have some questions about that:

• He was so young when God placed this vocation upon him; what had he ever heard of his own voice?
• After this prayer would he recognize the voice as his own?
• What is Jeremiah's authentic, truest voice? Was it his God-voice? or his post-God-voice? or at that point in his life, would they be one and the same?

The questions about Jeremiah's voice, of course, have prompted musings about my own voice, about how I speak into the world with God's voice, with my voice, or with some combination of the two. I'll continue asking the questions.