Pain from Identity

“All of us, I suspect, have times when we’re made to suffer simply for being who and what we are, and we become adept at inventing means of escape…but Jeremiah [the prophet] reminded me that the pain that comes from one’s identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through…It was as a writer that Jeremiah spoke to me, and it was as a writer I listened. I couldn’t have asked for a better companion.” Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, page 38.

G.K. Chesterton wrote to the effect that our hopes and dreams and our identities are educated out of us as we grow up – what we “saw” in the nursery is ripped out of our imaginations and trampled on the ground – we are told to grow up and be adults. C. S. Lewis said that we are producing “men without chests”, our hearts are being torn from us – soulless bodies, empty vessels; today we are filled with and manipulated by a constant barrage of electronic cocaine and opium – it either hypes us up or lulls us to sleep.

The practical and pragmatic reduce our “call” to dust; it is costly to seek first the Kingdom of God, it is costly to love the Lord with all that we are and to love others as ourselves, it is costly to lay down our lives for our brethren. It is costly to stand apart from the flash floods of popular opinion and to speak what is transcendent when the cry all around is to live in the moment and make everyone feel better.

If we have been reduced to numbers, it has not been because someone has given us a number, it is because we have accepted the number. Jesus does not tell us that He will give us a new number, but rather a new name – we can discover that new name now, in this life, as we live out our identity and calling in Jesus Christ. How sad it is to live as if our bank account number, our 401K number, our Social Security number, our profit and loss numbers…to live as if any number or combination of numbers…is who we are.

Yes, there is pain in identity – the pain of metamorphous.