Divorce, Identity, and Restored Humanity

My sister suggested to me that I was not done writing about identity yet.
...She was right.
This gets more to the heart of what I was talking about in my last post...and isn't as long. :)
It's also much more easily delivered through the context of my own story.

Having gone through a divorce and being involved in a ministry that works with divorced people, identity is a topic that I deal with a lot.
It's obviously not just me...everyone has a story that shapes, destroys, or rebuilds his or her sense of self, but divorce is one that employs all three.

So.

One of the repercussions of dealing with divorce is loneliness. This is not something I struggle with often by any means, but in the days, weeks, and months after my ex asked me to move out, I experienced somewhat of a shock to the system at being forced to adjust to coming home at the end of the day to...no one.
Sure, I missed having someone to talk to, cook with, and watch random nonsense on hulu with. But what struck me most deeply was the wrenching emptiness of feeling unknown.
DON'T GET ME WRONG...I have amazing people in my life who go to GREAT lengths to love me well.
The incomplete nature of this life on earth, however, makes this love very fragmented in some ways.

For example...
My dear friends here in Dallas never knew what I was like as a single person before I was married. My friends from high school and college never really saw my marriage. My family never really saw my marriage because I lived in another state. Any friends I made after September 2011 don't know what my life was like in the context of marriage.
Lives are so multifaceted...there are so many components of our stories that, even as much as we do life together, we can never fully know each other.

This, though, is what makes knowing Jesus valuable so profoundly necessary. We are temporal, and in order to live our lives, to pay attention to one aspect of our lives (either the fact that I was married, or the fact that I'm single now) is to necessarily neglect the other aspects. We simply just don't have the capacity to take in the whole story as one...in my case, no one can know me simultaneously as single and married. No one can address all parts of my story at once.

BUT (my favorite parts of Scripture often begin with "but")...Jesus gets it.
Because He's outside of time. Because He's orchestrating my story. Because He made me.
And this makes it so much more necessary and BEAUTIFUL to abide in Him...because He knows the whole story of our lives without having to neglect any of its parts in order to give another part of it attention.

What about all that stuff I said in my last post about losing ourselves in order to find ourselves? What about all that "I must decrease so that He may increase" business? That doesn't sound like being known...it seems a complete contradiction to say that in order to realize our uniqueness or be fully known, we have to essentially be depleted of everything about us.

HOWEVER...this mysterious decrease of our "selves" is actually the increase of our ultimate Self. As we become more like Him...(He, the ultimate reality, the One who has always existed and has never changed, He who is so wonderfully complex that if He placed a single, solitary unique attribute of His into every human He created, there would never exist enough people over the span of time and space to even begin to house all of His properties)
...rather than losing our humanity as we put our flesh to death, our humanity is more fully restored. Only when we purge ourselves of our love of self do our real Selves begin to take shape.

We've kind of constructed this depressing conundrum where we think that God wants us to lose our uniqueness and become absorbed into some amorphous, homogenized mass.
Good golly. That WOULD be depressing.
The joyful reality is that it is only in becoming more like Him that our uniqueness and humanity can hope to be fully realized.

Christ, in becoming human, redeemed the essence of what it IS to be human.
He doesn't deny us our humanity. He provides the only venue in which we can fully realize it.

Without this ultimate fulfillment of self in the Maker, we walk around like shades...shadows. Becoming less substantive, less real, less known with every self-oriented thought.
Being real means being known...and known especially by Someone who will never stop knowing you, never have to neglect a part of your story to focus on another part, and who has fashioned every detail of your life for His glory.
His glory is much more real than our inhumanity...so really, the crucifixion of the flesh is the crucifixion of our inhumanity.


So for me personally...going through my divorce jarred me to my core...because at my core, I was still finding parts of my identity in my role as a married person. I prized that relationship so much that it became an inextricable part of what I drew my value from.
But God has constructed these elements of life to be enjoyed...NOT to have an identity constructed from them. When we build our value/identity/meaning on something temporal (albeit wonderful, but temporal) like relationships, vocation, political beliefs, intelligence, talents, interests, or anything else created, ANYTHING created is susceptible to change.
Anything, then, that can act as an agent of change in life is not just an agent of change, but a great and real threat to our identities. 

So I've put the role of a married person to rest...and in doing so I have embarked on a journey of losing my need to live for myself or find my identity in anything that changes.
I've been wrestling with the Holy Spirit over what other things I let define me other than Him. It's pretty staggering...my appearance, my intelligence, my potential, my work ethic, my responsibility, my date-ability, my knowledge, my opinions...
I am known...fully...unique and special and loved not because of my temporal roles or changing interests...but because I'm made uniquely in His complex image.

Identity and the Problem of Self

So. Blogging is hard to do when you've got 18 credit hours and lots of homework/church/life/travel/people/stuff that matters more than blogging going on. I could blog more, I suppose, if I just posted the papers I write for class on here...
Not sure, though, if anyone wants to read about the use of ideology and terror in post cold war America or how I had to bring Aristotle out of hell based on his engagement and regard for natural law.
Any takers? No? I wouldn't, either.

So this is one of the things that my mind has been engaging over the last 2 months...

Just about everything in my life...what I'm reading, what I'm studying, my life experiences, conversations I'm having, the music I'm listening to...are all pointing to one thing: a catastrophic struggle with identity.

I'm not just talking Christians here by any means. I mean everyone.

What I'm referring to goes beyond the scope of people not knowing who they are...because most people at least think they know who they are. They look to their interests, vocations, roles, skills, experience, and values to categorize it.
If I did this, I'd say I'm an artist, a musician, a nanny, student, daughter, friend, a traveler, a (groan...) borderline hipster. I'm moderate politically. I like most genres of music. I like trying new things. Blah blah blah.
The rub with all of the components of this laundry list is this: they either change with time and circumstance, or are not unique to any individual.
Everyone is a daughter or son. Friends change. Jobs change. Interests change.

Where am I seeing this? Everywhere.

In marriages.
I serve in a ministry at Watermark (the church I attend here in Dallas, for those who don't know) called DivorceCare where I get to love on folks going through the pain of divorce. I have lost count of the number of people I've heard frame their marriages as tragic mistakes because they "got married too young, before I knew who I really was." This was one of the things my ex said to me when he ended our marriage, as well. As if unbiblical divorce is justifiable because people change over time.

In popular culture.
"What do I stand for? Most nights I don't know anymore." (Fun.)
"In the dark I have no name." (Mumford and Sons)
"Only worth living if somebody is loving you." (Lana Del Rey)

In literature.
I read Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War by K.A. Cuordileone. It's a work of history that draws attention to the gender-saturated language used in society (the government, academia, popular culture) during the early Cold War years. She argues that the call to masculinize the weak, soft, effeminate political left that so many spoke of during the Cold War years was really a reflection of profound sexual and gender identity tension. According to Cuordileone, this gender identity crisis is what perpetuated things like the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and even the civil rights movement.

Even in The Hunger Games, Katniss resolves that making it a life's mission to kill President Snow and ultimately President Coin is framed as noble because revenge became so deeply engrained in her identity after a lifetime of oppression.
(I have way more examples of books that deal with identity, but for sake of space, I'll stick with these two).


...a malleable identity.
Dictated by roles, experiences, and circumstance.
Put together by...whatever you decide.

Why is this a problem? It sounds ideal in some ways, actually. Openness, change, adaptability. This is the pinnacle of human maturity and civil society! Well...not exactly....

I've become increasingly aware of an inextricable connection between the malleable self and the eschewing of moral culpability.

So much of my life recently has been saturated with the theme of the self...namely, what the self is responsible for.
Can one sin without a self?
Are we culpable for decisions we make in our search for identity?
While the answer seems obvious to some, the reality that a lot of people, even Christians, perpetuate the facade that the lack of a concrete self is grounds for exoneration from responsibility or consequences.




We're a society of rampant logical inconsistencies.
(Caveat--I'd be way overselling myself if I said I could adequately put all of the non sequiturs and fallacies into the appropriate philosophical categories (I'd probably just as soon refer to "denying the antecedent" as "crazy business."...let's stick with that.)
But attending a public university has me daily experiencing people and reading material that betrays the fact that everyone is faced with the reality of worldview...and a lot of worldviews are simply just not thought through.

Why did I just bring up worldview?
Because worldview shapes identity.
 A lot of people are quite content with not thinking through their worldview or exploring where it leads at its logical end.

For example...
Here's a statement: Humans have meaning and dignity.
Most of us are down with that. I've got a political theory prof who loves to talk about society needing to have leaders who rule justly and according to virtue, that rights to freedom from tyranny are inalienable, and that some things are just WRONG...
BUT most times my fellow classmates press him on where that meaning comes from, he falls back on the postmodern answer of "whatever you find meaning in. Religion, naturalism, family, your job...whatever it happens to be for you. You decide." Really? That's it? We're talking about why humans have meaning and you shrink back?

People are fine with granting and embodying significance...and not bothered at all about it coming from an unidentifiable source. The intellectual pursuit breaks down, the worldview has been exposed as paper-thin, and rather than face the reality that the argument is glaringly less than comprehensive, we call it being open minded...because we're afraid to call it what it really is: irresponsible and insufficient.
Meaning is what we're looking for in our basest components, right? As much as we operate at the level of functionaries, the silent but violent tumult in our hearts overtakes all of the coping mechanisms we've built into our psyches...and we're confronted with the reality that we have no idea if we matter, or if what we do matters.
How can we impute meaning to anything if we're waiting for it to be imputed to us in the first place? What gives one the authority to say meaning comes from THIS? One can't give what one doesn't have.

A lot of us (Christian or not) simply don't dig an iota deeper when we realize our worldview is inconsistent.
Why not?
Moral culpability.

I'm super down with how Ravi Zacharias talks about this business.
~Through secularization, religious interpretations and institutions have lost their significance, and we experience the end of shame.
~Through pluralism, no worldview is dominant and every moral decision becomes relative, and we experience the end of reason.
~Through privatization, spiritual beliefs are expunged from the public sector of life, and as secularization and relativism spread in its place, we experience the end of meaning.

No shame. No reason. No meaning. No self. No moral culpability.

No hope? Are we doomed to a lifelong struggle with eat-pray-love philosophy in which we search for meaning in relationships, life experiences, and some crazy ass trip around the world?
Without hope, we'd be crushed under the staggering weight of our own inconsequentiality. 

I have not comprehensively studied every worldview out there...but I have done a lot of homework. And based on the evidence that I have come across...the Judeo-Christian worldview is the most comprehensive answer to the issue of identity:

• Human value is answered in the imago dei, humans' image-bearing of God--an infinitely creative Being uniquely made and gifted each individual. 
• Unique individualism is fulfilled in spiritual gifting and personal identification with the Creator. 
• Moral absolutes are grounded in the immutable attributes and character of the Godhead. 
• The problem of suffering is answered with the ability of people to freely choose to love or rebel against a perfect God.
• Hope for redemption is cemented in the ongoing, sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.

An identity can only be unshakeable if it is grounded in something, or Someone, that doesn't change...isn't affected by circumstance, geographic or historical location, experience, or role.

THERE IS AN ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF SELF.
And it is wrapped up in the message of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe to us: you must lose yourself to find yourself.