It has become apparent to me that in a modern, global world, one's identity cannot be considered fixed at any point in one's life. Where once there were few choices available in the makeup of a personality, when people rarely traveled far beyond their village, and sons grew up to take their father's place and daughters to be married off, now there are seemingly endless combinations of disparate cultural backgrounds, educational opportunities, music preferences, religious affiliations, media bombardments, and any one of a thousand other factors that shape a person at every moment. Even physical attributes that could at one time have been considered fixed determinants of at least a portion of a person's identity, such as his or her skin color, sex, hair and eye color, can be changed to fit the will of the individual with varying degrees of safety and success. How much more, then, do the less tangible components of the identity ebb and flow with the tide of life? 

I have thought a bit about my own "roots", so to speak, and how my origin combines with my individual experience to form an identity. I cannot say the I have ever been privy to the small-town mentality that I was born in one place, one culture, grew up there, will work there, and will die there. However, I do seem to have a connection to my family that others consider unusually (even some have had the audacity to say unnaturally) prevalent and strong, and I have had to mentally prepare myself for a long time for the prospect of being transplanted away from them into new soil. In some sense I know the value in leaving home, in taking risks that may allow me to grow and change and become the person that God is calling me to be, but in another sense I fear losing the foundation that I have and being set adrift on an ocean that I cannot navigate.

In a sermon he delivered at the Integrity Eucharist during the 2012 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson talked about the necessity of reorienting ourselves in life, and the anxiety that accompanies that feeling. He spoke of Abraham, and his experience of always moving from place to place, and trusting that God would lead him in the right direction. Like Abraham, bishop Robinson said of the people of God that we are "meant to live in tents"; that we long for a city with foundations, but every time we think we have everything safely figured out God pulls us in a different direction to a new issue or idea that we have been ignoring. His words, in that time, and in that place, comforted me as I listened, as do the words of an old hymn that my grandfather sings when he's out on the tractor in our family farm in Washington, which my family got to sing together on our recent gospel album, and which I find myself singing often when I am alone and unsure:

My very first church service, which my mother brought me to as a newborn infant even before I'd been baptized, was a service for Ash Wednesday. In an Ash Wednesday service, one of the most solemn in the Church calendar, a priest makes the sign of the cross on each person's forehead using ashes from the palms of the previous year's Palm Sunday service, a triumphant celebration, and bids each individual to, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." My mother tells the story of the priest putting a cross upon my tiny head, and speaking the words gently as she held me in her arms, and realizing there that I did not belong to her, and that I was God's alone. When I turned 18, the anniversary of my birth fell on Ash Wednesday, and I was reminded then, right as I stepped from my identity as an adolescent into my identity as an adult, that my only sure foundation, my only real root, was that I was raised from the dust of the Earth, and that I will one day die, and return to it. I am the Lord's creation, His to keep, and best I be reminded of that regularly.

The benefits of living, as bishop Robinson says, in tents far outweigh these anxieties, however, as well as the the securities of a life with unshaken foundations. Without fluidity in our own identities we could not change our minds, nor come to comprehend our errors in thinking and move toward truth. It is this fluidity that ended institutional slavery in the United States, that extended democratic principles and equality under the law to women and minority populations, and that even now is working, by the grace of God. to change hearts and minds to offer equitable opportunity to the poor and equal treatment to sexual minorities. We are meant to live in tents. Amen.


To hear bishop Robinson's sermon, visit: 

http://gc12.integrityusa.org/Home/announcments/integritvday5-integrityeucharistwithbishopgenerobinsonpreaching

I was particularly intrigued reading Richard Rodriguez' "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood". Though while reading my mind expressed a fair amount of internal skepticism as to the ability of a child of that age to have formed such clear memories and interpretations of the private and the public,  I still think he's onto something profound within the pages of the text that may be going on without our really knowing about it, that is ignoring the differences between public and private in our traditional bilingual classrooms. Rodriguez expresses a genuine fear of and struggle with alienation from his family as a result of language, and having to learn English as the language of public expression. The stereotype of the immigrant who refuses to learn or speak English in their household is deployed with a certain amount of familial pride and affection in the text, even as Rodriquez points out the obvious, that it was difficult for those members of the family to speak from a position of strength and confidence among the "gringos".

One of the things that surprised me the most was his awareness, as a child, of a world that was public and a world that was private, and of the immense sense of loss he felt when his parents ceased speaking to him in Spanish all together. Or perhaps what surprised me was his reaction to that loss as he reflects back in the memoir. He says that as painful as it was, he did need to learn to communicate in a public manner. There's still that anxiety and hurt that comes from interactions with other family members, and their near scornful reaction when they find he's lost his Spanish fluency, but he also has more confidence and comes to see himself as belonging more and more to something like an American public identity.


I must confess I am a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant male in a family with a college educated mother and father and two siblings, so we are in many respects the portrait of the nuclear family, but I do from time to time see some conflict between my private, family life and my public one. For instance my family is very close, and particularly my siblings and I are very openly affectionate and supportive of one another, in ways that have often led people to comment. Generally speaking I've found that those who comment admire the bonds we share, but there have been those who see that bond as unnatural and believe our public image should be one of rivalry.