Tag Archives: identity crisis

Authenticity, God, and Identity Crisis

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People of spiritual commitment often, if not most of the time, come to the point in their life when their faith needs to be cast aside.  This is the time when emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually the maturity has been reached to realize that even spirituality can be used to cover up the essence of life, even the “God” that we purport to worship.  This does not mean that this “God” will necessarily be forsaken but that one’s projections about “God” will be seen for what they are and cast aside, leaving one with the possibility of discovering “God” in a meaningful fashion.

This identity crisis, usually in mid life, is when the fantasy world that we have created and wrapped around ourselves is crumbling, providing for us an opportunity to enter into a more authentic dimension of life.  Even the “God” we have been worshipping might be seen as a self-serving fantasy and will have to be given up for a more honest, humbling relationship with a God who is the very Ground of our Being, our Source, and not a mere prop to adorn the hollow life that we have been living.

Anthropologist Clifford Geerst once said, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”  It is challenging to contemplate that the whole of our life, including our faith, is suspended in these “webs” and that to achieve any authenticity we will have to wrestle with them and discover as did poet Adrienne Rich that, “We can’t begin to discover who we are until we recognize the assumptions in which we are drenched.”  It is only when some, or most of these “assumptions” begin to crumble that we can begin to understand the wisdom of the crooner Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything; that is how the light gets in.”

 

Thoughts About Identity

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Identity has always been a fascinating subject for me because, I now realize, I had such a hard time constructing one in my youth and maintaining a sense of identity through the course of my life. But I’ve always been blessed with some core sense of who I am, some basic center, which has allowed me to function well though often with self-doubt and insecurity.

A Spokane, Washington woman has just made the news with her parents exposing her duplicity of passing herself off as a black woman for years even though she is white. With her dark complexion and hair style, she has adopted “black-ness” for decades and achieved some prominence in the Afro-American community. (http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/rachel-dolezal-tried-really-hard-be-black-why?sc=fb)

This is just a fascinating story and I’m so curious about what motivated her to perpetuate this ruse when there was so much she could have done for the Afro-American cause as the intelligent Caucasian woman that she is. But she had some deep-seated need to be “black” and that this ruse has been exposed, I’m concerned for her. All of our identities are a pose in some sense and to have them suddenly torn from us, to be exposed, is to open us up to the nakedness that underlies our persona.

W. H. Auden had the following to say regarding the illusionary dimension of identity. In this poem a father is speaking to his young son:

I wish you first a sense of theater.
Only those who know illusion
And love it will go far.
Otherwise, we spend our lives in confusion
Of what to say and do with who we really are.

AFTER THOUGHT—A new development in this story answers all questions about this matter.  The family now reports that Rachel had four adopted Afro-American siblings while growing up.  

Musings About an Identity Crisis

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I wish you first a sense of theater.

Only those who know illusion

And love it will go far.

Otherwise, we spend our lives in confusion

About what to say and do about who we really are.

This poem by W. H. Auden presents an essential quandary in our quest for identity. If you find yourself wondering about “who I really am” then you have already opened a can of worms and have an identity crisis in the offing. And please note that an “identity crisis” is often a luxury, one that millions of people cannot afford, being the urgency of the day-to-day grind of trying to make a living to provide for themselves and their family But for those of you who have this luxury, I’m going to share some thoughts about the nature of identity.

The notion that “I am” assumes a whole lot. When I think about who “I am”, I am practicing selective attention as the question brings to mind only memories that are consistent with presuppositions about myself that I have been permitted and find myself comfortable with. Everything else has been excluded. But the “everything else” is still there and always beckons in the unconscious, coming to us in fears, anxieties, projections, and dreams, good and bad. Addressing an identity crisis is to realize that we have drawn the boundaries of our existence too narrowly and that the “crisis” we are now feeling merely is an opportunity to broaden these boundaries. It is to realize that our identity….the one that I’m presenting here as a false self, even as a charade in some sense…is very necessary and is not to be totally discarded. It is to realize merely that it is only part of the picture, only the surface of our real identity and for that identity to have meaning we must allow some of its excluded context to surface and be integrated into our sense of self. That “false self”, or “ego”, is very important. The problem lies only in our insistence that it be the whole of ourselves.  Failure  to recognize this is to find o living a very shallow life.

Let me illustrate with a snippet from another Auden poem in which he notes how that most of us “drive through life in the closed cab of occupation.” By this he meant that a person often, if not usually, sees the world through a template which is often best characterized by his occupation. Thus, a physician sees people through a medical model, an educator sees people as children needing to learn, a clinician (such as myself) sees people with the cold detachment of a diagnostic manual. But, Auden’s point was not merely about “occupations” but about a template, an ego structure through which all of us see the world, be it “occupational” or otherwise. This ego structure is our identity, our “false self” or persona, which always needs to be enlarged. And when this “enlargement” takes place, it does not invalidate the template…usually. The template usually serves a useful purpose. But we need to see the world through broader terms than we are wont to do when totally subservient to the template that with which we are so familiar and comfortable  that we can’t even see it and are actually averse to seeing.  (Emily Dickinson noted, “The mind too near itself to see itself distinctly.)

Let me illustrate with Mitt Romney. I think Romney was, and is, an intelligent, good human being. He had many qualities which could have made him a good President. But his worldview, his “template”, got in his way and posed some real problems in his campaign, best illustrated in the surreptitiously taped 47 percent speech to wealthy donors. His template demonstrated an extreme rigidity which often left him appearing very awkward and socially maladroit so that he often missed the nuances of personal and public interactions. For, Romney is a “corporate” person, a “corporate” mogul and persons of this cut do have a place in our culture, be that good or bad. He sees the world through the eyes of a corporate mogul and was not able to give this viewpoint pause on occasion and approach the public in more personal terms. It is not that he was “bad”. It is just that he was Mitt Romney and that “Mitt Romney” was, and is, a “corporate mogul.”

(An equally valid point is the “literarylew” is merely “literarylew” and sees the world through the template that comes across through his blog. Those who know me personally also see how clearly that “literarylew” is part and parcel of who I am, it is my identity, and yes, it really gets tiresome on occasion, or at least as annoying as hell!)