Finding Ourselves

When my wife and I approached my in-laws, letting them know our plan to return to Chicago and to school, I remember my father-in-law’s quip, “Well, at least you aren’t going to travel Europe trying to discover yourselves.” It was a well-placed joke in the midst of a conversation where they offered to help us avoid debt and work slightly less arduous hours during our time in school. At the heart of his quip was an important observation about our current age and our understanding of what it means to be a self. We have entered an age that has radically redefined the nature of what it means to be a human person and how we relate to the various social and religious structures around us. This has had the effect of cutting us off from most of what is meant to define us as human beings, creating enormous and unsustainable pressures we were never meant to carry. It has also had the terrible effect of making a whole generation of group-think slaves. 

I write this in the midst of a season where I sit with a group of teenagers (3 of which are mine) on Sunday nights working our way simultaneously through Carl Trueman’s excellent Strange New World and the Heidelberg Catechism. What has been surprising about our conversations is how clearly these high school students feel the unbearable weight of what’s being hoisted on them by the present age and how relieving it is to hear the wonderful truth of Heidelberg question no. 1 - “That I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.” If one accepts the modern mood, such words sound oppressive. I don’t belong to myself. I belong to another. It flies in the face of Eddie Vedder’s screed in Pearl Jam’s anthem, “I am mine.”

But there is an unbearable weight to carry in our modern approaches to the self. It is a weight none of us can carry and a weight none of us were meant to. You see, I am not mine. I never was. I remember the self-esteem training that plagued much public education in my youth , “You can be whatever you want to be.”  In those words are the recipe for the disaster that surrounds us today. Despair and depression is on the rise, particularly among our nation’s youth. Anxiety cripples millions. We are told, “just be yourself.” And never told precisely how to figure out what “yourself” means except to look within, to ones’ emotions, ones’ desires, and ones’ fears. These are paramount. And so we are to take the twisted and contradictory desires of our youthfulness and do what no other age before ours has done - fulfill them, realize them, be unhindered by anything except for consent and not causing anyone else to have negative emotions. We are left to invent ourselves - our sexual preferences, our responsibilities, our appearance - just be your own authentic self. But that project requires a complete remodeling of the world and how it works. We must be remade to suit our own desires and so must the world. But we can no more reinvent ourselves than we can make men into women and women into men. For the world is simply there filled with design and hierarchy and things that work and things that don’t. We can pretend that the created world is simply infinitely malleable just as we can pretend that we are infinitely malleable but we aren’t. We are creatures. The world is created. The world is ordered and we are placed in that order. To resist this, to ignore this is to fight the wind. We were not made to fight the wind and our current epidemic of despair is a society-wide exhaustion growing from decades of trying. 

Counterintuitive to this view of the world is the real crime here - such living (expressive individualism as Charles Taylor has called it) is the basic ingredients to slavery. Cut off from our Creator, cut off from our families and especially our fathers, cut off from the communities designed to shape and constrain our desires with wisdom and godliness we are ravaged by an ambiguous society that rewards godless conformity. Add the cheap (and thin) fulfillment of our sexual lusts and you have created a despairing and shamed population ripe to be controlled and blind. Rene Girard wrote extensively about the concept of mimetic desire. At its root is the rather simple idea that no one knows what they want until they see what someone else has. Our desires are never original - they are copies, often drenched in envy and now manipulated by vast corporations, government agencies and social media bots. Our desires are not our own. What we believe will make us happy is often simply a series of images and narratives hoisted on us in the name of selling a certain brand of toothpaste. And so buried in the chocolate candy bar of our perceived autonomy and sexual liberation is the razor blade of tyranny and manipulation. In the name of freedom we have abandoned all real freedom. We walk through an ordered world pretending it is not really there. We reject the great estate God has built for us in the name of building our own hut in the desert. And so we have become slaves to the powers that spend millions of dollars in order to reap from our desires billions. We think ourselves original and independent, but we are told what to desire and how to feel and obliviously obey. We are slaves carrying burdens we can’t bear. 

But where to begin? 

We must begin with the Gospel: “I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.”

We were designed to find ourselves defined by at least these four things:

1. We belong to God.
   You and I were created. We were created male and female. We were created in the image of God, designed for particular tasks in the world. You and I were redeemed (which is a wonderful legal term which indicates that we were purchased from one master by another) by Jesus. We are subject to his good laws. We are subject to his good design. We are his. And he has placed us in a world made and designed by him. There is no escape, no matter how loudly we protest and kick against the goads. But this is marvelous news, you see, you don’t have to design a world to suit your ever-shifting and often destructive desires. There is a God and he establishes the bounds of our lives. And marvel upon marvel, he has given us a book where he tells us who he is and how we can live in this world he made. More than that, he has redeemed us from our own insane and foolish rebellion against him and his designs. We don’t have to be bound any longer to the terrible burden of slavery to our own whims. Receive what God has said you are.
   

2. We belong to a family.
   All of us our sons or daughters. Many of us are wives and husbands. Some of us are fathers and mothers. These are not mere expressions of some self-directed or socially constructed relationships. They are given to us by God. They are designed to situate us within a network of responsibilities and gifts. They are designed to constrain our desires and to train us in wisdom - or how to live skillfully in the world. They are essential to who you are. This is why adultery is wicked and destructive. This is why an abusive or abdicating father corrupts generations. These aren’t merely interpersonal sins, they actually mar the design of God in how we are to receive our very selves. We are situated in a set of social relationships with the covenant of the family at the center. We belong to God and we belong to each other. Communities and nations extend the network of responsibilities beyond our own household. I find myself in a neighborhood, in a particular city, in the United States. These responsibilities differ, but I cannot know what God has made me to be if I cut myself off from my family or my neighbors.
   

3. We belong to the church.
   By the church, I do not mean some esoteric ideal. I mean the real people you worship with each week. I mean the elders charged with shepherding you with God’s word and the sacraments. I mean the rough and tumble glories of the actual local church. Charles Spurgeon famously called the church our mother. If God is our father, submitted to his rule is our mother, the actual local church. Again, the church is not simply a matter of personal tastes and preferences - another way to express your own individual desires. She is meant to be a source of real authority and real responsibility for all of us. She is bound by the faith confessed and the great work of worshiping in the presence of God, reminding us always of who we belong to. Far too often the church is treated as merely another consumeristic provider of religious goods and services, rather than the glorious covenant people to whom we belong. People swap churches for every reason under the sun: music, mood, aesthetic - but they do not acknowledge the weighty and good responsibilities we bear towards one another. You belong to God. You belong to your family. You were designed to belong to the covenant body of the local church.
   

4. You have desires. You have gifts. You have a brain.
   Lest we dismiss the precious reality that David confesses in the Psalms: you are fearfully and wonderfully made. We are corrupted by sin. We are confused by our foolishness. But as the you which God has made navigates the world God has made you have particular traits and strengths and desires that are good. I am a bulky 6’1”. I was not made to play in the NBA. I am further convinced I was not designed to do math problems with much efficiency or accuracy. These are an aspect of who I am. I despise mushy peas which means I am not likely British. All of my desires and emotions and gifts and shortcomings ought to be submitted to these other three constraints on my self. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. It just means that they are not paramount. And this is, in the end, remarkably good news. I am not God and cannot be.
   

And so I call on all of us everywhere to rebel against the spirit of the age. Rebel against despair and slavery. Rebel against autonomy. Instead revel in the fact that you and I belong to another. Revel in the fact that you have been freed from slavery to your own desires and emotions. Take joy in the glory that you have been made. You have been purchased. You have been given much, receive all of it with gratitude and a kind of freedom that autonomy can never give.