Thoughts on Identity I: Actually, It's Just Conan

Who are you, really, as a person? Ancient cultures knew a person according to who they belonged to. If you had just met a person at the village well, you would ask them who their father was, and in that collectivist, backwardly-focused culture, you would know who the person was. This type of culture would be concerned with who you were as an individual only to the extent that you brought honor or shame to your family, and it was out of this framework that the entrenched casts of the aristocrats began. Today, the majority of cultures, including America, are individualistic, forwardly-focused societies. When you meet someone at the office water cooler, you ask them what they ‘do’—what their job is, where they are going in life, or what their ambitions are. Conan, son of Thor, has now become just Conan. Democracies have an even stronger tendency toward individualistic thinking because our society has no aristocratic tendencies of latent casts; you could easily become the President of the nation even if you were born into the log cabin of a backwoods farmer. Far from knowing a person by who their father is, modern cultures know a person according to what they do.

Today people marry later in life (only to divorce later), move farther from home, and participate less in social and religious communities than they did even fifty years ago. Many social trends have cultivated an increasingly isolated population in America. Many people work in professional (i.e. sterile) environments only to pull into their driveways and enclave themselves within their house for the night after the garage door seals with the cement. In our driven, individualistic pursuits, it may be worthwhile to rediscover the simple joys that come with an ancient understanding of finding self by belonging rather than achieving. This way of thinking is beneficial for two reasons.

Margin Room II

In America we live at such a fast pace and it can be hard to imagine a society could operate differently. It’s not just our imagination: Americans work longer hours than the rest of the world. Lawrence Jeff Johnson, a chief labor market economist, has proven “workers in the United States are putting in more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world.” However Johnson adds that “we're not the most efficient, when you compare it per hour.” It can be difficult to imagine a place where shops open at ten, close at six, and lunch breaks are long enough for social gatherings and naps. That’s right— naps. Not errands. Naps. In some Africa cultures social obligation to a visiting neighbor has priority over work (wrap your mind around the implications of that) and it is unthinkable to stop and ask a stranger any question, such as for directions or for the time, without inquiring after their family and life.

A life ordered in a way to allow margin space emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially and socially is a life that creates reserve tanks for when they are most needed. However the fact that I am arguing for our need of rest, by citing that it increases the functionality and fullness of life shows that I have not yet understood the role that rest and margin space should have. The point of rest is not to keep ourselves functional. Real rest is an acknowledgment that our worth does not lie in functionality. We do not merely rest from work and for work, but it is rather through rest that a person can step out of the working world to experience nourishment and transcendence. Leisure is the basis for culture, and as the author of that title wrote: “Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as whole.”

It is in the margin space of life that relationships and thought, and art have space to unfold. I don’t know how to realistically seek rest within the culture I am immersed in, but I think that perhaps it may start by me giving permission to myself to have an identity based not in doing, but in being. This certainly needs to happen before I can invite others to slow down and simplify their lives. Since all that has ever been asked of us is who we will be today, for my part—today— I plan to live a life where neighbors and art matter, and the music drifting out of coffee shops is worth pausing to listen to. My hope for us all is that we would find margin space. May we learn to gather the daily manna of beauty without hoarding. And when we learn to release busyness, may we find in the end the life it promised but never reached.

Margin Room I

High risk living captivates us. It’s the feeling of breathing thin air the first time you hike past 8,000 feet— the cold that rushes past your Gore-Tex when your kayak lifts off the edge of a waterfall and you hope the whole freefall that you raised the bow enough— it’s a rock climber whose silhouette suspends from Red Dihedral in the High Sierras. The saying, ‘living on the edge’, immures this idea of pushing yourself to a level where the difference between defeat or even danger is separated from glory by a single breath. This way of living has always appealed to me. I open my eyes every morning eager to analyze all the good I can compress into one day; I analyze my budget to see how many adventures I can pull from the bottom line, and love diverse experiences. The things we fill our free time with are always worthy pursuits: I never regret the great literature when I make time to read, the dynamic people I have intentional time with, or the classes and walks and community gatherings. As Thomas Aquinas said, “in the pursuit of the end, no limits should be set.” Living at maximum capacity is a life full. Or so it would seem.

A few months ago, my life began to change, slowly at first, but small changes soon became a way of living. I started skipping social obligations and avoiding people on the way to appointments. No longer was there time to savor the simple joys of sleep and food, coffee and periods of relaxation; these became a means to further productivity. Instead of providing my body with nutrients it could sustain itself with, I found myself inhaling caffeine (or worse, energy drinks) to artificially push it through fatigue. It is common that people who deeply appreciate the simple goodness of life can go wrong when they gather too much of it. Just as manna hoarded into baskets goes bad, so too worthy pursuits crammed into day-timers ironically decomposes into a life un-lived. Living at full capacity will inevitably replace enjoyment with duty, and restful awareness with rushed narrowness. There is no margin space in which relationship or quiet learning can be cultivated. Life on the edge has no margin for wonder.

Besides being unfulfilling, living at full capacity is not sustainable. The problem with trying to live continually at a maximum capacity is that when a person is operating at their highest emotional, physical, spiritual, and social abilities, one unforeseen event (also known as life) can effortlessly present a small demand which pushes them over the limit of what they are capable of dealing with. I found this to be true when my schedule would have melt-downs if I got lost reading Emerson even by fifteen extra minutes. Any random serendipity had the potential to thwart all punctuality for the remainder of the day. One slight disagreement became more than I could emotionally deal with. Life on the edge has no margin for error.

Soul Vs. Spirit

Some consider a person as divided into two parts, the body and soul-spirit. The other camp holds to a triune division of body, soul, and spirit. Good and godly scholars hold both views. I take a triune position mostly because there are multiple verses in both testaments that speak of the soul and spirit in the same sentence as though they are different. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 lists the division plainly: “may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless...” The other key verse in this debate is the well known Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit...” Watchman Nee agrees “the Bible never confuses the spirit and soul as though they were the same. Not only are they different in terms; their very natures differ from each other.”

Genesis 2:7 says that God formed man from dust “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” This word soul is nephesh in Hebrew. The nephesh is what gives life to the formed body, just as Aristotle observed, “the body apart from the spirit is dead” (James 2: 26). Aquinas talked about this life-giving soul as the “first principle of life in those things in our world which live...life is shown principally by knowledge and movement.” Leviticus 17:11, and 13-14 addresses this idea that unlike plants which only have a physical ‘body’, animals and humans have nephesh—an animating life which was why the blood of flesh was not kosher. It is clear that animals and humans have a life that is unlike the life of plants, but the Bible teaches that only human beings are fully in the image of God for they alone have a spirit.

So while our spirits are alike, our souls and bodies are different. I use the word soul as that which animates the body, and as the seating place of where the differences in how we think, feel, and act are. Nee writes of the soul that it “is the site of personality. The will, intellect and emotions of man are there.” There are liberal camps which recoil from suggestions that women could have a tendency towards a different kind of temperament or personality than men do, or can have a different way of thinking, but outside the academic world of political correctness, this idea is considered self-evident. Women also may experience emotions differently than men, and often have different intellectual processes. Clearly, our bodies are also beautifully, wonderfully different. There are other parts of the person that can be isolated and discussed such as how the heart, mind, will, or intellect, are different, but that goes much deeper into philosophy than I am able to present for your consideration, and is not relevant for our needs.

And That Was All There Was To It

I was first made aware of how I could be celebrating and cultivating the part of me that was feminine only perhaps a year or two ago. My aunt Rachel (whom you’ll hear a lot about in this blog) wakes up every morning aware of and thankful for her womanhood. She has two children, a boy and a little girl, and she actively celebrates and cultivates both of their genders. That could not have been more foreign to me. I wondered, was that too feminist? Could you love the fact that you were a woman without feeling negatively about men?

Though the idea of a woman loving her gender was new, I began to embrace it more when I thought of how I desire for my fiancé Matt to be responsive to my womanhood and inspired by it. It occurred to me that I can’t help him to fall in love that part of me if I don’t fully understand or appreciate it. Similarly, if I don’t know how grow in being a woman, I can’t teach my (future) daughters to live fully in their femininity either. But I want my daughters to be glad and rejoice in what will set them apart in childhood as girls, and in their later years, as mature and beautiful women.

Just as the enjoyment of God overflows into spontaneous praise, so too my growing enjoyment of those qualities in women we call femininity has overflowed with ideas and conversations. C. S. Lewis’s well loved quote on praise is always worth reading again: “All enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.... The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside... Just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?’”

Someone once said that “painters understand nature and love her, and teach us to see her”. What a beautiful and concise reason for us all to pursue our artistic expression. Van Gogh is my foremost inspiration of what it means to behold beauty— to internalize it— and then to desire to share it. “If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.”

Naturally

"The holier a woman is, the more she is a woman." -Leon Bloy

Some have established the position that womanhood happens naturally; they consider gender to be so tailored into the fabric of our being, which makes it unnecessary to reflect on at length. I agree that part of what gives womanhood its charm is the way it springs up inherently in little girls and shines out of old women who pin their hair every morning—for beauty. I agree that part of the process does unfold naturally, like a flower that leans into the sun or opens to the rain. And it seems like it should be that way.

I was supposed to be a boy according to the ultrasound, but sonar imaging was poor quality in the eighties, and it turned out that I was a girl— the second-born of four actually. I’m just as ‘female’ as I was twenty years ago, but I like to think that I am becoming more feminine. That is one of the foundational ideas in this book on womanhood: that there is a difference in being a female genetically, and growing in feminine qualities. I will always have the feminine chromosomes sketched into every cell of my body, but there is something deeper that I can grow in specifically as a woman. It is an amazing moment when you believe, perhaps for the first time, that God was glorified, and the world, somehow bettered, because you were born a little girl. Considering gender as something to be celebrated— everyday— not just on the first day, of a person’s life, is meaningful because it is a testimony that the depths of God are deep and wide and that His image was diverse enough to spill from Adam’s ribcage and into Eve.