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The Identity Question

Occasionally I have reason to go back over some things that I have written.  That can be a fun, rewarding experience.  Certainly not everything I have written is worth preserving.  Sometimes what we write is for the moment.  Clearly this would be the case with many papers we write when we took classes in school.  Many of us have jobs in which we have to write stuff for a specific moment.             

Computers make saving stuff much easier.  With computers we can create folders, organize all sorts of things and now store things “in the cloud,” whatever that means!  I think it means whatever I write and store in the cloud will live longer than I do.  Maybe that is a new version of life after death!           

Obviously I have lived long enough to remember the days before computers.  I recall the time when having an IBM electric typewriter was about as good as it got!  Those came equipped with the built-in means to backspace and erase a mistake.  That meant we could throw out the “white out” bottles!  However, I can be a bit wistful when I think of the white out liquid.  Magically it would make my mistakes go away.  And if I were careful and not use too much, it was very difficult to see where I had used it.          

My writing life goes even further back to the manual typewriter.  I don’t even tell my students that any more, because they don’t really care.  Besides, they can’t understand a guy who uses an iPhone talking about manual typewriters!  It simply does not compute!  I think I began using the manual typewriter sometime in my high school years.  I know I took a typing class in high school.  I still appreciate that skill set.           

Amazingly enough, I can even recall writing those theme papers for school, when the teacher insisted it be written in ink and written legibly and neatly.  Boy that was real pressure! To write in ink meant no errors.   

But through it all, it was still my own mind creating ideas that were committed to “paper.”  From the handwritten papers to the “papers” generated on my laptop, the unchanging facet has been me.  Of course, that does not mean I have not changed.  My mind has grown, developed, and expanded in phenomenal ways.  In some ways I am not at all that young guy writing papers with ink pins.  But in other ways I am still the same guy today composing thoughts on my laptop. 

While this might be interesting to some, one can wonder what does it have to do with spirituality and the spiritual journey?  As I narrated my journey as a writer, it has been a personal narration.  I have made that journey and still am on the way.  One might say the journey’s trail is the host of things I have written.  They represent me…but they are not me. 

To use poor English, I can pose the deep question: who is me?  I suspect most of us answering this personal question would settle on external and superficial aspects of who we are.  We can think of age or body type.  We cite vocation, interests, etc.  These are aspects of our identity.  But they are not truly who we are.  Identity goes deeper. 

Much of my writing seeks to be soulful.  Obviously that presupposes I have a soul or, as I might prefer, am a soul.  I do suppose that to be true.  Knowing there can be different definitions of soul, let me simply say I understand soul to be the essence of who I am. 

This means if I can tell you about my soul, then I am telling you at the deepest level who I am.  I realize that I have become quite spiritual at this point.  I cannot possibly tell you anything about my soul without telling you also about my soulful Parent---the creator God who “made” me in the beginning and blew the very Spirit of God into my soul.  At that very moment I became a living being.  “Me” was created and all the potentiality of my mind was activated. 

At some point, the actualization of my mind developed to the point where I had words and could conjure up ideas.  I became as creative as my Creator.  I knew I had words to share, just as much as God had a Word to share.  My words went onto paper and, then, into some people.  God’s Word went directly into people.  Receive my word and receive me. 

Communication becomes communion.  Understood well, communion is nothing short of miraculous.  Communion is “union with.”  It is a uniting---a union.  For Christians it is the three in one---the trinity.  Ultimately, it is the all in one.  At that point there will be no need for words.  The silence will go so deep into the Sacred, there will be nothing to say---no need for Amen.   

Then there will be no identity question.  Perhaps in the union of communion there is not even identity for all shall be One.
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