"We are called to know God personally, but we are essentially social beings. We only come to know who we are in the context of other people, in the context of living in a family, in a community."(R.Rohr "Radical Grace" p.317)
Who am I? The greatest question that every person wrestles with. Sometimes I feel like I know more about my roles than I do about who I actually am. I know a part of who I am is as an alumni of Grinnell College and the Episcopal Divinity School. But even that role has had different knowledge of me. It is interesting to hear what people who knew me in those contexts believe I am or what their experiences of me were. Did they have a sense of the real me? I don't know.
I know my role as husband and father. Again aspects of the real me make up how I live into those roles, but I believe I'm more than that.
I'm a priest in the Episcopal Church and the Rector of Holy Trinity Wenonah. I know my role in those contexts, and I know again how aspects of me are revealed in those contexts.
The reality is that we are more complex than the roles we have outside of ourselves. And with all those "hats" it is easy to lose sight of what makes us unique. We may strive for a consistency of personhood, but often fall short of that, adapting and bringing out different personas as needed.
Maybe that's why human beings are made in the image of God. God as revealed in scripture is fairly complex and hardly consistent. Except in this one way, God always seeks relationship with us.
Blessings,
Ed
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