Studies show that Americans change careers, on an average, every twenty months. Not jobs, but careers. They do something completely different than they did in their last job. That’s incredible. The talk that once happened by parents, to find something you enjoy and do it for the rest of your life is now changing to make your self-adaptable. It is no longer important to be good at one thing and loyal to one company, but to be able to change quickly. How often have you heard someone say, “I have reinvented myself”?
Love also has shown signs of changing. Again studies are showing that most people fall in love with more than one person in a lifetime. Just as in work there is constant transition, so too it has become that way in love.
When work and love are constantly transitional, so too is identity. My self-definition changes when I change jobs or lovers; I know myself differently, see the world differently, and in many ways become a different person. Identity becomes fluid when work and love are liquefied. They still exist, no doubt, but they have greatly transformed, no longer able to support a single self-definition. So what does this mean?
The Death of Identity
by Pastor Greg Uthus
Hill Avenue Grace Lutheran Church • Pasadena, CA
http://www.hillavenuegrace.org/tasks/render/file/?method=inline&fileID=BA8CBC69-A42B-CDE6-52EB3859B708727F
If I was to ask you to answer the question, “Who am I? What would you say? How would you answer? By what criteria would you use to you define yourself?
Dr. Sigmund Freud once said, “A healthy person (defined identity) is someone who can work and love.” That may have been true in the past. I am not so sure it is today.
It used to be that in your early to mid teens you would discover what you are good at, and it would help to define what you would do for work and thereby help to define whom you were. This wasn’t limited only to work. It also included the one you love. You would find your sweetheart, date, become engaged and then marry. Once married you would have children, buy a house, join the PTA or coach little league. Your work and your love would define who you were and establish your identity. Not any more. Today we have moved away from work/love ethic for our identity. I have seen this, of all places, on the golf course.
When I play golf, if I go by myself, I will be paired other people. What I have noticed is that those over 40 typically ask me what I do for work. Those under 40 tend to be more curious about the clubs I use. The difference is about what each age group focuses on for one’s identity.
It used to be that we would try to figure out who we by what we want to be and who we are coupled with. But what happens when work and love are no longer dependable? What happens when the very material to form an identity becomes hollow?
Work and love have not held up as of late, making identity thin, making it harder and harder to define one self. There is really no such thing anymore as deciding at fifteen that you’re good at, majoring in it at college, and then getting a job doing that and staying with the same company for fifty years. The rapid technological changes makes one’s major obsolete in a few years; the rapid shifting, downsizing, and morphing of corporations makes lifelong loyalty a thing of the past.
Studies show that Americans change careers, on an average, every twenty months. Not jobs, but careers. They do something completely different than they did in their last job. That’s incredible. The talk that once happened by parents, to find something you enjoy and do it for the rest of your life is now changing to make your self-adaptable. It is no longer important to be good at one thing and loyal to one company, but to be able to change quickly. How often have you heard someone say, “I have reinvented myself”?
Love also has shown signs of changing. Again studies are showing that most people fall in love with more than one person in a lifetime. Just as in work there is constant transition, so too it has become that way in love.
When work and love are constantly transitional, so too is identity. My self-definition changes when I change jobs or lovers; I know myself differently, see the world differently, and in many ways become a different person. Identity becomes fluid when work and love are liquefied. They still exist, no doubt, but they have greatly transformed, no longer able to support a single self-definition. So what does this mean?
Work and love no longer provide identity. Identity has shifted to consumption. It is no longer important what you do; what is important is what you buy. Our identity has shifted to the point that what I possess forms my identity (i.e. the kind of clubs I use). In a fluid society consumption works so much better in forming our identity than does work. Consumption can adjust to an every changing environment and helps to keep us focused on our future. How often have you said to your self, “All I need to do is to stop at Target, The Gap, or Apple to feel like a new person”? We define ourselves from what we buy. This same idea has affected our concept of love.
We have shifted from love to intimacy, from commitment to the feeling of closeness.
Love was about commitment; love was about constancy and dependability. But lately you can love your spouse or partner and yet feel a void of intimacy that in the end justifies moving on and finding someone new. It’s not unusual to hear, “I still love him, there was just nothing there” (translation: no intimacy). When identity is constructed in the constant flow of consumption and intimacy, it can often feel like there is little to hold on to.
The church has not helped. All too often the church has fallen prey to the same lack of meaning, we have allowed ourselves to become a place of consumption, a place of creating the feeling intimacy. We hear words like, “The church needs to be….” or “The church is like….” We push for new worship styles, new outreach programs, new models of youth ministry, better curriculum, and more impressive buildings assuming that it is in the consumption and feelings of intimacy that we will be the church that Christ ahs called us to be. In the end we are doing the same thing to ourselves that our culture is doing, and that is giving over to the gods of consumption and intimacy.
If the world is struggling with the question, “Who am I” then the church can only be the church when it is willing to enter into the despair of the question, to participate in that place where identity has been destroyed and intimacy has been lost. We are the church when begin to start asking, “Who is this God that enters despair? Who is God for us and how can the church witness to this God?”
Isaac was born from the despair of a dead womb; his boys would come into the world in conflict, the younger of the twins, Jacob, holding the heel of the older, Esau. Their names summed them up. Esau was strong, hairy, and manly. Jacob was a heel, a trickster, and a con man. With the help of his mother, Jacob pulled off the greatest con, tricking his blind father, Isaac, for his blessing supposed to be given
to the older Esau. Like all good men, by the time Esau could see that he had been had the “heel” was gone.
But now it was time to meet up with his brother from whom he had been running, knowing that when they meet his brother will likely kill him. When the confrontation must happen, the schemer that he is, first sends over to his brother his cattle (i.e. like suitcases of cash), but fearing that wouldn’t work he sends his children and wives, hoping they will assuage Esau’s rage.
Now alone, Jacob meets a man, repeating the kind of wrestling that began his life, and it would last all night. The masked man touches Jacob’s hip, putting it out of joint, revealing that he is more than an ordinary man. Holding on, Jacob who is more of a runner than a fighter pleads for a blessing. Asking for his name, Jacob tells him, “I am Jacob, the ‘heel,’ the con man.” “No,” the angel says, “you are now given a new name, a new identity for you have wrestled with God. You are “Israel”.
The despair borne in the heel has been taken up by God, wrestled, and made into the promise. The impossible has happened; the “heel” has become the promise. And so it is with us. In and through our despair God comes, wrestles it with us and turns our despair into hope, changing who we are, and changing our identity.
Really miss concept of love passion and commitment,
Love passion and commitment apples to all life rules as job friendships marriage and also divorce.