BBC Radio 4 2016-04-14

BBC Radio 4 2016-04-14

Good morning. I suspect that, following the revelations about the Archbishop of Canterbury, a good number of people, like me, have been doing a bit of thinking in recent days about personal identity; about who we really are and what makes us what we are. We know that a good deal of us comes from our genes, and tracing family history seems to get more popular by the year. It can be fascinating to find out about our grandparents, and their parents before them. But a more important influence surely is the impact of our upbringing, especially whether it was loving and stable, whoever brought us up. But is that all we are?- a combination of genes and upbringing? That’s why the Archbishop’s answer to that question was so thought provoking. He found his identity, he said, not through his genetics but his faith. Three cheers for that.

I once got to know someone who out of the blue started attending services at the church where I was working. He told me that both his parents were drug addicts, and his earliest memory is of them crawling helplessly round the room. After this rackety start he came to this country and eventually became a male prostitute. Then, after telling the rest of his story, he almost shouted in joy. “Out of this mess has come me”

Everyone’s life has a bit of mess in it, but out of our mix of good and bad experience comes a unique me, the special person which is each one of us. And that’s not the end of it. For we are on this earth, I believe, to live and grow into the fullness of the person we have it in us to be. And from the standpoint of Christian faith that potential is vast, much more than we usually dare imagine.

One of the great figures to come out of World War II was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was hanged for taking part in the plot against Hitler. In prison he wrote a little poem called “Who am I?” In it he contrasted how other people saw him, confident and unafraid, with how he felt inside himself, “weary and empty..Faint and ready to say farewell to it all”, as he put. He ends up

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

Who we are is unfinished business. It’s not just what the past has given us or what our own choices, bad and good, have made us, but where we feel we belong now, and where we think our future lies.