How People Are Trying To Self-Identify Toward Transcendence

Maybe it’s because I’m a guy, but I’m just learning that people can build their wardrobe around their “season.” I’m an autumn, I think. Some people are really into it. You determine your season based off your hair color and complexion, and that provides your ideal fashion color palette.

There’s nothing particularly novel about different people looking better in different colors, nor is it surprising to see another template for self-identification catching fire. All this work of being anything you choose to be starts to get rather tiring. Can’t someone else just tell me?

This is the trouble behind our modern identity crisis. We have transposed all of mankind’s search for meaning into the vocabulary of identity. That’s why “I identify as _” has become the single most important sentence for you to complete. It’s also why it’s become a joke. That sentence doesn’t do what we want it to. In completing that sentence you’re looking for something transcendent that will explain everything you feel, want, and do. I call this a “master identity.”

Today, people use identity language to find categories that will help us understand our feelings and purpose. For example, if someone says, “I identify as the planet Neptune,” with a straight face, they mean something by that, even if you don’t particularly want to know what that is. Maybe they feel isolated, or blue, or full of gas. There is something about their sense of self that they feel the planet Neptune communicates. What’s much harder for everyone is determining exactly what that is, or how intense or pervasive that feeling should be.

Not long ago, if you referred to someone by a single identity marker (i.e. race) that would be seen as offensive. Now it’s often seen as a relief. At least I’ve found one thing I can hang my hat on, that I can be known by. You’re seen; you’re solid—no longer a translucent avatar. You have a master identity that can explain you, orient your path, and give you a place in this world.

The trouble is, as you experiment with and try on different master identities—career, sex, gender, race, hobbies—none of them seems up for the task of managing the entire operation of you. It’s an exhausting job. Your identity of artsy filmmaker, for example, eventually gets burned out and just wants to sit in her room, eating uncrustables.

The vastness of human identity is too complex to subsume under a single identity marker. The only identity big enough for the whole of you is a whole person—Jesus. “Without a transcendent point of reference, something truly beyond our identity, we ourselves shrink.”¹ Jesus is the divine identity that your soul is searching for. Everything else will make you shave off good parts of you, or make you grow crooked. When you turn your life over to Jesus, you get to spend your life becoming more of who you are.

1. Dick Keyes, Beyond Identity: Finding Your Self in the Image and Character of God (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998), 16 ↩︎