The Now and the Know

Hello, my name is Chris and I’m an Identaholic.

Hello Chris!

There, glad I got that out. I feel better.

I have been playing around with this idea for a while now: we are addicted to identity. Let me explain. In the age of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and countless other networking sites that exist under the broad umbrella of “social media,” we have become addicted to identity. And don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty as the next person. My BlackBerry makes it that much easier to fuel my addiction to identity. We’ve got a problem folks, a serious problem. Countless status updates make it easy for us to let people know who we are… and who we want them to think we are. The anonymity of social networking allows you to be whoever you want to be.

Stop and think about it for a minute. Look at your past Facebook updates. Who do you want people to think that you are? The Smart Guy? The Party Girl? The Work-A-Holic? The Hip, Semi-Emergent, Theology Reading, Suedo-Pastor Guy? (That last one may or may not be a self-portrait.) Donald Miller writes in Searching for God Knows What:

…I figure I was attaching myself to a certain identity because it made me feel smart or, more honestly, it made other people tell me I was smart. This was how I earned my sense of importance. Now, as I was saying earlier, by doing things to get other people to value me, a couple of ideas became obvious, the first being that I was a human wired so other people told me who I was. This was very different from anything I had previously believed, including that you had to believe in yourself and all, and I still that is true, but I realized there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside of myself to tell me who I was. (43)

This section in my copy of the book is highlighted, underlined, and marked with a bright yellow tab. Why? Because it hit home. Miller says he is a person, “… wired so other people told [him] who [he] was.” Whether he knows it or not (and I suspect that he does) Miller is making a commentary on the condition of humanity. We are all people wired up so that others dictate our value. I determine what my role is and how important I am by how other people treat me. The kicker is that now, in the age of social media, we have the ability now more than ever to project the imagine that we want others to perceive. Status updates and Facebook profiles (not to mention blogs by no-name students of theology  ) all help us tell people who we want to be, how we want people to think about us. But let’s take it one step further:

One of the needs on Maslow’s pyramid was the need to know God. Not to know God, but rather to supply for the human psyche a kind of divine heritage providing, among other benefits, an explanation for existence. Because science is severely deficient in details of origin, Maslow held that man invented God as a kind of false bridge from one need to the next. God, far from a Being who had revealed Himself to man, was more an intellectual cuddly toy with which man snuggled during his dark night of the soul. God, in other words, was somebody who validated man’s identity. Man need God to shove into the crack created by the truth of his meaninglessness.

The truth of our meaninglessness. Here is the great irony of our lives, we think (note I said “we”, which includes me) that we don’t need God. We understand our existence (read: purpose) to be wholly separate from God.God is more like an accessory to existence than a necessity. And here’s the best part, he comes in different makes and models. There is Catholic God, Lutheran God (or Catholic God 2.0 if you want to poke fun at Lutherans, which I do because I am one), and countless others. And in this age if you don’t like any of the flavor options, you can even create your own. We treat our God experience like we’re stepping up to the custom burger bar at Fuddruckers. To paraphrase Miller, we create a God that validates our identity.

I have discovered two truths of humanity:

1) We crave meaning. Our addiction to identity is nothing more than an attempt to satisfy our desire for purpose. We long to know, we are desperate to know, who we are. It’s not selfish, it’s how we’re wired up. Everyone needs to know that they have purpose, that they belong somewhere and are valued by someone.

2) We create meaning. Because meaning is so fundamental to who we are, we create it everywhere: the jobs we have, the degrees we hold, the cars we drive, the stuff we own. We assign meaning to everything in our lives, including God. Does anyone else see the problem with us assigning God a purpose? Me too.

I have discovered this truth about God:

Only God gives true meaning and purpose. No one gets to tell you who you are and what you are meant to be except the one who created you.