History & Identity

made this a few years ago.  sometimes I like to pretend that I'm a cartoon artist.

Last Friday night, I watched a movie called “Unknown.” No, not the one with Aslan (aka Liam Neeson) - the one with Jesus (aka Jim Caviezel).

Anyways, it had a really interesting storyline – five guys wake up, locked inside a warehouse, with no memory of who they are or how they got there. From the blood, the wounds, and a rather conveniently-placed newspaper (a little too convenient in my opinion), they figure out that two of them are hostages and three of them are kidnappers. But they don’t know who’s who! What erupts is an interesting situation in which people waver between forming shaky alliances and fighting for personal power/security. You see a lot of the human condition coming out – selfishness, ego, altruism, compassion, mistrust, etc. Three of the guys become especially close and begin to work together to try and break out before the other kidnappers get back. But obviously, at least one of them is a kidnapper. One states that regardless of who they were, their decisions in the warehouse are what’s going to define them from then on. And so they choose to trust each other. Sort of.

But as bits and pieces of their memories start to come back, they’re forced to reconsider where their loyalties lie. One guy realizes that he was with the kidnappers. And he doesn’t like that. But he can’t ignore the reality of who he is and what he’s done (and the consequences waiting for him).

It’s crazy, the impact memory has on a person’s identity! I was tempted to scream at the TV, “Dude, who cares what you did before, just do the right thing now!” And maybe that would ring true when you don’t really remember what you’ve done. You’re kind of a blank slate. But it’s not that simple, not when you start to remember who you are. Not just what you’ve done, as if you’re looking at your deeds through a glass window, but remembering who you are – remembering yourself in the moment of those deeds. You may not like what you’re doing, but it’s YOU doing it – you’re still inherently tied to yourself. You are the composite of your past choices and experiences. And even if you didn’t make all those choices (for example, maybe you didn’t choose to be born a white girl in the year 2000), those experiences still brought you here. So you’re inherently linked, indebted, related to them. Like your parents.

Not that we’re totally bound by the past – at one point, the past was today. And tomorrow, today’s choices will be the past. So current decisions are not determined by previous choices/circumstances. But current decisions are frequently informed by previous decisions. Like the guy in the warehouse. Learning that he was a kidnapper almost sent him over the edge. Knowledge of history defines your identity which determines your choices.

I’ve seen this history--> identity--> choices phenomenon play out in my own life, actually. Not that I’m a kidnapper with amnesia or anything. But I do have a weakness for binge reading. Yes, binge reading, in which one ignores all responsibilities and simply reads through a whole book in one sitting. I know I should be doing my laundry, writing emails, preparing for tomorrow, ect … but I want to keep reading, so I keep going (legit desire, fulfilled inappropriately). Eventually I’m sick of reading. But I don’t want to face the fact that I just wasted my whole day and haven’t gotten anything done, so I keep reading (avoidance of guilt). The next stage is where I realize that I’m actually mad at myself for giving into my inner book zombie. I’m not having fun and I’m not amused with myself. Good time to stop, right? Right, except now I’m in a rut. I continue reading – I’m just a greedy little book zombie at heart, so quitting now doesn’t mean anything. I’m not condoning it, I just feel tied to it, like I can’t stop because that’s what I’ve done – it’s poisoned me and all my future choices. And so I read until exhaustion and fall asleep. I’m sure this sounds really strange to the outsider observer, but I can tell you that it’s a very powerful force.

The funny thing is that sometimes, the next morning when I first wake up, I don’t remember the night before. And so I smile sweetly up at God, and skip about, getting myself ready for the day, like a responsible little girl. Except as soon as I see the book and remember what happened, my will to do good is crushed. And my relationship with God instantly sours.

What’s changed? Nothing. Only my perception of myself, my history, my identity. I’m more compelled to be good when I think of myself as a good girl, who hasn’t sinned very recently. And I’m more prone to continue in my sins when I think of myself as a selfish zombie. This isn’t a self-talk promotion. I shouldn’t just ignore my zombie past. If I try to white-wash it as “innocent fun” or something else equally good-girlish/excusable, I’m simply deluding myself. I am a zombie. And I know that that doesn’t mean I have to be a zombie today. But I can’t deny the existence of my inner zombie, especially not in front of God.

Which is something that the movie didn’t address. There’s a moment when the kidnapper guy remembers that he had a daughter – which gives him hope to persevere, do the right thing, and get away from the other kidnappers. One of his buddies tells to him, “Maybe you just forgot who you were before you were a kidnapper.” But I think that’s too convenient. The truth is we do ugly things. And those things become a part of our identities. Ergo, we have ugly identities, even if we had “pure” identities before. We may be victims, but we are also villains. And we can’t just blot that out.  We cannot change the past. Which makes it hard to change the future.

And that’s where Jesus comes in. You know the whole “My identity is in Christ,” phrase that gets thrown around the MECCA a lot? Well, I think that’s a very powerful phrase. Not in the sense that Jesus is the definition of my personality. But in the sense that my union with Christ gives me an alternate history/identity to work off of when I get stuck in a sin rut. I’m not denying my identity. I’m owning it, before God, and accepting the due penalty (death). But when I die with Christ, I also survive death with him. And I get his identity, his history.

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:17-21