When I have won my gold medal, who am I? Or more challenging still, perhaps, having spent four years and not got the expected medal, who am I? Not questions that most of us have to answer. But we all have the challenge of identity. Who am I in relation to myself, to others and, ultimately – or is it foremost – to God?
It is tempting to seek identity in places that turn out in the end to be an illusion, all of them fading with age and time. To seek it in money, status and power. Through being clever and achieving. By being an influencer, or belonging to an in crowd.
We all need to know that we exist and to have our existence acknowledged. The worst thing is to be ignored – people living on the street will tell you that. We also need to know that we are loved and valued just for who we are. Identity is more than the persona we create, or the picture in our Greater Manchester bus pass. It is, as John reminds us, ultimately about love, about loving relationships.
That is challenging, because to find our identity, we have to let go the identity we have created and connect with those around us in a spirit of love. As John exhorts us, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.” Identity is about giving and receiving, loving and being loved and connecting with our source.
At the end of the Women’s Pentathlon all the competitors embraced each other, stood in a line across the track, held hands and, with smiles on their faces, raised them aloft in a salute to an applauding crowd. Thousands of individual identities merged in a greater loving whole.
Chris Dawson