Sermon Archive
Identity
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Evensong on 9 June 2002
Last Friday, a woman brought up in England, but who has lived most of her adult life in Scotland, was attending a meeting in Fife. In the room next door, people were watching the world cup match between England and Argentina. Suddenly a great cheer went up; and her heart sank. She assumed that the Scots next door were cheering an Argentine goal. It was not an unreasonable assumption: despite the generous advice of some SNP leaders, plenty of Scots had been reported in the media as saying that they would support anyone except England. But it was, of course, a mistaken assumption.
In 1759, less than twenty years after Culloden, the traditional blood-curdling charge of a regiment of Highlanders played a decisive part in Wolfe's defeat of their old French allies at Quebec. Wolfe's observation about the Highlanders is infamous: 'They are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to rough country and no great mischief if they fall'. But the Highlanders' shift from Jacobite to Hanoverian allegiance, and of other North American Scots later from royalist to republican, allowed them in due course to forge a new identity for themselves as Canadians or as citizens of the United States.
It's true, of course, that the Highland emigrants often had no option; and there's a school of historical thought which claims that British national identity was imposed on those who remained in this country but never really accepted by them - so that by 2002, after the decline of Empire, only the English, and not all of them, still think of themselves as British. But national identity, I think, is more complicated than that; and after many centuries of internal migration, intermarriage and all kinds of social and cultural contact within Britain and abroad, many Scots, Welsh and English now have multiple identities. As someone born and brought up north of the Grampian Mountains, but with a great-grandfather from Cumberland, and married to a Lancastrian whose mother's family probably originated in the Isle of Lewis, I don't think I'm all that untypical. As a Highlander I retain a healthy suspicion of Edinburgh, as a Scot of London, and as British of Brussels. But I also resent the pollster or politician who tries to make me choose between the Highland, Scottish, British and European aspects of my national identity.
Underlying such attempts to make people choose between different aspects of their national identity, I suspect, is the mistaken idea that our personal identity itself is something given - the idea that who we are is determined by our origins, by where we come from - illustrated at its most parochial perhaps by the traditional Edinburgh question ?What school did you go to??
Origins, of course, contribute to identity, and for some practical purposes it may be crucial to know about them. The Government, for example, is currently consulting the public about whether, in the future, children born as a result of medically assisted conception should have the right to know who were their genetic parents. With an increasing number of tests for genetic predisposition to different diseases now available, information about an individual's genetic history may be vital in order to prevent or treat such diseases. This information moreover will need to be up-to-date - the genetic tests may not have been available at the time when the sperm, eggs or embryos were donated. So because of that, and because genetic predispositions turn out differently in different individuals, the only way to get this information may be from the donor him or herself, if he or she is still alive.
But there's a problem about all this. Up till now, donors of sperm, eggs and embryos have been guaranteed anonymity, and many doctors believe that without this guarantee, people will not be willing to donate, and so doctors will not be able to help many people who are unable to have children of their own. Yet it is very difficult to see how such anonymity can be promised in the future without denying the children's right to medically important information about their genetic history.
This current problem shows how knowledge about someone's origins may be crucial for their future health and well-being. It shows how origins can contribute to identity. But it doesn't prove that origins determine identity. Whatever public opinion and the Government decide should happen in the case of future donors, past donors, who were guaranteed anonymity, will not be forced to identify themselves. Such legislation cannot be retrospective, and the thousands of children already born as a result of assisted conception will have no right to such knowledge of their genetic history, and in many cases will not even have been told that they were conceived as a result of donation. If these children grow up in ignorance of their genetic origins, does this mean that they will have a false sense of their own identity? Research, and the personal accounts of some who have grown up and then discovered that they were artificially conceived, provide no definitive answer. Some desperately want to know who their genetic fathers or mothers were. But to others this is much less, or even not at all, important - to them, their true parents are the people who loved and cared for them from birth.
If knowledge of one's genetic origins is essential for a sense of identity, not just children born as a result of medically assisted conception, but countless others, orphaned or conceived extra-maritally, cannot have or have had a true sense of their own identity. But that, surely, can't be right, nor is it right. For as I've already suggested, that conclusion is based on the mistaken idea that identity is something given, which we can do nothing about. In reality, by contrast, our identity is not what is given to us, but what we make of what is given, not something assigned to us, but achieved by us.
What we make of what is given, of course, can be richer or poorer. At its poorest, it may be based on what we think other people think about us, or the ways in which we think we differ from other people. Neither of these is very satisfactory, because what most other people know about us is inevitably limited; and because the ways in which we differ from other people are, as many social surveys show, often less striking than the ways in which we are like them. It is often the tribes or nations nearest, and sometimes most like us, from whom we strive most fiercely to distinguish ourselves. Not only those who congratulate ourselves that they are not like other people, but also those whose self-esteem sinks to their boots whenever they compare themselves with others, are deceiving themselves.
A richer sense of identity cannot be achieved in this way. It comes, rather, not by seeking it directly but as an by-product of taking other people seriously. The more we take other people seriously, the more we try to see things from their point of view, to understand what they must be going through - so the more we understand both how much good there is in other people, and also how we all need to forgive and forbear with one another. We see, in other words, how inextricably our own identity and that of others are interwoven, how little we can afford to stand apart in splendid isolation, and how much we all need one another. And it is when we see that, that our personal identity - the identity of persons who are persons through other persons - is enriched and fortified.
The classical example of all this, of course, is found in the gospel story of the self-congratulating pharisee and the self-critical tax collector. The pharisee's sense of identity, based on convention and a sense of superiority to others, is shown to be fragile and illusory. The tax-collector, by contrast, is shown to be a realist, aware of how much damage we humans do to one another, and of his own responsibility for this - but not thereby a person of low self-esteem, since he trusts that God cares enough for a human like himself to hear his prayer.
Identity is not something assigned, but achieved, for richer or poorer; and a richer identity is achieved only as a by product of taking other people seriously. Even then it is still incomplete; and that surely is right, because the task of achieving our true identity, as the tax-collector knew only too well, is never finished here on earth. Who we are, mercifully, is who we are yet to be.
Shortly before he was executed in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote some verses in which he addressed his own question , 'Who am I ?' In them, he contrasts what others told him of his apparent cheerfulness and calm as a condemned prisoner, with his own inner turmoil and near despair. His conclusion sums up the ultimate answer that any of us can give, here on earth, to that question - and our ground for hope.
Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person to-day and to-morrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely question of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!
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