lost and found…

The ever wonderful Maturest Student in the World has been reflecting here about the loss of identity that can come from leaving behind one life to begin another. This is a topic close to my own heart as, like her, I find myself struggling these days to know how to answer those inevitable “what do you do” questions that seem to be the foundation of all modern conversation. Like many people I suspect, I found a great deal of my esteem in my working life. The fact that I had worth to my employers, gave me my identity. Each pay rise or new job was a boost to the confidence that I couldn’t seem to find for myself, I had an identity in my profession that was the framework to how I understood myself.
Loosing that external validation of worth when I gave up that profession has been hard and yet… it has taken me to the start of an amazing journey to discover my worth to myself and more importantly my worth to God. It’s taken me all year really to come to the sense that my old identity has gone, that an essential part of the training process is this stripping away of all the scaffolding of the past. Doing this enables us to be free to build anew, to work with God to come to a new sense of who we are and of his purpose for us…. a process that I know will continue long after college has finished.

This whole issue of identity has been at the forefront on my mind of late as I reflect on my parish placement this summer. There I witnessed one of the most heartbreaking things I think I will ever see. The funeral of twins, born extremely premature, long before there was any hope of independent life outside their mother. Born before the 24 week deadline that legally sees life begin these were not, in any official sense, children. Their identity, if you could call it that, was as unviable foetus’ subjected to a spontaneous abortion as a result of an infection. Yet, you only had to listen to their mother to know that whatever the law might say these were her children, much loved and much wanted, grieved for with the intensity that only a parent that has themselves lost a child could fully understand. They were her children. They each had a unique identity, named and known in the few days there was to say hello before the grim task of saying goodbye began. For the first time I really began to understand the importance of a funeral in declaring the full personhood of the deceased. This is never more so than here were the simple naming ceremony that preceded the committal put the identity of these children, as human beings known and loved by God, front and centre for all to see. Never have the words “a person known to God” seemed more real. Whoever the world may say we are, whatever identity we claim for ourselves or others claim for us it can never be more important then that.