I am not an ice cream cone

some thoughts on identity, prayer and hope

I was standing in my 5^th grade classroom at US Grant elementary school in Colorado springs when I first remember having the thought, who am I?

We 10-year olds were meant to be making collages that could express who were are. At the top of each student’s board read the words “I Am…”. Our provisions for answering this existential question: glossy magazines, glue sticks and safety scissors, as if, armed with these things we could create a suitable image of our selfhood. The boy next to me was quickly filling his poster board with pictures of trucks and I thought, wait, he’s not a truck. He just likes trucks. At the time I had only a single picture on my own board… it was, unsurprisingly, from a Baskin Robbins ad. And then I thought, but am I ice cream? Am I a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone since that is what I like? (I puzzled about this for so long in fact, that I never finished my I AM board).

In some ways it feels like I’ve tried to fill in that collage every day since then, cutting out images from various subcultures and then confidently gluing them on my metaphorical I Am board only to look back on myself later and think how wrong I was, because now I am different. (I mean, not for nothing, but this dynamic is slightly more acute when you are someone who writes memoir. For instance, I was obsessed with Crossfit during a 3 ½ year period that happened to overlap with the time I was writing Accidental Saints, so even though I am now nearly 10 years older, 20 pounds heavier and 100 times happier than then, readers still assume I want to wake up each morning to burpees and snatches, which, trust me on this, I do not).

Other times in life it has felt like my identity is wrapped up in my political associations or professional position, or ideological leanings.  Or I think of myself as a collection of my wounds or a collection of my accomplishments. Or I think of myself as whatever it is everyone else thinks of me as.

So, who are we really?

This is why I love meditating on this verse from 1st John:

Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.

1 John 3:2

Which is maybe just a more theologically eloquent form of that facile coffee mug saying: “be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet”.

We are, no matter what traps we’ve fallen into, no matter what addictions we have given our hearts and wallets over to, no matter how many times we have focused on accomplishing something big, done it and felt nearly as empty after as when we began, we are more than anything else: God’s own. AND no matter how old we are, what we will be is still to come, still unfolding, and still closer to the core.

This week my friend Tom, who grew up on the rez and follows the Lakota ways, said, when talking about prayer and spiritual practice, that, “prayer is the sloughing off of who we are not”. Isn’t that just invitingly simple? This, and not trying to manipulate God into getting what we want, is a form of prayer, or more accurately, a desired result of prayer that I can get behind.

Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.

I cling to this as a reliable form of hope.  

I cling, not to some delusional idea that everything will be better, that life will get only easier and never harder, that bad things won’t happen – no, I cling to the hope that I am known in my true form by the God who knit me together in my mother’s womb, and next to that, every identity that I cut out pictures of and paste on my I Am board is ultimately meaningless.

I cling to the hope that the me whom God loves is the me that isn’t wearing makeup.

I cling to the hope that God’s work upon me leads to new thinking about others and the world and even about myself.

Because this same hope is what allowed the hemorrhaging woman to reach for the hem of Jesus’ garment. She trusted that what she would be had not yet been revealed.  She knew there was more for her. More than illness, more than impurity more than alienation.

Because this same hope is why Bartimaeus the blind man cried out when people told him to shut the hell up already.  He knew that who he would be had not yet been revealed. He trusted that his voice was hearable to the one who created it.

Because this same hope is why the woman who was described as being a “sinner of the city” busted into a perfectly respectable dinner party and covered Jesus feet with scented oil and tears and then wiped his feet with her hair.  Because she knew her designation was not her destiny.

Same with me.  Same with you.  We are more than our designations, more than our preferences, more that our ideologies, more than what our families say we are, more than what society says we are, and for sure we are more than the sum total of what we buy.

So as we all go through this week, may we remember to pray, (whatever that looks like) and know that, every layer of the onion that is sloughed off in the process, all the “what we are not” that is left behind, can be blessed for what it gave us and be left behind as that which is no longer needed.

Because obviously no board of compiled images can ever portray who we really are in our original beauty as God’s own. Not even, and this is hard to believe, but not even a picture of a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone.

In it with you,

Nadia

ps - tomorrow I’m doing a “ask me anything” in the paid subscriber chat and I am really looking forward to our conversation!

In case you missed it, here’s an interview (I really enjoyed doing) at Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe I think there’s a day or two before it is paywalled:

Words of Good Hope: A Conversation with Nadia Bolz-Weber, Part I

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