Continuing from a previous post, Joan A. MacDonald and her book “The Holiness of Everyday Life”, under the above title:
I went to a women’s discussion circle several years ago. The leader started the discussion by having everyone in the room introduce themselves and tell the group one thing about themselves that defined who they were. When the discussion came back to her, she said there was only one word that described herself; that word was becoming.
The scriptures state that we are all children of God and that “it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” This is unsettling. “Who am I?” we ask. The scriptures answer, You are a child of God and so you can’t fully understand who you are or who you are becoming. All you can know for sure is that you are in process.
This is also liberating. We are becoming. We are not done yet. We will never be done in this life. Awareness of this can free us from some self-imposed restrictions. We are free from role-playing, script-following, and self-limitations. We are led into openness: open now to all possibilities and directions, open to ideas, open to different ways of being, open to the promptings of the Spirit. All of life becomes a walk in faith. Since we do not know for sure where we are going and who we are becoming as described in a beautiful hymn “Lead Kindly Light”. . . . Lead kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom; Lead thou me on! The night is dark and I am far from home; Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene—one step enough for me. I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that thou Shouldst lead me on. I loved to choose and see my path; but now, Lead thou me on! I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears. Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years. So long thy pow’r hath blessed me, sure it still Will lead me on, O’er moor and glen, o’er crag and torrent till, The night is gone. And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, And lost while!
As we watch our children grow, we know that, at any stage of childhood, they are not finished; but neither are they finished once they become adults. Nor are they, or we, finished once we marry and take on new roles as husbands and wives; nor are we finished once we become parents; nor are we finished when we move into middle age and that rocky, redefining period psychiatry refers to as “midlife age crisis”; nor are we finished when we become old, even if we have managed to attain a measure of wisdom along the way; nor are we finished when we die. Becoming is eternal and turns all of life into an ever new and grand adventure!
So, the first part of the answer to the question “Who am I?” is that we are becoming. We can’t fully understand yet what we are becoming, but there is one thing we can know for sure: We are becoming that which we already are. Erich Fromm describes this in a discussion on the source of human conscience; It is important to distinguish between an “authoritarian” and a “humanistic” ethics. An authoritarian conscience . . . is the voice of an internalized authority, such as parents, state, religion. . . . this type of conscience . . . guarantees that the person can be relied upon to act always according to the demands of his conscience; but it becomes dangerous when the authorities command evil things. . . .
Quite different from the authoritarian . . . conscience is the “humanistic” . . . conscience. It is not the internalized voice or an authority whom we are eager to please and afraid of displeasing; it is the voice of our total personality expressing the demands of life and growth. “Good” for the humanistic conscience is all that furthers life; “evil” is all that arrests and strangles it. The humanistic conscience is the voice of our self, to become what we potentially are. 2 ~~~ Joan A. MacDonald, The Holiness of Everyday Life (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1995) p.34-36 (continued)
