Reflections on Lent, #9

I am reading Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.  He writes:  By identity I mean an evolving nexus where all the forces that constitute my life converge in the mystery of the self:  my genetic makeup, the nature of the man and woma who gave me life, the culture in which I was raised, people who have sustained me and people who have done me harm, the good and ill I have done to to others and to myself, the experience of love and suffering--and much, much more.  In the midst of that complex field, identity is a moving intersection of the inner and outer forces that make me who I am, converging in the irreducible mystery of being human.

Identity, I am glad to say, is complex and shifting from a human standpoint.  The sages of the age say that life is all about change.  That is a good and bad thing; it is a truth I can embrace and yet one I reject.  Embracing it means I can change and I can have hope that what I am and how things are now don't and won't have to be this way.  But . . . if I do not have hope in a changeless Christ, than all the rest is meaningless and a delusion.