Just who am I? Thoughts about identity and meaning

The current fashion amongst many to determine a non-obvious 'identity' based on their sexual interests is odd, to say the least.

At least, it would be odd but for the collapse of the broad Christian consensus in which there was a reference point for 'meaning', or rather, existential confidence that sat outside our life-world.

Now that the 'life-world' for many has collapsed to the individual, the only available reference point which has some flavour of external validity is to adopt a group or fabricated 'community' reference point. So we have some who 'identify' as 'trans' (the most conspicuous assertion of difference from the everyday male-female distinction and di-morphism), or any one of the variably numbered 'genders', so-called. Each an invitation for the claimant to grasp at some form of specialness while verging on the narcissistic.

But for the Christian a great point of connection for a possible conversation about the gospel is given by this loss of bearings.

The 'loss of bearings' is a direct result of not only society's loss of confidence in Christian Theism, to which people without Christ 'out-sourced' their existential moorings, but is also exemplified by the vulnerable individuals whose sense of self is shaky.

It is these individuals who are left with no option but to seek to anchor themselves in an asserted 'identity' which, reduces the beauty and wonder of their created self-hood (in God's image) to a sexual obsessiveness.

The move is one to offset the loss entailed in the fall, and exemplified in the constant and pervasive discontents of life. It is a strategy to deal with the 'problem of evil'. But one that leads to a futile empty self-referential dead-end.

Thus the conversational opportunity for the gospel.

It would be a long conversation to get the other person's 'settings' tuned to the issues of discontent and the slipped mooring that we all suffer but for Christ's indwelling spirit.

The conversation, once the person has asserted their 'gender' (as such people are wont to at the earliest opportunity), is then about what 'identity' means; how it attaches them to a community; how we all need community.

The conversation might then flow to the reality of that need, but its contradiction of the materialism that pervades the modern thought-world brought by Darwinian (or any materialistic) Evolution.

After all, why would a bunch of molecules that give nothing but chemical signals have anything to do with a need for 'identity' let alone the idea of 'identity' itself. Yet the need is there.

However, the need which emerges (as we know) as a fracture in the fabric of reality brought by our denial of life (only available truly in Christ), cannot be resolved within that fractured reality. It will always be unsatisfactory.

The need emerges on the basis of our created nature: we are created for community, and for that lovingly. Just as God is love, and his being is of community in the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit.

We are cut off from sharing in that community and without it seek to bind up the rupture with some futile 'identity' of mere assertion. An assertion the locus of which is merely the self seeking its own introverted and ungrounded definition.

As Sartre is reputed (but perhaps unlikely -- I have no reference to this) to have said: 'No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.'

Because, without an infinite (or independently (self) existent) reference point, there are only ungrounded relative 'references' which are because ungrounded, meaningless and always existentially disconnected.

This basis for conversation could lead to the Pauline point of inflection in Acts 17 on Mars Hill: that we have a creator who made us like himself, for fellowship with him.

The whole question of origins, materialism and substance dualism opens up with exciting possibilities.