Enjoy! As much as you can, anyway, knowing that you don't really know who you are.

One the most challenging questions we all face in life is, “I wonder if there’s anything good to eat in the fridge?”

And, of course, there isn’t, so we’re forced to go out to eat, or to make an unscheduled visit to the grocery store, or to open a can of Health Valley’s 99 Percent Fat-Free Vegetarian Chili, which just barely qualifies as something to eat, let alone as something good to eat, but, hey, it’s there, and it’s probably got to be eaten sometime, and we’re too lazy to get up off the couch and leave the house, so it might as well be heated up now.

Or eaten out of the can with a plastic fork, cold.

Lazy is as lazy does.

But one of the other big questions many of us wrestle with in life is, “Who am I?”

This question is at least as difficult to answer as the one about what’s in the fridge, partly because, by default, we don’t even know who’s asking. The question hangs there in the air, just outside our peripheral vision, quietly tip-tap-tapping at our inner thoughts like a tiny jackhammer trying to break up the thick concrete walls of our skulls. It never goes away, either—it’s there when we wake up in the morning to brush our teeth, it follows us to lunch with our co-workers, and it gleefully joins us for a lovely apéritif with friends after dinner.

It is, in essence, a relentless nattering nabob of negativism that refuses to be ignored. Or divorced. Or killed.

Faced with the inevitable, and not knowing what else to do, most of us tend to answer the question—if we bother to answer it at all—by telling people what we do, instead of who we are.

 “I’m an English professor,” we say, blithely, as if that’s all there is to it. Or, perhaps:

“I’m a student, but I haven’t signed up for any classes yet because I’m not even sure I want to be a student.”

“I’m an ex-Mossad assassin with awesome hair.”

“I’m a cheese connoisseur who likes purple.”

“I’m a writer.”

“I’m a whore.”

Bohnhoeffer looked and talked like a pacifist, but he tried to blow up Hitler.

To be honest, though, decent folk rarely admit to being writers or whores unless they’re drunk, or trying to get paid, or they’re pressed to confess to it in a court of law. But the point is, we all sense that we’re not defined by what we do, especially since what we do varies widely according to time and place. We all sense that we’re much more than what we do, although how much more is as unclear to us as the meaning of our own lives. Perhaps that’s because the definition of self is so transient. We’re one thing when we’re 5 years old, another when we’re 25, and, generally speaking, nothing much at all by the time we reach 125. And because the target’s always moving, it’s as impossible to accurately pin down our identities as it is to put on a blindfold and pin the tail on the donkey at little Billy’s seventh birthday party.

We often expect our spiritual leaders to do a better job of answering tough questions about our place in the cosmos, but they rarely do. The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer was famously troubled by the question of who he was, for instance.

A lifelong pacifist, Bonhöffer also spent some time in Spain, where he became a fan of the bloody and brutal sport of bullfighting, and a fan of the bloody and brutal sport of systematic Christian theology. Later, near the end of World War II, he also participated in a secret and ultimately unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler with a bomb. Bonhöffer fervently believed Hitler wasn’t Der Führer, or The Leader, but Der Verführer, or The Abuser. But the contradiction between Bonhöffer’s non-violent beliefs and his very violent actions bothered him for a long time—at least until he was executed by Hitler’s hangman, perhaps even longer than that. He wrote a poem about it, which he called, probably not coincidentally, Who Am I? Read it for yourself:

Who am I? They often tell me

I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me

I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly,

As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I bore the days of misfortune

Equally, smilingly, proudly,

Like one accustomed to win.

———————————

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were

compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,

Tossing in expectation of great events,

Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,

Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

———————————

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!

Three facts are made clear by this poem: One, Bonhöffer wasn’t much of an assassin. Two, he was even less of a poet. And three, he wasn’t all that different from the rest of us despite being a famous speaker, author, religious leader and martyr; he was, at his core, deeply uncertain about his true identity, unable to satisfactorily answer the question, “Who Am I?”

Which raises another thorny question: If a great theologian like Bonhöffer couldn’t answer the question “Who Am I?”, should we bother to try?

Probably not.

Like life itself, the question of who we are is too complicated.

But the question’s always there, and it never stops pestering us. We’re forced either to attempt to ignore it, or to keep trying to answer it, just like we keep opening the door of the fridge, hoping against hope that this time—just this one time—we’ll magically find a slice or two of leftover pizza, or a box of uneaten Chinese takeout, or enough turkey and cheese to make a decent sandwich. Anything so that we don’t have to open a lousy can of chili for dinner.