GUEST COLUMNIST: Breaking out to find our identity

His sweatshirt said he was a Marlboro Man. When he got up to leave, his jacket identified him as being from the University of North Carolina. Reebok was printed all over his sneakers and his chain-smoking wife pledged her allegiance to Gucci all over the front of her sweater. Both had on jeans that said Levis. Just who were these people? It was clear they felt comfortable wearing everybody else's name on just about every piece of clothing they wore. But how did they define themselves? How is it any of us develop a self identity? Sociologists believe that, in part, we develop a self-identity because society serves as a "looking glass" image which reflects back to us various messages about who we are. (Thus, your mother and your religious tradition reminds you to give serious thought to who your friends are going to be.) Most of us are reared in places of safety -- places where the "looking glass" helps us feel loved and comforted -- where we know we belong. These places are almost always homogeneous. The people around us who probably look like us, will teach us their rules of behavior, how to think, and what attitudes to have in order to maneuver in our safe little world. It is in homogeneous places that we first learn our identity. As we grow older in our adolescence we often grow feisty and challenge some of these ideas, definitions, the rules and to question the authority of those determined to define us. In reality, this rebellion is a healthy response which prepares us to leave the safety of our secure homogeneous "world." We soon discover that we haven't known the world at all. In the Christian tradition the metaphor of Jesus as a good shepherd is used to describe the concern and guidance which God shows to us. A shepherd watches over the sheep whether they are corralled in a pasture, scampering over the rocky crags of a cliff, or stumbling down steep hills lost in the wilderness. The sheep have the freedom to go "in and out of the pasture." (John 10:9) This analogy is helpful in understanding the importance both of belonging in safe, homogeneous groups ("in the pasture") as well as experiencing the vitality of heterogenous groups ("outside the pasture.") After all, every animal confined to a pen knows that the foraging is usually always better outside the fence, just around the corner! To get to it however they have to be willing to risk. If we are to grow into independent mature adults, at some point, we must leave the safety of homogeneous groups and enter the adventure must leave the safety of homogeneous groups and enter the adventure of life that takes place in the wild woolliness of the Unknown, the worlds of the Other. It may begin by leaving the home, leaving the Midwest, or simply by changing politics. We usually discover the world is very strange to us; not everyone thinks like we do, observes the same rules, or dresses, eats or speaks the same either. Just as the fences around our groups kept things safe, they kept things the same as well. The danger of staying in safe homogeneous groups is we can begin to feed on our prejudice, become xenophobic and tribalistic in our thinking. For example, a battered woman needs the safety of an all-women's group where her reality does not have to be explained, justified or defended. This is a place where she will heal and grow strong, willing to trust her own reality again. At some point in her healing however she will need to reenter groups with men. This will challenge her assumption that all men are violent brutes. In homogeneous groups we can over-exaggerate the differences between Us versus Them, demonizing the Other, fueling our rage. Thus, white men from a threatened, lower economic class who band together in a hate group will more than likely begin to rage against people of color, or women, or gays and lesbians as the reason for their problems. But beyond the fences outside the pasture, everything is up for grabs. Some respond by deciding the rest of the world is wrong and should instead live by their rules, the correct rules! This is often heard in the refrain, "Why can't they just be like we are? Why do they have to be so different? Just what is the big deal about??" All of us need the homogeneous groups, including the proverbial men's locker rooms in order to affirm our identity, to define our own agenda as a group, to lick our wounds when necessary, to gather courage to face the often brutal reality of what lies beyond. However, significant insight and growth happens for us when we reexamine our assumptions about reality and compare our world view against that of others who are dissimilar. Do we lose ourselves in such an investigation of differences? Do we melt down into an indistinguishable glob if we begin to appreciate and sample another's culture or agree with some aspects of another's reality? I think not. We do however readjust our looking glasses a bit. We broaden our understandings of what it is to be human. We begin to recognize the complexities in life and the glorious and wondrous diversity of the Creation. Not only will we begin to know more fully who we are, we will become more intentional about the kind of label we are willing to attach to ourselves. We become less willing to be defined as one of the many Marlboro Men or Gucci Women. By surrounding ourselves both with people who are similar as well as those who are different from us we risk losing our too-small world and may discover life is an amazing adventure. It's far too exciting to let others define the limits.

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