Remembering Who You Are

In 2010 country singer Miranda Lambert recorded and released a song written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin entitled “The House that Built Me”. It was a clever song as well as a moving one, playing on the notion that we build houses; houses do not build us.  The point of the song, however, was that the house the singer once lived in did build her— i.e. it was responsible for the kind of girl she became.  In the song, the singer confessed, “You leave home, you move on, and you do the best you can.  I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am.”

       Her solution?— To revisit her childhood home:  “I thought if I could touch this place or feel it, the brokenness inside me might start healing.  Out here, it’s like I’m someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself.”  Accordingly, she visited her old childhood home, knocked on the door and asked the present owner if she could just step inside for brief visit: “If I could walk around, I swear I’ll leave. Won’t take nothin’ but a memory from the house that built me.”

       It was a lovely song and went on to win great critical acclaim, possibly because it tells the story of so many people.  The houses we once lived in become the focal point for the memories of our childhood with all its formative magic.  Then we leave home, we move on, and we do the best we can.  And sometimes we get lost in this old world and forgot who we are.

       A quick visit and tour of the old family home, however, may not, in fact, help us remember who we are.  Maybe it can; it certainly seems to have had that power for the writers of the song, Mr. Tom Douglas and Mr. Allen Shamblin.  It all depends upon exactly what did and didn’t happen to us when we were children growing up inside the old family home.

       Sometimes the memories of what happened in the house that built us are not pleasant memories.  People that come from toxic and dysfunctional families, families where addiction or abuse or violence reigned, certainly are unlikely to find healing for their brokenness through a quick tour of the scene where so much misery occurred. Remembering who we are presupposes that we know who and what  we are.  Who are we really?  What is our truest and deepest and most authentic self?

       For most of those reading this blog, the question cannot be separated from conversion and faith in Christ.  In my own case, meaningful as that would be for my nostalgic self, I would not be able to find out who I really am by visiting my old family home because I was not a Christian at the time when I lived there.  For me as perhaps for many, conversion and faith in Christ came after I had moved from the childhood home.

       Nevertheless, it is, I submit, a universal reality that we still forget who we are— at least at times and at least for a while. We do things and act in ways that are not truly authentic and that do not express who we are in Christ.  Christians don’t act this, so why am I acting like this?

Here I cannot help but remembering the murmured comment of a character in the series Downton Abbey, the lady’s maid Mrs. O’Brien.  She was about to do something terrible to her mistress, Lady Grantham, as the latter was bathing.  At the last minute she changed her mind, saying to herself in the mirror, "Sarah O'Brien, that's not who you are". (Viewers of the series will also recall that O’Brien’s change of heart came just a little too late.)  But regardless of the severity or otherwise of the deed, we all do things that are contrary to who we really are in Christ.  We forget who we are, having gotten a bit lost in this old world.

St. Paul knew this and warned us about it.  That is why he wrote to the Roman Christians, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). 

In Christ we are restored to our true selves, the self that God made us to be and wants us to be.  Paul contrasts this new self (sometimes called “the new man”) with the old self, “the old man”.  To the Ephesians he wrote, “Lay aside your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24).  If we walk long enough in the world, the world will work to squeeze us into its mould, tempting us to conform to its false values and ways.  It will push us to forget who we are and to identify our true self with our old self.  We must resist and remember who we really are in Christ.

How do we do this?  Visiting our old family home may help, if we were raised there as devout Christians.  But the Church offers us something else, something more effective.  It is called “Lent”.

The Lenten season, whether it be the Great Lent preceding Pascha or one of the other three Lenten seasons in the Orthodox church calendar such as the Dormition Fast, is a time to stop and reflect and remember who we are.  We make this discovery afresh as we embrace the traditional Lenten disciplines of fasting, extra prayer, and extra reading of Holy Scripture.  All of these combine as a mirror to remind; they drum into our too often forgetful skulls who we really are: the servants and handmaidens of the living God, the disciples of Jesus Christ, members of His holy Body, soldiers in His sacred army, armed and militant in the earth.

The Church of God is our true home, regardless of our childhood experiences.  Lent is a time to tour that House of God afresh, to enter more deeply into its many rooms through our Lenten disciplines, to walk around in them and remember again who we really are.  From that Lenten sojourn there we take a memory.  And we remember who we are.