Chapter 1 - Waking: Buttoning up into our Identities
Waking: Buttoning up into our Identities
Today at lunch, I opened a new library book entitled The Little Village of Book Lovers. I will admit two things at this moment: 1) Yes, my children and I read during lunch. We are a homeschool family, and so we make our own rules, and one of our rules is: it’s okay to indulge in two pleasures at once: eating and reading. 2) I still choose books at the library mainly based on the titles and covers. You would think that someone who had a minor in English in college and who is an avid reader would have come up with a more sophisticated system than doing the very opposite of the old adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, but I will confess: I still do. What a beautiful title. It came home with me.
Between bites of homemade pizza, I found myself on page 9 with my eyes suddenly welling up with tears. I stopped for a minute and read it aloud and began a full, all-out cry. Here’s the passage that stopped me in my rather ordinary day up to that moment:
Hearts, you see, are like beautiful, perfectly glazed earthenware cups at first, but over the years they get cracked and nicked. Hearts break once, twice, repeatedly, and each time you do your best to put them back together again, trying to live with the wounds, patching them up with hope and tears.
I give full credit for this eloquent, heart-wrenching, beautiful writing to author Nina George. I have never met her or even heard of her, but I flipped to the back to see her picture and to look into the eyes of her photograph. She knew what she was talking about, and it was evident in her words. I thought perhaps I could see it in her eyes too.
Her description of grief and pain immediately caused my undesired but valid perception of myself as someone who has suffered to present itself. With that simple paragraph, she instantly pulled out of me the memories of my times of brokenness, those times when I felt like I was in thousands of pieces on the floor, thus my emotional outpouring.
In our focus book, Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren also caught my attention when she pulled out the visual imagery of “getting buttoned up into our identities” (15). I could picture precisely what she was saying by this, and I saw myself reflected in it. Some days I find myself pulling on the clothing of a basketball coach, other days it’s more professional attire for working in the church office, and I think of all the identities that we have on any given day. There are moments on any given day where I am enraptured in my focused identity as a reader and a lover of literature, and there are other moments where I am explaining to my children a concept of politics or religion or history or science or math or grammar where my intellect and articulation defines me in those moments, or at least that’s what I’d like to hope.
I hope that in all of my identities, there is a reflection of my eternal and most important identity of being a redeemed child of God. What identities do you button up into on any given day? When we think of how we define ourselves and what’s most important to us, we need to fully embrace that before all of those things, we are simply human - as Warren says, “unimpressive, vulnerable, newly born into the day, blinking as our pupils adjust to light and our brains emerge into consciousness” (16-17). Our humanity is what God loves best about us: created in the image of Him to glorify Him.
