What are you?
What am I?
How can you know what I am until you know who I am?
Who I am explains what I am.
But we have little time for knowing who anyone is.
Labels, please.
Declare yourself.
Christian.
Atheist.
Agnostic.
Spiritual.
Buddhist.
Muslim.
Republican.
Democrat.
Libertarian.
Liberal.
Conservative.
Shall I go on?
Busy. Busy. Busy.
Facebook.
Twitter.
Blog.
Texting.
Quick, immediate.
In 280 characters or less, what are you?
But I told you that you can not understand what I am until you understand who I am.
Who I am requires far more than 280 characters.
More than a Facebook comment.
Far more than a blog post.
Who I am requires time.
And effort.
And patience.
Too much work you say?
Then I feel no compulsion to tell you what I am.
The who comes before the what.
Which is all people seem to want to know about me.
Pigeonhole.
Classify.
Categorize.
Label.
Dismiss.
I am far more complicated than your attempts to what me before you who me.
So pigeonhole, classify, categorize, and label me,
but by no means know me.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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“Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh, you said “pigeonhole!”, huhuhuhuhuuhuhuhuhuhuh!!!”
Ha! I knew it… you finally admit what you are! All of it! Wow, you are a complicated eruption of nouns and adjectives… If only you had been properly churched, all of this might have been avoided. Now, what a mess.
Who’s on first.
Sadly, I think most people would rather make simple judgments in our internet era. Nobody really wants to know someone deeply, unless already attached.
I feel more complicated than labels can describe. Maybe I flatter myself.
What a timely post – I just finished watching a documentary on the CBC called “The Divided Brain,” based on the book by Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Dr. McGilchrist posits that our culture has been moving away from a big-picture relational and interconnected perspective towards a more compartmentalized one.
Ironic in the light of worldwide social media, but it seems to me that we increasingly see one another as disconnected factoids and labels and soundbites. To all too many people we’re 15-second commercials but they can’t be bothered to watch the whole show. 🙁
Obstaclechick, I hope we’re all more complicated than labels can describe…or else we all aspire to be.
If you read scientific papers, you know that at the beginning comes an abstract, where the paper is summarized. It is usually a a few paragraphs long, and a good one is incredibly hard to write. Packing the summary of an entire paper about even some teeny, tiny sliver of scientific experimentation in two or three paragraphs is a serious challenge.
And yet, our culture routinely summarizes entire, complex humans into a label or two. That’s normal, and to me, unacceptable.