Quotes About Identity

Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except in the daily life she leads. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

With all those places to live? How come nobody's anywhere?

I find it fascinating that this bottle is so cosmopolitan, a true multicultural brew, but it is so quiet about it.

Food is packed with meaning, as well as vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. It satisfies needs beyond those of the body and the pocketbook. Food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history.

Or could it be that there is something about globalisation itself that produces local culture, and promotes the constant formation of new forms of local identity, dress, cuisine, music, dance and language?

My parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family.

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.

If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.

The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.

In solitude, at last, we're able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain wound identified (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to redeem the world, as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God . . . The great surprise and irony is that you, or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation or its demise. It's sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn't it? All you can do is nurture it.

We have to let go of the passing names by which we have tried to name ourselves and become the "naked self before the naked God." That will always feel like dying, because we are so attached to our passing names and identities. Your bare, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. When you can rest there, you will begin to share in the universal Christ consciousness, the very "mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).

If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.

Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both "a lever and a place to stand" before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.