In speaking of personhood, it’s very difficult not to tackle the issue of gender. For women, particularly, it is near impossible not to consider how notions of gender limitations have affected the way they look at their own sense of self and personhood.

My own understanding of, and struggle with, personhood has had much to do with sexuality too, although the quest doesn’t end there.  Then too, our upbringing, our childhoods and family relationships all make their mark on the way we conceive of ourselves as gendered persons. So whenever I think of sexuality or personhood, I invariably take that first walk down the avenue of my past.

The Perilous Journey Into the Past; Or, Freudian Thoughts

When I was young, I had little conception of gendered difference except in the most obviously biological of ways. I had a sister and a brother, so presumably, I knew what was what. My parents were rather careless and remiss about such things, and forgot to mention that being a girl, XX, I was expected to behave differently from my brother, the XY at home.

My sister was more the typical “girl” of the family, being rather given at a young age to hankering after pretty dresses and the like. My regulation costume, out of school, was a pair of shorts and a striped yellow T-shirt that I wore to death. Incidentally, when I was 11, I was a nifty sprinter, and the only one in class who could do cartwheels (ahh, the pride of life …).  I also climbed a lot of trees, and hung upside down from many a branch, to the dismay of my best friend’s parents, who were trying to instill lady-like qualities in their daughter. My favourite book characters were The Famous Five, The Naughtiest Girl In School, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and a most annoying schoolboy called Jennings. You see here the beginnings of my downfall. My friend will attest to the fact that my one ambition, at 11, was to be a sailor: she admired me tremendously for that. For someone who didn’t have sea legs, that was overweening ambition. But never did I imagine that that was something I could not do because I was a girl.

When did I first learn sexist ideas and language? In spite of my “liberated” childhood, perhaps the confining moments did begin there after all. They probably started with my sister’s Domestic Science classes, when the uncomfortable thought of things only girls did began to impress itself on my young mind, till then a tabula rasa in sexism.  When she was 13, my sister had to learn Domestic Science. Every week, she came back with some species of unidentifiable food, and in order not to discourage her tragic efforts (there were copious tears shed …), my brother and I were enjoined to eat the stuff … It was her custard caramel that did it for us. (Well, at least we managed to tell what it was.) By the time I got to Form One, my parents happily relinquished me to the Commerce teacher.  I guess my childhood was not really the place where the battle of the sexes was properly conducted, although the Domestic Science tragedy was a foretaste (bleah!) of things to come. I only truly enrolled in Sexism 101 when I entered the precincts of the Church. 

The Chapel Perilous

I didn’t understand personhood for a long time, in spite of Jesus demonstrating to me what “free to be” meant. The first church I seriously walked into was a Pentecostal church near my house. To give them their due, the only sexist thing they did was to keep calling me “sister” (hallelujah!).  Later, when I got “seriouser” and “seriouser”, I encountered other stranger Christians who kept shoving wok and broom in my direction. I had great trouble wondering what domesticity had to do with my working out my faith. For some inexplicable reason, my spirituality was inextricably tied to my apron strings. Yet I knew I was called simply to be a person before God. I was a sinner saved by grace; it never occurred to me that my category was “female sinner” (“and Eve was deceived; but Adam was not!”). Those were the days of my Great Rebellion, when I was angry with God and his church for these confinements to my person.  For a moment, I almost believed that transformation lay in utter denial of my essential self.

I have since learnt that personhood involves (r)evolving ideas of the core self gathering and growing its inner resources to itself. (Imagine a dustball growing bigger and more substantial the more it rolls about.) It involves words like “integrity”, “the authentic self” and “inner and outer weather.”  These seem like big words, but they are not. Integrity refers to your inner thoughts (inner weather) matching up precisely with your outer manner and actions (outer weather). Only an affirmed person of strong self-worth is a person of integrity. Against this is the hypocrite character whom Jesus strongly denounced. The hypocrite is the person who has allowed his authentic (true) self to atrophy and encouraged his false self to project itself to the world. In ancient Greek drama, actors wore theatrical masks to suggest the character/part they were playing. These masks were called personae. Little wonder that the word “hypocrite” in our modern understanding derives from the original Greek word for “actor”: hupokrites. Once upon a time, I thought mistakenly that I had to be the masked hupokrites to be Christian. For a while, I was almost persuaded.

Past the Gates of Folly: Imago Dei on the Gilded Plains

Pop. psych. proposes that we can “find” ourselves, renew, restructure and reinvent ourselves according to the configurations of a desired blueprint that we can come up with. This is the “wholeness” and “healing” often offered to genuinely hurting individuals the Oprah Winfrey way!  Basically, we just want to embody the ideal image of ourselves. Popular psychology has many supposed Christian leanings that makes it attractive and appealing, but for one thing: How do we balance this with Christ’s injunction to crucify ourselves?  Can we achieve the ideal image while ramming the nails into ourselves?

But this is precisely where our Christian distinctiveness lies. Yes, we have the good news of Jesus to proclaim, but it is anchored not in our introspection but in a decided looking away from ourselves towards God. Our longing for self-discovery and fulfilment is dependent on our yearning after God, first of all. And our search for identity and personhood delves into our very heart’s search for the heart of God. It is only when we see him that a strange thing happens: we also see ourselves! Personhood becomes suddenly not a fluttering notion, a remote possibility, but concrete truth in the mutual gazing that goes on between God and us. It is a breathlessly renewing restoration of not just our “ideal image” of ourselves, but God’s vision of us as the imago dei! And when God confronts us, breaking through the stale layers of our inherited and imprisoning ideas, he is purified air entering our deprived lungs for the first time ever, doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. In psalmic vocabulary, God’s yeshuwah reaches down and delivers us by snatching us out of a cramped enclosure and setting us down in a broad room.  He remakes us anew.

Repentance or the return journey to God’s embrace began again for me as I worked out these same realisations for myself. It was when I finally put aside every other consideration and turned to gaze on God alone that I gained in substantiality, and in an anchoredness that has not left me.  I don’t know what healing exactly God wrought in the recesses of my complex and complicated being, but he did all that was needed in creating a safe harbour for me.  I have come to understand and appreciate how deeply my personhood affects God. I am reminded that I am indeed imago dei, as we all are, creatures “made in the image of God.” And it is liberating.

“Till We have Faces”: The Knightly Prize

The Christian understanding of imago dei is no clearer than in C.S. Lewis’ book called Till We Have Faces, in which he describes the Human Soul’s struggle to become. The achieving of the goal was in the character, Psyche’s losing and then regaining her face and features after countless trials in the Underworld.  During the perilous time, she is a cipher, and a blank space confronts us where her face should be. She carries a bowl of water to reflect this blankness to herself. On the day she sees her face looking back at her, she knows that her trials are at an end. For me, this is the journey God takes us all through in our quest for personhood. Particularly, he wants the stamp of his character on us; if in the process, this requires a painful taking apart of our false selves (facelessness) and  recreating our authentic selves, God will do it.  But at the end of the Quest Perilous lies our pristine and beautiful face, sculpted and crafted by the only hand which knows how. This face is no persona, or mask, and we are no hupokrites who must play a part to hide our blankness. This is our true face that God sees when we look upwards to return his healing gaze. 

In Conclusion: “Unafraid to Be”

It will take our lifetime to discover fully all that God meant us to be. Our quest for personhood does not end when we first become Christians. In fact, so much of our struggle for authenticity and realness begins right after the point of our conversion. The joy and the struggle of being, and the agony and the ecstasy of learning to embody God’s great vision for/of me,  are the encompassing experiences laid out for me in my life. In spite of the fact that personhood has not come easily to me, or that realising the substance of my Christian faith in my self has not been achieved without great cost, I am simply grateful that I have become “unafraid to be” most truly human and most alive.

This was first published in a Kairos monograph.

Of all the saints of God, St. Francis is probably the one most identified with nature. His order, the Franciscan Order, established in the 13^th century, attempts, in its approach to life, to seek always peace, justice and respect for all of God’s creatures. “Pace e bene” (“Peace and all good”) is the greeting used by Franciscans to all alike, whether human or beast. It expresses the heart of Franciscan spirituality, and encapsulates their mission to care for God’s good earth, seeing at once the interdependence of all God’s creatures on one another. Francis’ sermon to the little birds of the air and his “Canticle to the Sun” demonstrate the respect and sensitivity he held for the natural world as the beautiful creation of God. Though marred by sin, he believed that “it was very good” (Genesis 1: 31) when God first brought it to being. In this, Francis’ understanding of life is typically and conventionally Christian.

“Pace e bene”

Born Giovanni di Bernardone, Francis was the son of a well-to-do cloth merchant. His father nicknamed him, “Francesco” (“Frenchie”), possibly because of his fondness for all things French. One day, as the story goes, Francis was praying in the Church of San Damiano when he heard Christ calling to him, “Francis, Francis! Go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruin!” For two years, Francis obeyed the command literally, and rebuilt several churches in and around Assisi. In time, he recognised the spiritual significance of his call, and eventually established the order that would be characterised by the peace of God that brought wholeness to all that were “falling into ruin.”

St. Francis and his friars exhibited a joyful and radiant peace that has been recognised as typically Franciscan through the centuries. The reason for this is that they understood that the deep interconnectedness they saw in creation came from a single source. And if that were so, then they believed, all of creation was held by an intuitive sense of universal community. Sin shattered this harmonious and beautiful whole, but Christ, who came and espoused poverty in his Incarnation, restored this blessed unity. Francis and his followers were deeply motivated by their reflection on the Incarnation of Christ. As Jesus allowed God’s love to flow through him to the broken world, so likewise, the Franciscan was to allow Christ’s love to flow through him to the world. The life of the Franciscan is in imitation of Christ through selfless, willing sacrifice in giving up everything to live out the life of Christ who gave up all for us.

The Incarnation tells the eternal story of the God who breathed out his shalom onto man through the life and death of Christ on the cross. Indeed, for the Franciscan, not only is the Incarnation central to life, but so is the cruciform, which he finds is the basic structure in all life, whether spiritual or physical.

From the cross, the peace of God flowed out from Christ’s wounds to a sinful and broken humanity. To accept the gift of God’s peace entails that we, first of all, acknowledge our conflicts, brokenness, sinfulness and woundedness. Accepting the peace of Christ means allowing that peace to flow through us in love to the rest of the world, permitting it to resolve our separation, division and isolation, and restore wholeness, oneness and healing to life. This is the meaning of integrity.

The Franciscan’s call leads him from a realisation of the multiplicity and shattered brokenness of life to a contemplation of the healing wholeness and oneness of God. He takes three vows: the vow of obedience, poverty, and chastity. Of the three, the Franciscan order is most closely associated with the vow of poverty. Francis spent his youth in thoughtless gaiety till Christ laid hold of him. Over a period of time, Francis came to see more and more the call to deny himself and take up his cross to follow Christ. When his friends questioned him concerning marriage, he answered that his love was Lady Poverty, indicating in those early days of conviction and compunction the principle that would come to characterise his order so meaningfully. And so, like his Saviour who became poor that we might be made rich, Francis sought to deny himself and give up his all in order to be the yielded channel of the gracious love of Christ emanating its peaceful rays out onto a darkened and sin-stained world. In being devoted to Christ, the Franciscan espouses himself to Lady Poverty, demonstrating not a sanctimonious and unnatural preference for being poor, but rather announcing to the world that freedom and richness in Christ could only be come by in obedience to Christ’s call to the rich, young ruler to “sell all you have, and come, follow me.”

Renewed Humanity, Restored Creation

Francis could not conceive of God’s joyful shalom being limited only to harmony and reconciliation between humans. Community built on unity and oneness had to be extended to include the entirety of creation as well if God’s peace were to have its proper influence over life. Indeed if God’s human children were to demonstrate the ministry of reconciliation faithfully, then they would have to contend with the obvious fact that wider creation too requires the hand of fellowship extended to it. The peace of God must extend beyond the human community to the wider community of creation. In thinking of the healing of God for our sin, we need too to consider the rest of creation, broken and scarred because of our wounding. In effect, creation truly groans because of us.

In a bid to spread the redemptive good news of God to all creation, Francis preached extemporaneous sermons to birds, encouraged villagers to feed hungry wolves, wrote a canticle to God praising Him for His children, the sun, moon, stars and so on. Crystal spring and friendly fire both found a hospitable companion in Francis, who delighted in communing with anything that was part of God’s beautiful earth. Humankind stood at the pinnacle of creation, but was certainly part and parcel of it, and not apart from it. Called to responsible stewardship, humankind was to express love, care and thoughtful consideration of the created order. Thus the wolf, the birds, the sun, moon, stars, springs, fire, even death, were brothers and sisters to St. Francis. After all, God was the Creator of All. Interdependence of all life was the mark of creation’s integrity. Isolation and division came about through the fall; but it was not so in the world’s genesis. To reiterate the point, Francis’ vision of the redemptive power of Christ involved and included humanity and the wider creation, so much so that he very often failed even to make a clear distinction between the two; so wholly integrated and connected were they that it was futile to try to separate them. To do so was to bring pain, agony, brokenness and violence …  

Thus Francis taught his disciples to regard Mother Earth with a gentleness and fondness that surely must mark him out as one of the first ecologists of Christendom! So enthralled was he by the wonders of creation that his disciple, Ugolino, later compiled a book of stories about Francis’ miracles and pious examples, calling it, Fioretti di Santo Francesco d’ Ascesi (The Little Flowers of St Francis of Assisi).

Creating open paths for God’s healing grace to flow out into one’s surrounds requires therefore that the individual function as a physical and spiritual locus which may be described as sacred space for God to occupy and channel his peace. Indeed as the yielded soul continues to emanate the radiance of Christ’s effulgent peace, then the sacred space from which God redeems and rescues devastated creation becomes bigger, wider and brighter.

All this would not be possible without the motive and inspiration of love. In the midst of a world violently torn apart by genocide, racism, and environmental disaster, therefore, the Franciscan friar persistently sings of a message filled with the shalom of God that restores oneness, unity and integrity. Only then would the redemptive work of Christ be universally seen and experienced in the healing wholeness and abundance of the created order. This peacefulness which surpasses all understanding stems from the root of love that is God Himself. Love is the Franciscan’s inspiration as peace is his tireless message.

Dona Nobis Pacem: Lord, give us peace

In 1912, a French prayer in song was published in a spiritual magazine called La Clochette (The Little Bell). Titled, “The Prayer of St. Francis,” the song was attributed to Francis himself, though it cannot be traced back any further than 1912. While its present form is probably not Francis’ work, nevertheless, its sentiments define so well the peacefulness and goodwill that Francis possessed towards all.  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, your pardon Lord;

and where there’s doubt, true faith in you;

O Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Perhaps no better conclusion could be found to press home the point of this prayer in song than in Francis’ own greeting: “Pace e bene!” Perhaps too in our consideration of the stewardship of creation, this greeting should be our central thought, our cruciform that stretches outwards towards all in a sacrificial gesture reflective of the undying love of God: “Pace e bene!” Peace and all good to you.

This was first published in a Kairos monograph titled, Creation, in 2010.