If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try. (Chapter 2)
Being wrecked in the same vessel, being restored and united under one God, with hearts and minds attuned to the welfare of others, the things which matter so much to some people no longer signify much to them. (Chapter 11)
Growing up, I was constantly asking myself who I was, and finding trivial answers. I liked this composer or that composer, so that was my identity. I didn't like playing rugby but I did like knitting. Well, there's an answer for me.
There are two aspects of identity in reality.
The first is the material aspect: the aggregate of likes, dislikes, activities, achievements, temperament, personality, experiences, and so on, which accumulate during a person's life. The younger a person is, the more of a blank sheet they are. As on an election night, the first ten returns out of six hundred do not give a picture of the overall result. The first half-dozen features of identity that emerge, the first likes, dislikes, activities, achievements do not represent the picture of the person, who, at that point, is chiefly potential. Material identity is gradually actualised over the course of a life, not identified or, heaven forbid, chosen. Having an identity at fifteen, twenty-five, even fifty, is grossly premature. Wait and see.
Such an identity is an identity of composite substances. Connecting with Couperin or Klimt is substantive. Being therefore part of a category of people that like Couperin or Klimt is an accidental but uninformative fact. If you have ever met a group of people who happen to like the same composer, artist, author, political party, team, or whatever, you'll soon discover that the commonality of the point of intersection is eclipsed by the myriad differences, and even that commonality, where it can be found, is blanched or even fragmented: the person can like precisely the same moment in a Howells Gloria and yet like that moment in a completely different way. One feels this person, even on this point of intersection, is a complete stranger. Identity as a collection of belongings to a set of groups is a secondary way of coming at the question; i.e. identifying who I am by saying which groups I belong to and then inferring something about me from the fact I belong to that group, fails descriptively, as, from belonging to a group, very little can be actually be inferred about the person. The more specific the feature, the more informative: being fond of Dostoyevsky's The Devils or of Die Frau ohne Schatten, hanging out in Chelsea or Prussia Cove, will provide at least the beginnings of an indication. Saying I'm British, saying that my origins are French, saying that I'm male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, places me in a category so broad it is almost entirely uninformative. To hold on to one or more of those macro-identifiers, those belongings to impossibly large groups, is to say precisely nothing. I'm French, then am I? Which French? Which French person am I like? All of them? Listen to French radio. They're all arguing. They can't agree who they are.
What does this have to do with the AA programme?
Everything.
The programme involves a journey from the ego-built world of illusions to the God-granted world of actualisation through service of God. In deciding to turn my will and life over to God, I decided to detach myself from everything I thought I was, the labels, the cultural accoutrements, the skills, the attainments, and instead allow God to write who I am on a blank sheet of paper. Tabula rasa heading via terra incognita and mare incognitum to ultima thule.
There is no mirror in the world of the spirit. This means I cannot discern my identity from the material side of the divide. I can regard the trivial externalities of what might in the past have constituted my identity. But the mistake is actually to insist on having a specific, identifiable, communicable identity in the first place and then, faute de mieux, to cobble it together like a Frankenstein's monster of parts. I identify myself as [insert characteristic: a Londoner] is a failed proposition: who I really am is the I doing the identifying; the subject matter is the I doing the identifying, but that I is indivisible and cannot be reduced to a single subject predicative. I'm not a Londoner: I live in London. I'm not a broccoli eater: I eat broccoli. Any attempt to identify myself with anything is necessarily, ridiculously inadequate. Just because I cannot see who I am in the realm of the spirit, who I am in the eyes of God, does not mean I need to paper over the gap with a billposter, an advertisement, like an unoccupied shop. The shop is occupied, and I should not be papering over the window. No, the question must be set aside:
Questions of identity, which mattered to me so much before, do not matter to me now (see the second quotation above).
Now, I promised a second aspect of identity, and it is this. Take your best friend, and write down the fifty most characteristic features of them. Would that identify them? Would that capture the essence? If any of those were erased, do they cease to be them? When they die, and those identifiers are no more, has the person been deleted?
There is something beyond these laughable substitutes for identity, these emperor's new clothes thrown over the nakedness of not doing God's will, of floundering around the world cut off from my source, or over the real clothes of doing God's will, yet it is in doing God's will that lies my real identity: my identity as a piece in God's jigsaw puzzle. This identity is elusive and indescribable. This is the essence of each of the people one knows, quite separate from any of their characteristics manifesting in the material world. Just like the voice of a character in a good novel, for instance the first-person hero of the early Hervé Bazin novels or the narrator in The Incorrigible Optimists Club, the person shines through, beyond any stated, statable characteristics, despite such characteristics not because of them.
What is this identity? Child of a living Creator: taking from its essence and related fundamentally to all other beings. That's my identity.