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 gender too, although the quest doesn’t end there. The best place to start is thus at the beginning – our upbringing, our childhood, and family relationships mark our later attitudes indelibly. I invariably 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 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 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. 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 dust ball 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 Orpah Winfrey way! Basically, we just want to embody the ideal image of ourselves. Popular psychology has many supposed Christian leanings that make 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 imagio 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 imagio 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 that 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, sculptured 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 truly discover 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 conversion. The joy and the struggle of being, and the agony and the ecstasy of learning to embody God’s great vision of/for 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.
Wong Ming Yoot teaches English Literature in the English Department of Universiti Malaya. This article was first published in the June 2002 issue of Kairos Publication. Reprinted with permission. Enquiries: kairos@tm.net.my. |
