More Deep Thoughts about Identity from George MacDonald
This is my second post on an inspiring passage about identity called “The White Stone” in C.S. Lewis’s anthology of George MacDonald readings.
As I write this post, tens of thousands of protesters are gathered in cities throughout the country to call for justice and reform after the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020. I feel so much grief over the long and sordid history of racism and injustice in my country that has destroyed countless lives. 155 years after the abolition of slavery and 60 years after the civil rights movement, we are still unraveling the consequences of generations of evil. I don’t know the way forward for America, but I do want to listen and learn, and I do know that every person on earth bears the image of God and deserves to be treated with dignity and equality. That is what MacDonald helps us appreciate, and what I want to explore in this post.
As MacDonald explains, every person expresses the the loving, personal intention of the Creator, and each person has an individual and peculiar relationship with God. This is the idea of the white stone with the secret name.
MacDonald writes: “The name is one ‘which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.’ Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship Him.”
When God looks at us, he sees “our soul’s picture.” He understands us. Each one of us bears a unique reflection of God’s character and has the capacity to perceive and share something peculiar, or unique, about God.
Wow! Let’s just consider how amazing that is. There are almost eight billion people in the world in 2020. Approximately 360,000 babies are born each day. Yet just as each baby, child, and adult has a peculiar fingerprint, they also have a peculiar name from God that expresses the meaning of their soul and reflects the blossoming of their true self.
I love to people watch at big events. It’s fun to see what people wear and how they act with their friends, but I can only see their outsides. I don’t know their stories: what happened to them when they were children, what their family is like, what they love to do, what they think about, what they are struggling with that day.
It is awe-inspiring to consider as MacDonald does that “for each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret—the secret of a new name. In every man, there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter.” We can see only the outside of others. Even with our closest friends and loved ones, we can only imperfectly perceive their inner lives. But God enters into the lonely spaces of our innermost souls.
In Christianity we often talk about being made in the image of God. Our creativity, rationality, capacity for love and relationship, and attraction to beauty all mirror who God is. But God is infinite and we are so very finite, and for this reason, it takes all of us together to reflect the image of God.
In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes friendship in a way that illuminates MacDonald’s concept of personality in relationship to an infinite God: “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. . . . In this, friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest” (62).
God is like a diamond with a facet for each of His children. We see God’s brightness and beauty more fully as each of His children relates to Him. We’ll experience this completely in heaven, but we can have tastes of it now as we lean into God and to each other.
It’s tempting to hang out exclusively with people who are like me, to read books and articles that I already agree with, and attend church with people whose life experiences are like mine. But when I live this way, I experience only a tiny portion of reality, and I wall myself off from knowing God more fully. MacDonald’s vision, on the other hand, is so encouraging: “Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows something—it may be without knowing that he knows it—which no one else knows: and . . . it is everyone’s business, as one of the kingdom of light and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest.”
