Spiritual Identity and Narrative: Fragmentation, Coherence, and Transformation

We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one true faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of any orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, are complicated by our lives.

Believer and unbeliever are in the same predicament thrown back onto themselves in complex circumstances, looking for a sign. As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer where it belongs.

This is the significance of a piece of writing that makes a case for the Communion of Saints by way of one girl’s short, hard, complicated life—and, perhaps, the significance of the religious faith that makes its case through the account of God’s experience of life on earth as a certain person at a particular place and time. There is no way to seek truth except personally. Every story worth knowing is a life story. . . . Like it or not, we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours.¹

—Paul Elie

Believers and non-believers alike must face the task of creating a personal life story. Often they must do so without being able to appropriate a generic secular story or a faith story offered by a religious or spiritual tradition in a one-size-fits all fashion. Paul Elie fully embraces a particular version of the believing self that has been emerging for some time now. As he puts it, “we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours.” Although this story into which we are born will not by itself supply meaning and coherence to our lives, nonetheless, we creatively make use of existing stories as we fashion our unique meaning-endowing life-stories.

This process of narrative meaning making through the creation of a life story of faith constitutes our spiritual identity which each of us in the context of late-modernity or postmodernity must create for ourselves in relationship to the stories within which we come to life. I am proposing that this narrative construction of spiritual identity is virtually impossible for a fragmented self and that the development of a coherent sense of self must be stable but not rigid in order to remain open to future life adaptation and to a transformation that only God can effect.

After Hours, Courtesy of Camil Tulcan

Postmodernity and the Fragmented Self

I have long been intrigued by the assumptions of many in academic circles that a sui generis, fragmented, rootless—nothing but a narratively constructed self is a good or an inevitable development. In this account, we tend to assume that the self is closer to a purely fictional self than one that has for good or ill had any effect in time on others or in the world through one’s actual bodily and spiritual existence. This postmodern self has been characterized as a saturated self,² or an empty self,³ or a chameleon self, ever being created anew. While some people of all ages are burdened with or even celebrate such a fragmented or only partially coherent self, it is amazing how many people work very hard at achieving a reflexive self, expressed in a temporal, coherent, and self-defining life-story. They not only rehearse this story interiorly, but increasingly extend their autobiographical creations beyond private journals to on-line blogs and other forms of autobiographical writing that have multiplied significantly over the last quarter of a century. Those of us who are invested in spiritual formation, spiritual direction, passing on a religious tradition, or for that matter, living our own spiritual lives with intentionality and coherence are hopefully more interested in fostering in ourselves and others a coherent self that is capable of undergoing considerable transformation without becoming stranded either in fragmentation or rigid coherence.

The postmodern self appears to...