Our identity is in some way wrapped up in what we think—even what we believe or trust about the world. What I allow my mind to trust, my self will entertain through the practice of these thoughts. When I think of places I imagine symbols first, then, once the symbols that makeup a place are remembered, I step back and perceive the place. There are the pieces of our lives as people and there is our person. And our posture in the world points toward something. We all lean into something with the way we dance out our thoughts. What is that something? Is is a person? Is it God? Or is it just our own shadow?
I was at a beloved coffee shop that is nested near the foothills of the mountains a few nights ago. It is a cool spot and an odd community. Its your typical coffee shop on some days and on others it is just, different. First, they sell ice cream, which may not be odd but it is certainly extra. Also, no one seems to be concerned with up keep—unlike the Starbucks a few venues over. But maybe the oddest thing about the place is the people. Any mold you could manufacture, some kind of typology, just wouldn’t work. Useless perhaps, you were looking through the lens of Peter Pan and the lost boys, then you might get somewhere. It is a rebel coffee shop, and I knew it the first time I stepped in and was served by what I thought was a pirate. So as I sat with my friend the other night—both of us needing to study—we couldn’t help but feel at home in the oddness. We exchanged a polite nod as we noticed the career artist giving the blind woman a neck rub, the Aramian men getting their picture taken, the drug addict meeting with his mentor, and the high school students talking about politics. It all fit in this low lit coffee spot in the mountains.
“Ultimately, one’s belief is not in one’s own faith; within one’s experiences in faith and one’s decisions, one believes in someone else who is more than one’s own faith. Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification…” -moltman
Moltman goes on to say that those whom God identifies with, then, are those abandoned, the odd ones who trust toward Jesus’ faithfulness. Jesus’ way is becoming quite odd to me these days, or as both Moltman and Janna have said quite well, it is marked by “strangeness”. I take that as a liberating task, to be at home in the strangeness at home with the oddity of grace and life full of reckless love.
