IDENTITY IN BEING BECOMING, BECOMING BEING

After posting Genesis Revisited, I woke on the morning of Christmas Eve 2020 with thoughts on Being Becoming, Becoming Being. To my surprise, I felt that I could suddenly string and express into words my personal take on the being becoming of Triune God and being becoming of a human being.
 
For the past forty-five years or so, I have long been grappling as to whether there is authenticity in the personality or identity of a human being or God for that matter, whether the ‘I’ and ‘me’ is authentic and real. If so, who am I? What is Identity? What is my being?
 
By and large, humans go through life embracing, accepting or even presuming that there is an authentic ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’. This is fundamentally essential to live life as we experience it and relate one to another in this plane and dimension.
 
We do not live life in complete isolation from everything. In each and every moment we are in continual relationship to every other existence that is apart from ourselves, in time and space, in this reality.
 
WE ARE NOT ALONE.
 
As such, for me, who and what I am, my identity, may be understood and defined as a ‘being’ of the sum of all my relationships.
 
An analogy of this, on a more minute and personal scale, can be better understood through a brief examination of the human body.
 
From an elemental perspective, “Almost 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. All 11 are necessary for life. The remaining elements are trace elements, of which more than a dozen are thought on the basis of good evidence to be necessary for life. All of the mass of the trace elements put together (less than 10 grams for a human body) do not add up to the body mass of magnesium, the least common of the 11 non-trace elements.”[1]
 
In terms of molecules, the human body is made up of:
 

• Water
• Proteins – including those of hair, connective tissue, etc.
• Fats (or lipids)
• Hydroxyapatite in bones
• Carbohydrates such as glycogen and glucose
• DNA
• Dissolved inorganic ions such as sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate, phosphate
• Gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, methanethiol. These may be dissolved or present in the gases in the lungs or intestines. Ethane and pentane are produced by oxygen free radicals.
• Many other small molecules, such as amino acids, fatty acids, nucleobases, nucleosides, nucleotides, vitamins, 

cofactors.

• Free radicals such as superoxide, hydroxyl, and hydroperoxyl.[2]

 
Our bodies also contain trillions of bacteria defining who we are and our wellbeing.
 
Any fluctuation in elemental, molecular or bacteria composition in our body will have a consequential, however minute, effect on us. As the elemental, chemical and bacterial components of the body changes moment by moment, the complete ‘who’ and ‘what’ we are undergo similar changes. These changes are essential and fundamental for the process of growth and decay in our lives.
 
The newborn babe at childbirth will grow into a young person, who will eventually grow old and die. Such is the nature of life and being that is ours.
 
Yet through all this, as humans, we continue to identify who we are and our being primarily through the human body of our birth till our death. Who and what we are seem to be intrinsically jointly and severally linked to, with, in, into and through these changes, in that the growth and decay of the moments, though separate and specific events, are but expressions of the dynamic continuum of identity. For we are not static, beings frozen in time, space and dimension, without the ability of growth, decay or self-renewal.
 
Rather we are dynamic beings in our becoming and becoming in our beings, in and as the sum of all our relationships
 
It is written in Genesis 1:26,27  “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,[3]….. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.[4]”
 
Humans were created in the image of God. As such, reflections and hazy glimpses as to Who and What Divinity is, can inherently be found, within us as human beings. If so, could this being in becoming and becoming in being, this identity, also be within the Nature and Being of Triune Divine?
 
As humans, we tend to absolutise perfection. In so doing we are inclined to view absolute perfection as something that cannot change. For change seems to suggest that the thing that is absolutely perfect is no longer that which is absolutely perfect. Change implies a motion that makes that which is absolutely perfect, less or better than what it was before the change. In so doing, this, our notion of absolute perfection, carries within it an inherent element of unchanging nature and being.
 
Humans, by and large, ascribe absolute perfection to the nature and being of God. As such, the nature and being of God must necessarily, also, be unchanging. For if God can change, then God would not be absolutely perfect. For change would mean that, that which was, is now lesser or better than what it had been, thereby negating, this, our notion of absolute perfection. Therefore, one of the essential attributes of God is that God must be, and is completely unchanging, in nature and being.
 
But this cannot possibly be.


[1] Wikipedia: Composition of human body under Elements.

[2] Wikipedia: Composition of human body under Molecules

[3] Genesis 1:26(a) New International Version

[4] Genesis 1:27 New International Version

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