Written by: CampUs4
12/31/2009 5:59 PM

Rip’s Identity Crisis

By Joel Mark Solliday

What if you went to bed on New Year’s Eve with a heart full of good intentions for a new lease on life in 2010, and you woke up on January 1, 2030 – twenty years later?

"I'm not myself -- I'm somebody else!”

These are the words of Rip Van Winkle after waking up from a twenty year slumber in the Kaatskill mountains and returning to his home town.

Rip’s story comes from Washington Irving’s classic; The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of short stories written around 1819. It’s an escapist little yarn about a chap who slept through twenty years of life and woke up to a different world.

What would you lose if you slept for twenty years? Rip lost his trusty dog, his new gun, his humble home, his nagging wife and many of his old cronies at the village inn. Yet, what terrified him most was the loss of identity he felt when he couldn’t recognize anyone in his town and they didn’t recognize him.

Here’s my point: The world around you defines you more than you know. Your personal identity is a community issue.

Rip Van Winkle is not so much a story about time travel as it is about community and how it impacts our identity. Irving explained, “Rip's heart died away, at hearing of these sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world.”

Alone? Actually, a curious crowd was gathering around this old coot with a long beard. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t know them.

We all need to be recognized. All families, friendships, churches and nations are bound by recognition—and not just physical recognition. We need a recognizable language, a shared history, as well as common values and ideals. We need mutual customs, traditions and beliefs in order to belong to each other. Moreover, we need these gifts to even be ourselves.

Community depends on mutual recognition, deep below the surface. When we lose touch with the beliefs, memories, legacies, gifts, values, traditions and hopes we once held in common, we lose touch with more than each other—we lose our very selves. Without a history to treasure, heroes to revere, and a common legacy to embrace, we cannot know who we are as a people. Without a memory, we are lost.

This is a challenge to live beyond yourself. Take personal responsibility for the health of your church and community. Wake up and resist the temptation to retreat into your computer screen, fantasies, television, or dream world. Engage your community. Go to church, treasure church, be church, and, most of all, do church! You need your local church family more than you realize.

This is not a challenge to fear constructive change. However, fight tooth and nail against lazy deconstructive change. Stand up to any and all forces that make a mindless mantra out of “change,” exploiting the discontent we all feel from time to time in our imperfect communities. Let’s not throw away, on the pretext of change, the precious legacies of faith, family and freedom passed on to us by our forebears.

Those who see only ills and errors in our past are blind to the value of our awesome heritage. Like Rip Van Winkle, they slept through the real-life process of engaging and building community over time. Maybe they are just angry in their loneliness. We can pick out the bones in our culture without tossing out the turkey. Don’t let a wonderful treasure slip through our collective fingers.

In October, I submitted an article to Campus CrossWalk titled “Who Are We? We Are What We Celebrate.” Holidays present perfect opportunities to build community through mutual recognition and celebration of the beliefs and values that bind us together. Don’t take our national and religious holidays for granted, as if they were nothing but convenient days off.

Irving’s little essay ends on a happy note. Rip was finally recognized, first by his grown daughter and then by some old-timers. His daughter took him home, and he resumed his old walks and habits, much like we do after our New Year’s resolutions are forgotten.

Thank you, gentle reader, for your attention. I hope I helped you recognize the awesome blessing of belonging to a family, a church, a community and, yes, a great nation.

Joel Mark Solliday is the editor of Campus CrossWalk and the pulpit minister of the Northern Light Church of Christ in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.  After graduating from Pepperdine University, Joel earned his M.Div. at Fuller Theological Seminary and served in youth ministry for 8 years in California and Texas and in pulpit ministry for 20 years in California, Connecticut and Minnesota. You may contact him through the contacts page of the website.

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