Vicki Garvey, joined us for the second week of our Lenten Program. Below you will find some clips from her time in our midst and some questions to help you reflect on her comments.
In this first clip Vicki is describes Moses encounter with God as the burning Bush…
When have you found yourself faced with the question “Who am I?”
Are there moments in your own life when you have struggled to find an answer to that question?
What does that question have to do with our relationship to the people we choose to live our lives with? How does knowing “Who we are” impact those relationships?
In the second clip we find Vicki using the examples of “Alice in Wonderland” and the “Lord of the Rings” to motivate for us one of the central questions that Moses faced “Who am I?”
Vicki provocatively quotes Bilbo Baggins “who is asked at one point to identify himself and responds by saying ‘It would take a long while my name is growing all the time and I have lived a very very long long time. So, my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to.’ “
What then is your ‘real name,’ the name that would tell the story of the things you belong to?
Do you feel that your sense of identity is closely linked to your own name? What would your real name be?
Does your name change depending on who you are with, or where you are? Are there places in which you feel you have to hide your ‘real name’? Are there places where people know your ‘real name’?
The third clip shows the group after doing a modified Johari (Joe-Harry) window [The activity was modified because we were not asked to think only in terms of traits, but also in terms of specific facts about ourselves]. We were asked to consider what sorts of things fit into 4 distinct categories of knowledge about us. (1) The things we know about ourselves that other people know. (2) The things we know about ourselves that other people do not know. (3) The things other people know about us that we don’t know [of which we can find examples from our past relationships and experience.] (4) The things about ourselves we don’t know and no one else knows. Vicki goes on to discuss how the self-knowledge gained through even “silly little” exercises like this benefit us because they help us come to know who we are. And further, about how when we learn new things about ourselves it is often a result of our interaction with other people or unexpected events.
In your life have you had any experiences that taught you something unexpected about, who you are?
How would you have answered the question, who are you, last year? five years ago? ten years ago? When you were 18? When you were 10? How have you changed?
In this fourth clip Vicki explains that one of Moses question amounts to needing to know who God is. And further that Moses need to know who God is parallels our own need to know one another when we are in the midst of intimate relationships with one another.
Why is it so important for Moses to know who God is?
Have you ever had an experience of not knowing another person as well as you thought?
How do we come to know other people more fully?
In the fifth clip Vicki responds to a question about whether it changes the situation if we read the real question as being about, “Why me”, rather than, “Who am I”.
Vicki identifies a strain in the Gospels in which we find Jesus asking, “Who do you say I am?” So, there it is, a question which we too are called to respond to. Who do you say Jesus is? Do you find anything about answering that question difficult? If so, where does the difficulty arise from?
