Sinclair B. Ferguson

I went to a very ordinary state school in Scotland, a few hundred yards away from where we lived, where there were relatively few pupils who were what people used to call out-and-out Christians.

But as I was leaving school, one of my teachers gave me a book which I still own and prize.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship.

But it also had some lesser known works by Bonhoeffer, including a poem he had written entitled, Who Am I?

It's a very striking poem written in the 1940s when Bonhoeffer was in prison camp prior to his execution.

And in it, he reflects on whether he actually is the person people think he is.

So the poem engages in some real spiritual self-examination.

About 50 years or so after Bonhoeffer wrote that poem, I heard that the words, who am I, had become the most frequently used title for poems written by teenagers.

But these poems were not a form of self-examination.

They were a quest for identity and often an expression of identity confusion.

Bonhoeffer was asking about the consistency of his own life.

But these youngsters were asking the question, who am I?

Because they no longer knew the answer to it.

I don't know whether that statistic is still true about teenagers' poetry today or not.

But what I do know, and you know it too, is that this question now haunts the younger generation.

Not only is that true, but in effect, they're told to be haunted by it.

We are no longer someone who is given an identity.

Rather, it's our personal project to find it.

We have to decide who we are.

Are we male, female, transgender, lesbian, homosexual, or one of the supposed variety of other sub-genders?