Brother to Brother: On Persons and Their Lives




"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; "behold, all things are become new." (II Corinthians 5:17)
Every person has a life of his own, his one and only life, and that life he leads. Some are able to draw upon resources that for social, for physical, for historical, possibly for quite arbitrary reasons are unavailable to others. Some manage to give their lives a pattern, an over-allness, or the different measures of success that they have in making their lives of a piece.
And since it is not strained to recognize in such integration of a life, in the life of wholeness, something that, in many ages, for many cultures, has been in the nature of an ideal - a grace to be cultivated or a triumph to be won.*1
The most significant outcome of writing my autobiography is the establishment of a real relationship with God though his son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He gives my life a unity and a wholeness I never knew before. And what he did for me he can do for others, so I thank him and I praise him because he is worthy.
Jesus Christ allows me to forgive others as he forgives me; he allows me to love others because he first loved me. Mental connectedness is not simply indicative of personal identity, it is creative of it. Or better: mental connectedness is indicative of personal identity because it is creative of it. Mental connectedness is creative of personal identity because, on each occasion of its instantiation, it brings the person somewhat under the influence of his past. A mental event is assigned to a person because of its relation with some earlier event in his life: and when this happens, the relation ensures that the later event is a carrier of the influence of this earlier event, an influence that then pervades the person so that his biography is bound together even as it unfolds.
The present is tied to the past, a new past is thus constructed under whose influence the future may then be brought, and so the diachronic expansion of the person, his life, gets its unity.
And this tells us not only something about the special suitability of mental connectedness to be critical of personal identity but also something about the singular character of personal identity.
"The people of Indonesia, with some help from friends around the world, have done for their greatest monument what all the king's horses and all the king's men could not do for Humpty Dumpty. They have put Borobudur together."
"W. Brown Morton III, historic-preservation-consultant and Episcopal priest said, "Looking up, I could not see the top of the monument. It was lost from view. I believe this was deliberately done by the builders to illustrate dramatically the universal truth that you cannot see the end of your spiritual journey from its beginning. You must start out with faith alone."
"The monument to my American eyes looked much like a broken Humpty, all bits and pieces, but first impressions can truly deceive."2


Yours in Christ, Orville Springs



1Richard Wollheim
2National Geographic v. 163#1 Jan. 1981