I'm the antithesis of classifiable. I'm a Jamaican, who moved to the UK as a teenager and has lived in the United States in recent years. My father is Chinese Jamaican and my mother is a black Jamaican British woman. And I'm a Christian Scientist!
Needless to say, the concept of identity is one I've had to pray about for a long time. Who am I? How do I fit in?
When I was a child, my mother gave me the gift of identifying me as spiritual and perfect and complete right from day one. She didn't think of me as an empty vessel waiting to be filled; she didn't buy into the idea that I would be shaped by circumstances stemming from race or ethnicity or religious affiliation. She identified me as the idea of God. I like the way Mary Baker Eddy put this in Science and Health when she wrote, "Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique." Science and Health, p. 475.
