by Clint Wilson, Director of Community Formation
The American poet A. R. Ammons once penned a poem called “Identity,” which he wrote after observing the wonder and complexity of a spider weaving a web. In that fragile—yet paradoxically strong—creation he finds a great truth of our life, specifically the way we work to bring order into the disorder of our world. Against the chaos and complications facing all of us in the dark forests of this life, we work at the delicate process of creating our home, our place in the world. Ammons asks:
how does
the spider keep
identity
while creating the web
in a particular place?1
The question, I think, is one we all might ask of ourselves: How do I find my real identity at the center of myself, even if the margins of my life feel chaotic and outside my control? How do I focus on what I can control, the stability of whatever strands I hold in my hand, without worrying about the peripheries and circumstances well beyond my reach?
The poem invites us, like a spider, to find a spiritual home: to find, in other words, an identity. But the language of center and periphery is even more relevant here because so many of us feel like we live on the peripheries or margins. Many have experienced the pain of being excluded, feeling forced to margins, forced to live in social or even material precarity.
City Church aspires to be a place that invites people into the center of a life lived with Jesus Christ, one in which those who feel on the peripheries will also feel welcomed to a new center—a center defined by spiritual unity, empathy, and deep and abiding belonging. (Naturally, all metaphors break down somewhere, so please don’t hear me saying that City Church wants to be a spider web! Rather, we want to model the strength and vulnerability required to build community in a world of disorder and brokenness.)
Listen to how Ammons imagines the precarious balance that this spider must face—and that we all must face when we seek to discover our identity:
the row-strung garden web
keeps order at the center
where space is freest (intersecting that the freest
“medium” should
accept the firmest order)
and that
order
diminishes toward the
periphery
allowing at the points of contact
entropy equal to entropy.
At the periphery, there is “entropy” (a scientific term Ammons uses to describe how things in this life naturally decay and fall apart). We know this reality, deeply. We face disease, disorder, decay, death, and disunity on a daily basis, practically. We keep weaving the web of our life, the story we tell ourselves about our world, to create some sense of belonging and order in the midst of everything else going on around us.
We make our center, and if we’ve made it well, we invite others to join us in it.
For those who do not know what they believe, please consider the gospel’s invitation to a centered life, a whole and new life. There is still disorder and trauma and brokenness in our world, but the gospel does not paint over these things. Instead, it acknowledges that brokenness in its very story—at the heart of which is a savior broken so that the world might believe in the good news of this good story.
For the Christian, our “center” is the identity found in the newness of life found in following Jesus. Paul calls this “the new self” (Colossians 3:10). This new self is given to us as a free act of God’s grace, which invites us into the center of a life made whole in him. And we can trust this invitation because Jesus was a man who lived on the margins, who died an ignominious death, who was led outside the city walls to be crucified as a common criminal. He knew the disorder of peripheries. But he also knows the order of the center, the kingdom he came to establish, the life he came to give by overcoming the power of death.
As a final word in our blog series on “Identity & Belonging,” consider Paul’s encouragement to be a people defined by patience, love, forgiveness, and gentleness. Consider that we are all fragile creatures navigating the threads of a vulnerable life, and yet we are held in the hands of one who was crushed and pierced so that we could find true identity in him.
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity (Colossians 3:12–14).
1. A. R. Ammons, “Identity,” All Poetry, accessed 10 November 2021, https://allpoetry.com/poem/8510147-Identity-by-A.R.-Ammons.