The “Be true to yourself” and “You do you” slogans of expressive individualism show up everywhere these days. Even dangling from a tea bag.
One morning last week, I heated the kettle and got out my mug, tea, and stevia packet, preparing my first cup of the morning, and I noticed a small note attached to the string of the tea bag. “Trust your identity,” it said. “Be in touch with your reality.” An inspirational call to action, I suppose, with a little philosophy to kick off the day. And it got me thinking.
Tea Bag’s Call to Faith
“Trust your identity” is the tea bag’s call to faith. I’m the one who must decide what my identity will be. I must trust my decision, and I should express my faith in my identity to the world.
It’s interesting the tea bag didn’t say “Trust yourself,” which is the more common slogan. Self and identity may be similar these days, but the command implies they can be distinct in some way, separated from each other. We’re to choose our identity and trust we’ve made the right choice. It’s as if, after we’ve created the Instagram persona we feel most comfortable with, we’re told to trust the image we’ve decided to project.
The second piece of instruction on my tea bag provoked more thought than the first. “Be in touch with your reality.” This means I’m supposed to discover and remain connected to my reality. But what about, well, just reality? To lose touch with reality is to lose your mind. The deranged man is very in touch with his reality. It’s the real world—the reality outside himself and his own perspective—he’s lost contact with.
Ancients vs. Moderns
My tea bag exemplifies the contrast between ancient wisdom and contemporary thinking. The ancients believed the goal of life was to seek knowledge of the truth. Our choices in life are an important aspect of conforming our souls to a reality that’s bigger than and apart from us. There’s objective truth, goodness, and beauty. We grow as we pursue these realities.
Common sense today is the other way around. The goal of life is to seek your truth. Your choices in life are an important aspect of conforming reality to whatever you feel. The idea of bringing your identity in line with the real world has morphed into bringing the world in line with the real you. Gone is the notion you would conform yourself to the nature of things or submit to a revelation that comes from outside yourself. Your reality is at the center, and nature and religion must bend the knee.
Tea Bag Philosophy in Real Life
The clearest example of this way of thinking today is the debate over sex and gender. Trust your identity. (You are whatever you say you are.) Be in touch with your reality. (Don’t let anyone disconnect you from your own thoughts and experiences.) The only reason the term “gender confirmation surgery” makes sense is because so many people view the world through the framework of the tea bag’s philosophy: the alteration of the human body is a “confirmation” of the identity you’re called to trust, a medical attempt to conform the natural body so you can stay in touch with “your reality.”
Controversies about sex and gender may be the most obvious outworking of the tea bag philosophy, but we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to see its influence in other areas.
Take the diminishment of persuasion, for example. Civil debate has fallen on hard times. We’re increasingly mired in conflict without any tools to navigate the new world. How can we resolve conflict or discover creative solutions when everyone is striving only to be in touch with “their reality?”
Or consider the therapeutic impulse to privilege your interpretation of whatever takes place in a social setting. What matters most is your truth (a strange synonym now for your experience), even if your interpretation of reality is incorrect. If you feel someone has slighted you with the intention of causing harm, then your reality says this must be the case, even if the slight was truly unintentional. If you feel others are out to get you, then your reality will lead you to interpret all interactions with this defensive posture, even if the reality is the reverse. We become bound by our experiences, slaves to feelings that can’t be bothered by facts.
The tea bag philosophy has an effect on the church too. This way of thinking doesn’t make us give up on God. Instead, God gets roped in as a divine source of support for the identity we trust and the reality we want to be in touch with. God doesn’t go away. He blends into the decor, just one more item in the personal project of identity we’re building. Instead of conforming ourselves to God and his Word, we seek to bring his revelation into conformity with the desires of our hearts. We want him in the mix, but on our terms, as a bit player in our reality rather than the blazing center of all things—absolute reality itself.
Lost in a Haunted Wood
The tea bag philosophy is popular as an approach to life, but it’s powerless in helping us achieve lasting satisfaction. Trusting your identity doesn’t provide a strong enough source of self. Being in touch with your own reality doesn’t satisfy the longing to know a true, good, and beautiful reality—something bigger and better than anything you could dream up.
No wonder we see more and more people asserting their identities with ever more force, demanding recognition and affirmation. It’s because they feel their fragility. It’s as if we want to feel alive, to feel our own reality, and some of today’s controversies—even the pain we experience—at least give us the illusion of significance.
For others, the way to escape the world marked by the tea bag philosophy is one of distraction, a burrowing into our own individual “reality” so we don’t have to be confronted with the real world in all its glorious danger. And thus we become like those in W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1939”:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The tea is steeped now, the fragrance wafting through the air on this chilly morning. And as I take my usual place, kneeling on my prayer bench, with God’s Word in front of me, I sense the heart of Jesus: Trust me. Find your identity in me. Lose yourself and find yourself in me. I loved you into existence. I loved you all the way to the cross. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. You want to be in touch with reality? I AM reality. Be in touch with me.
My thirst is slaked, and not from the tea.
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