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 teenager's 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 subgenders. And in some ways this is just the tip of the iceberg. But my

question today is, why is this transformation indeed revolution taken place? And why is it

that we have a society of so many troubled youngsters and why is it that despite governments

and organisations spending endless millions, the situation is actually getting worse rather

...