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 in prize. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship.

But it also had some lesser known works by Bonhoffer, including a poem he had written entitled Who Am I?

It's a very striking poem written in the 1940s when Bonhofer 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 Bonhofer 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.

Bonhofer 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 teenagers' 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 sub-gender. And in some ways, this is just the tip

of the iceberg. But my question

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