Who Am I?

I have begun reading a book, Who Am I?, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. Such a simple question is actually quite profound and how we answer that question has enormous ramifications that ripple through all areas of our lives.
In her introduction, commenting on a poem with the title, "Who Am I?" written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his Gestapo prison cell, she notes that in his uncertainty to the question he ends by writing, "Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine." Elshtain comments,

I am thine. I am not my own, We no longer believe any such thing. Indeed, such a pronouncement--I am not sovereign in my own domain; I am a creature; I am not simply the sum total of my choices; I am tempest-tossed; I am not in full control; I am unsure of what I will do tomorrow--these sorts of pronouncements make us candidates for assertiveness training and other interventions and ministrations designed to bolster an obviously weak, even sick, "self-image."

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer thing of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong--we own' we possess. And that, to say the least, is not the same thing...Who are we? We are creatures who have forgotten what it means to be faithful to something other than ourselves.

Those words caught my attention. I think often about the "self" and its meaning for modern people and the implications of the meanings we create for "self" in our post-modern or as some like to say, our hyper-modern world. What thoughts do you have about this. Who are you?