(from Called to the Ministry, page 10) The Deepest secret of your idenity is in that name. Only God knows your real name, but that is the name by which he calls you. The Horror of lost idenitity - namelessness - haunts modern liturature. Madison Avenue knows about it, too. A bank recently invited customers from the subway crowds with billboards asserting that at Marine Midland they call account number 9557446, "Harry." How appealing: a city bank with huge resources, but a place where they know me!Still, there is pathos in that appeal. A man may flee the computers of metropolis to Centerville where everyone will call him, "Harry" - at least everyone who stays on speaking terms with him. Will he then find himself? No, the metropolitan millions serve only to confuse the issue. The tragedy of alienation is not that so many people do not know me; it is that no one knows me, for I do not know myself. The terror of modern thought does not spring from the addition of millions in mass population. It springs from the substration of one - the Lord my God.
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