Holding our pattern in the divine memory

In Joyce's Ulysses, both leading men reflect on whether our identity remains constant while almost everything that is physical about us changes. Stephen wonders if he can avoid repaying a debt on the grounds that he is not really the same person who incurred it. And Bloom wonders if he is still the same man with whom Molly fell in love.

In the Fall 2005 issue of Parabola, John Polkinghorne, particle physicist and Anglican priest, raises the same question in an article "The Pattern That Is Me." He writes:

We live in a state of atomic flux, and the ageing, balding academic that I am today [That hits very close to home, John] is essentially anatomically distinct from the schoolboy with his shock of black hair in the photograph of sixty years ago. What does connect me today is the almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern, carried at any one time by the matter of my body and continuously developing over time as my experiences and decisions mould and form my character. That pattern is the soul--an idea at least as old as Aristotle, who thought that the soul is the "form" of the body.

After exploring that idea further, he closes the article:

The information-bearing pattern that is me will, as far as science can tell, dissolve at my death with the decay of my body. Of itself, the soul, therefore, possesses no intrinsic immortality, but as a Christian I believe that it is a true and coherent hope that the God who is faithful will not allow that pattern to be lost, but will hold it in the divine memory, with the intention of re-embodying it in a final eschatological act of resurrection (81-82).