A Sense of Identity

On July 4 of this year I marched in an Independence Day parade in a small town in northern Michigan. Main Street (near a gorgeous lake) was impressively packed with young and old, flourishing flags and clamorously cheering. Unfortunately, however, those cheers were not extended quite so enthusiastically to us! I was marching with a float created by one of the political parties (Given my progressive stand on the Church, you can imagine which one) in an area that is overwhelmingly populated by people of the opposite persuasion. In fact, that other party was so confident about its own popularity, its members didn’t even bother to march…but they and their supporters did show up. 

We received some cheers but many more jeers and sneers (I felt as if I were outdoors witnessing again for the ordination of women on Holy Thursday in Philadelphia). My “job” was to run along with the float distributing candy to the children. We were not permitted to throw it to them, and so I was always close to the crowd. That gave one man the opportunity, seeing which group I was with, to yell in my face: “You’re dumber than dumb!” 

I handed him a piece of candy.

What I would like to have handed him was David Brooks’ column in the July 2, 2021 New York Times titled “This is How Truth Dies.” In that piece, Brooks analyzes our current political divisions and posits some solutions. So much applied to divisions and healing needed in our Church, too. 

Brooks begins by stating that we gain our identity as a people through two sources: the first, the stories we tell about ourselves; and the second, the knowledge we gain from empirical evidence via reason, logic, and careful analysis of facts. Our stories about ourselves, the first source, give us, he says, “a moral framework from which to see the world.” It tells us how we understand and interpret our human journey together. “This emotional and moral knowledge should give us a sense of identity, a sense of ideals to live up to and an appreciation of the values that matter most to us…this shared knowledge should help us discover a shared destiny and our shared affection for one another.” 

The second source, empirical evidence, is also the result of collections but not of stories. It comes, instead, through a network of people working within institutions (universities, courts, media, etc. – and I would add churches) that have set up systems to ferret out errors, examine evidence objectively, and then determine what deserves to be preserved. Brooks references author Jonathan Rauch as pointing out that an individual may be ignorant or biased or self-serving, but a network of individuals, checking and counterchecking each other while working together to seek truth and forge common goals, is often brilliant and fair and even objective…that is, as long as everyone agrees to certain rules. These rules are: “No one gets the final say (every proposition might be wrong). No claim to personal authority (who you are doesn’t determine the truth of what you say, the evidence does). No retreat to safety (you can’t ban an idea just because it makes you feel unsafe).”

All these comments made my mind zoom to the Catholic Church, as a body of (certain) people telling our story about ourselves and as an institution so often flagrantly ignoring the “rules” mentioned above that help protect us from distorting the truth. As it is and has been, only Churchmen get the final say; they determine the truth by perverting or ignoring evidence to the contrary; they “retreat to safety” over and over with horrendous and disastrous results. And then trust collapses.

Brooks is talking here about our divided America, but what he says next applies to our divided Church as well: “The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.”

What is our shared story in our Church? What is our shared identity? Or don’t we have one because of a history of persistently willful and deliberate exclusions? Some of us do not have an “honorable place” in the narrative and that is heartbreaking…

But it’s not hopeless. 

The Church actually does do some of the healing work Brooks asks education, in America’s case, to do. It does “help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows.” That is why many of us stay. 

But it fails in letting us tell our own complex stories as Church people, as people as Church: “This is the ability to tell stories in which opposing characters can each possess pieces of the truth, stories in which all characters are embedded in time, at one point in their process of growth, stories rooted in the complexity of real life and not the dogma of ideological abstraction.” This is why many of us leave.

My brother and sister-in-law were marching with me in the same parade. At a pause at an intersection, a woman in the crowd approached my sister-in-law and said she had been part of the party we were marching for, but she was finding it no longer seemed to reflect where and who she is today, and she was bewildered. 

Note: She did not dismiss us; she did not call us names; she did not label us as “dumber than dumb.”  Instead, she reached out. My sister-in-law and she agreed to meet for coffee. They decided to tell each other their stories and talk it through.