Identity

Fr. Hunwicke has an interesting post entitled "Identity" over at his blog (linked to the right).

Evelyn Waugh was once described as a man who thought of himself as being, in the sight of God, an English Country Gentleman of ancient and recusant ancestry. In fact, he was the son of a parvenu Anglican publisher quite well down in the Middle Class.

I sometimes think about this, especially as a convert. When I attend Mass, for instance, I think of how profoundly foreign all of this is to the upbringing of my parents. My parents even say so when they attend Mass with me. I justify it to myself by imagining more distant ancestors before the Reformation worshiping in this way (or rather, the medieval uses of the Roman Rite). And yet, as a convert, I will always have the tension that my faith was not passed down to me from my parents, but something I discovered apart from their influence. 

Or was it? On the other hand, I see the Catholic faith as not merely an expression of a culture and time period, but the most fundamental insight into the nature of reality, so essential that it had to be revealed by the Creator of reality, God Himself among us. Seen from this perspective, my upbringing and background not so much clash with the Catholic faith, but serve as kinds of sacramentals that brought me to the truth. I did not discover this new faith; it was passed down to me also. Because the Catholic faith, revealed by God, is so fundamentally connected to our nature, it is not truly foreign anywhere and belongs to everyone.

Another aspect of Fr. Hunwicke's post was commentary on the modern tendency to see identity as something we create or discover or mold for ourselves. Such was the fantasy of Evelyn Waugh. I see this tendency in myself and in other Catholics - convert or cradle. One manifestation was the men's nights among Catholic friends in college, where we smoked pipes or cigars and drank whiskey and might have worn bow ties if we had them. There is nothing more foreign to my upbringing than pipes and whiskey and bow ties. It's fun to play with costumes, but I wonder if sometimes in Catholic circles we sort of see ourselves as really being this kind of person, even if we are not, solely by our own invention, as if being an authentically-Catholic educated young man requires us to don this costume.

Sometimes people ask me why I don't have a Southern accent. That's because, for me, the Southern accent is not a caricature I put on for the admiration or entertainment of others. I would argue that my way of speaking is more authentically Southern than that found in the movies. The way I speak is a real-world manifestation of the way a person with deep roots in the South speaks when not thinking about the way he sounds.

At other times, people seek out the authentic Southern experience by putting on overalls and cowboy boots and going square dancing in a barn somewhere (with some eye-rolling by native onlookers). I, and every other real Southerner, have more authentic Southern experiences by waking up and going about the day as usual (which, for some Southerners, may also happen to include overalls, cowboy boots, and square dancing).

What we would find, I think, is that what often appears as the authentic Southern experience is actually a fantasy or caricature created by screenwriters and directors on the West Coast or in the imaginations of novelists, whereas true Southern experience appears ordinary and un-noteworthy upon casual inspection, or rather, is not apparent to us at all. This begs the question, then, for me, of whether the authentic Catholic experience we imagine is not, in fact, influenced by Catholic novelists who were themselves wearing costumes and putting on caricatures.

Catholic faith is not primarily a set of masks we wear in public (or even in private, to delude ourselves) to hide our roots and put on airs and pretenses. Because the Catholic faith is so deeply rooted in reality and our nature, it must "baptize" our identities to their deepest cores, not merely mask them. Implicit in Evelyn Waugh's costume was the notion that the Gospel might be more attractively incarnated in an "English Country Gentleman of ancient and recusant ancestry" than in a "son of a parvenu Anglican publisher quite well down in the Middle Class."

The contrast between Fr. Hunwicke's image of himself as a classicist who revels in Roman culture and French wine, versus the kind of man his father was as an ordinary British naval officer, is particularly striking.