Losing Identity, Recovering Identity
I think the greatest tragedy that can befall our species is to forget what it means to be human. The moments in history when we forget our identity is when we lose a big part of who we are.
Once when we were preparing a catechism on the Our Father, we were warned by our professors to be careful. Apparently, the word ‘father’ can elicit traumatic responses from young people who never had experience of good father. Further, if sexual abuse is committed by father figures, the lesson of the Our Father can be lost to the trauma.
It made me realize that the weaknesses in our experience of fatherhood does indeed affect the way we perceive God as father. But more than that, it also affects the way we become fathers as well. Boys who don’t receive good fathering will less likely become good fathers themselves. One brokenness snowballs into another and the identity of a father becomes murky.
I guess that really is the lesson of sin. Sin is about forgetfulness. We become forgetful of our identity, our dignity, and our place in the beautiful ecosystem that was gifted to us by God. When we forget how to be good fathers, the world loses fatherhood.
This is also what I realized about the issues surrounding abortion. I was trying to understand why women support it sincerely and powerfully at that. There are many nuances to the issue but then I see a bigger picture at play. Maybe we are also forgetting how to be good mothers. When women forget what motherhood is all about they lose compassion for the most vulnerable life.
Perhaps the fight then is really about recovering the identity of what it is to be human, to be male and female, to be fathers and mothers. Many social and economic pressures corrode at elements that makes our relationships human. Evil is working at eroding true identity and corroding relationships. It finds success in the isolation of the human person apart from his network of relationships, his ecosystem, and that isolation eventually brings about death.
Isn’t it that the major problems in a more connected digital world today is loneliness and depression? Isn’t it that we are fighting over definitions of male and female? Isn’t it that more and more of us are becoming more disconnected?
This made me see the Incarnation as the beautiful saving act of God to recover for man his humanity. It is only when God sanctified our collective humanity by becoming human that we learned from Jesus how it is to be human in front of God, with each other, and in the world. Jesus challenges us to remember, by seeing once again through his words and life, our true identity and our recovered dignity.
Jesus taught his disciples the Our Father to reintroduce God as a familial father – a papa, a ‘dada’. He lived in a family with Joseph and Mary to show us that the human family is our heaven on earth. He embraced life and culture to teach us how to be alive and to truly live.
Perhaps it is in remembering true fatherhood and true motherhood can we truly stand to defend life in all its forms, in all its levels. Perhaps it is in remembering humanity can we become humane with each other.
