Who Are You?

Who are you? We all struggle to find our identity at our deepest and most unchangeable level. Fundamentally, who are we? God gives us the freedom to define ourselves by seeking community with those who will support us and help us by setting up borders around the lives we want to live, protecting us from marauders and from being lost in the confusion outside. Paradoxically, it is within the confines and restrictions of community that we hope to be truly free to find our unique identity and place in the world around us.

Many communities which we might choose do not allow us to truly live. Instead they close us off from communication with "outsiders", imprisoning us in confusion and death. In our Catholic faith we are protected and fed so that we can grow into the unique holiness that we are created to achieve in this, our world. We are the body of Christ, longing to beat with His heart and to go out and be His presence in the world around us.

By Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael

IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG AS YOU LISTEN:

A Parkland story. There was a man I met up at Parkland Hospital; obviously he was terminal. The doctors decided he was going to be dying shortly and although he knew he was sick, he thought the doctors were completely wrong, and he wasn’t going to be dying.

He was angry. I was warned beforehand: this is one angry man. This was also one big man. Probably the size of George if you add on another 100 to 150 pounds. He was a huge man.

He lived his life to be obnoxious. When I was there at the hospital he refused to wear clothes because it would bother the women up there, the nurses and everything else... and this is what he told me... so he wouldn't wear clothes just so he could irritate them.

And he had been a truck driver, a short haul truck driver going all over the country delivering things. And he would stop; he would go to a bar at night and pick a fight and beat somebody up. That was his form of entertainment.

No contact with God. Nothing.

And one of the things is that during a fight he lost half his hand. And he would explain to me that this hook that he had left was really good in fights because he would keep his fingernails long and it would just scratch people. A totally obnoxious person.

So I would visit him a number of times. And I don't know why but, like so many others, they would talk to me. So the last time I go to him and he is in ICU. And I had seen him in ICU before. And around him there were, who knows, two doctors, two nurses. They were just desperately keeping him alive.

And I wasn't able to go in. That's very unusual circumstances when I couldn't go in, but I couldn't go in because they were trying to keep him alive. But he saw me and I saw him.

And I think of him with regard to St. Stephen (of Hungary). And you go, "Why in the world?" Because he (the man at Parkland) lost his identity.

And we see so much of things going around in the world now, where people don't have an identity. And the identity that they have lost primarily is an identity with God. They have no relationship with God and they really have no identity.

Their identity may be playing a video game. Their identity may be... who knows what. And one of the things that is very important to understand about our religion, our Catholicism specifically, is that it gives us an identity. An identity from with we are able to exist and move towards God.

What would you be without your Catholic faith? Now my wife's answer to that question is: nothing.

What could I be without God? What could do? What would my identity be? I would have no guide whatsoever.

St. Stephen brought to the people of Hungary the identity of Catholicism. That is a very important identity because if you identify yourself with a particular religion, if you identify yourself with Catholicism specifically, you have an obligation of charity and love. And that changes the way that you act.

The consequences of a lack of identity of that sort is that you go and place your identity on something else or you have no identity whatsoever and you end up basically killing yourself.

But we see in the 20th century particularly a loss of identity through religion and an attaching of identity to national identity. That was one of the great sins, or problems, of Nazism. It was that all of the wonderful things that had grown up in Germany, and there were many wonderful things, and including both their Protestant and Catholic identity, were lost under the Nazis and everything was attached to the German people as defined by Adolph Hitler. And anything done [by Germans] was acceptable because there were no constraints that were added onto it other than the constraint that someone would prevent you from doing what you wanted to do.

When you have an identity... you're Catholic... even though you're a bureaucrat, there are limitations placed on what you do because of what you are and because of your identity.

And we see this going on in the world now, which I find very disconcerting when you talk to young people. But it is a very important thing that we recognize how many countries represented here identify themselves, at least historically, with a particular religion.

The Poles are Catholic. The Hungarians are Catholic. The Irish are Catholic.

Where is that identity that is going to be constraining you? Where is that identity, for example, in the United States?

But if you lack that identity, and here is the dangerous part, I think, for the next fifty years for the world, is that if you lack the identity to something that gives you moral code, then you are unrestrained in what you can do.

In the United States the great example is: is it acceptable to kill babies? Yeah, it's called abortion. Under the structure of the United States, and the morality imposed by the United States, it is acceptable to kill the most vulnerable among us.

Because there is no constraint within the system of the United States that simply says, "No, you can't do that!"

So by the similar logic, and it is going through Oregon and it is in California, it's in Washington, and it is in a number of places, the next thing is... actually it is in most nursing homes right now... is: is it proper to decide who should die based on their drivers license or Social Security card which provides you with how old they are?

Absolutely. But if you don't have an identity that provides you with the moral base that says, "No, that is absolutely wrong"... you gave a good Catholic answer... no, that's absolutely wrong, and you have laws which you can change... at least engineers deal with laws that don't change, they may discover more things... but if the laws can change and the laws are not constrained by an identity that has a moral code to go with it, then anything becomes legal, if you can find a justification. And frankly, lawyers can justify virtually anything, and we have and do.

And so what we see in St. Stephen is a wonderful thing that occurred in 1000AD, that he, through his action, created the identity of the nation, the people of Hungary as being Catholic and attached them to the identity of Catholicism. The dangers that we see a thousand years later is that those identities are gone. So that bureaucrats can do whatever they want. Because they are given a range of discretion.

You know, “drive while Black” through Farmers Branch; you don’t do that. There is not law that says that. But that’s the reality. And what constraint is there from that morality.

And so when we look at our lives, we have to understand that each and every one of us has an identity as a Catholic. And that identity forms how we act. But similarly our Catholic identity should be brought by us, to what is called the public square, the public forum, the public, to understand that the identity of people with Jesus Christ through His Holy Catholic Church is a thing to be desired and sought. It is not something to hide under a bushel basket. It's a light to the world. And that light to the world has a profound effect on the world.

So when we look at it and we go, "Ah. I just don't want to say at that. I don't want to do that", remember the consequences of not saying what you need to say as a Catholic It has an effect on you. It has an effect on the person to whom you don't say it. But it also has an effect on the entire society and ultimately will lead to the attitude that anything is acceptable as long as I can come up with a justification for it. A justification that has no moral base whatsoever.

August 9, 2019 2