Empty passports

A national news station recently reported that U.S. passports will soon list three options for citizens to identify their sex: male, female, and other. Does this decision cause anyone else to pause and wonder? Where is the limit to such self-definition? Will we soon be able to state whatever dates and places of birth we select regardless of what the actual ones are? Who’s to stop us? A passport is a symbol linking us to a national identity and to other citizens. Will someday passports also list various nationalities as options for us to choose regardless of our actual nationality? Will they become documents empty of meaning?

Many of us are people who want to be exclusively self-defined. We demand that our self-definition begin with a blank page, one free of any identifying marks of history or heritage. As ‘masters of our fate and captains of our souls’ we believe we are ‘invictus’, unconquered and unburdened by realities external to ourselves. However, one immutable reality exasperates us: someone else created us. Although we champion ourselves as independent in every way, we are not autogenetic. We didn’t bring ourselves into existence. Even so, this inconvenient truth does not deter our efforts to sever ourselves from the control of exogenous realities, personal or moral.

Those of us who are like this have no qualms about jettisoning the past or dismissing the future. We topple statues, negate or revise history, neuter vocabulary, deny the laws of nature, and carelessly carry on with no regard for the world we leave behind. Free individuals that we are, we embrace Justice Kennedy’s famous words: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”.  We embrace it, but we can’t really exemplify it because we cannot abide mystery. Mystery is beyond our control. And, while we may be free to ‘conceptualize our own existence’ our ability to do so is woefully limited, unenlightened as we are by the wisdom of the ages.

As for the wisdom of the ages the etymology of the word ‘symbolic’ is instructive. In classical Greek ‘sym’ means together while ‘bole’ indicates a throwing or casting. Symbolism therefore represents linking together. The prefix ‘dia’ indicates division or separation. Diabolism signifies breaking apart. Symbolism binds us with the past, present and future. Diabolism severs us.

But, there are also among us those who resist the diabolic temptation of autogeneticism (is this what happened in Eden?). These are the folks who treasure symbols and revere their significance. They honor our link to a common human heritage, to the same laws of nature, and to the same external realities. They recognize themselves as their brothers’ keepers and manifest this solidarity in many ways including the way of philanthropy. It is for the service of this philanthropy that the National Catholic Community exists.

Is a passport required for Heaven? Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is already within us. We have only to recognize its existence and respond accordingly. A start would be to accept that we are not autogenetic and to believe that it is God’s love that creates, sustains and redeems us. Such faith is the passport.

Lord, we believe, help our unbelief.