Out of Identity, Into Communion

Notes from a New Catholic

About a month ago, at the Easter Vigil, I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church — crossing the threshold from my native Protestantism, and from a Christianity that had been a sort of vague, background ambience in my consciousness, into a fully-fledged centering of faith at the core of my being.

In other words, my religion has gone from my head to my heart — and along the way, surprisingly even to me, I became Catholic.

It still sounds strange to say, "I'm Catholic" — it's like writing one's name with an alternative spelling, or a new wardrobe acquisition that still juts out noticeably from the accustomed contours of one's self-image — or like there's been a clerical error on the part of the Hogwarts sorting hat, and I may have been assigned to the wrong House, but I love it.

"Catholic" is a word with a great deal of identity attached to it. The word literally means "universal", and yet carries an "identitial tinge" from its historically minority status here in the Protestant U.S., and by virtue of the claims it makes on its own ultimacy — its very claim to universality makes it particularly particular.

This is in fact what caused me to hesitate about it for so long, in spite of feeling drawn to it. In an age so riddled with the excesses of self-presentation, where we're invited to double down on, and virtually represent our cultural, sexual, ethnic and political identities, reifying them as sources of pride, power and belonging — I felt reluctant to add another layer of self-concept to my already self-inundated self. I didn't want to "be a thing." Isn't relationship with God supposed to be about freedom from self, freedom from identity?

And yet, in making this leap into the universal particular, I have so far felt exactly that — freedom. What follows is an exploration of that feeling, and how I experience it amidst all the convoluting forces that surround it: the pop-culture fascination with the Church in recent film and news media, the dubious world of online Catholic evangelism, and the constant politicization of the faith from within and without.

Sign, Sacrament and Simulation

In a sense, it seems like the whole world has been having a very Catholic moment, right at the time that I’m having one personally — and this has led me to questions about the relationship between religious experience and media consumption, and how that relationship is intensified and complicated in the digital age.

For I am not alone in this surprising conversion experience — many people are gravitating to the faith right now. Many Gen Z folks are converting from atheistic or irreligious backgrounds to Christianity in general, often entering the Catholic and Orthodox churches, due in large part to the robustness of their digital evangelization. There is an entire eco-system of Catholic podcasters, meme-lords, and influencers, both lay and clerical, with diverse, and sometimes very bitterly contested takes on what the faith means, ethically and politically, for the contemporary moment. Comment sections explode with doctrinal debate, and sometimes it feels like there's more Catholicism than catholicity — more of the performativity of denominational belonging, than the dynamic and transformational experience of faith.

Amidst all this, I’ve been hesitant to re-enter the sphere of digital discourse as a Catholic — to profess my faith in this realm of hyperreality, where the self that we represent begins to take precedence over the Self that is our source. I’ve even asked myself — is this real? Is this really my journey — is this God beckoning me, or is it the algorithm? Have I subjected myself to this maelstrom of Catholic influencers and apologists as a sort of willing plunge into the feedback loop of online identity-production? Is this transcendence, or hyperreality?

Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, developed in Simulacra and Simulation and elsewhere, refers to the phenomenon wherein the representation of reality becomes more "real", more immediate, than reality itself. "Immediacy" implies an absence of "media" — and yet we are so media-inundated that our various media become the primary content (key word) of our experience; rather than representing it, the re-presentation itself becomes the primary presence. Rather than "art imitating life", life itself is like a movie. This was rather strikingly exemplified by the popularity of the film Conclave, followed by the collective fascination with the actual conclave right on its heels, and all the memes that came with it — we were living in a movie, the Reel of the real. Thus hyperreality results in a sort of "simulation" effect, whereby events and meanings take on the character of seeming simulated — a show, a representation behind which "true" reality can no longer be accessed, if indeed it was ever there at all.

I felt this keenly when shortly before my Confirmation, I shared with a friend, a cradle Catholic, my choice of confirmation name. Even before my interest in Catholicism, I had felt drawn to St. Augustine. He'd spent many years laboring under a kind of neurotically charged philosophical dualism (he thought too much, which I know something about) — and eventually found that the only way out of overthinking is through the God who is Love.

When I shared this choice with my friend, she was like, "What??? That's who JD Vance chose!" Upon hearing this, doubt began to flood my mind — how can I choose the same Saint as JD Vance? A friction had suddenly emerged between my religious inspiration and my habituated cultural allegiance; and the meaning of my connection with Augustine felt emptied by its association with a figure so charged in the collective imagination.

I subsequently read an article on Vance that critiqued his very conversion — for he too is a relatively recent convert — as an act of strategic branding. The very act of confirmation-naming, taking a new name unto oneself, is akin to the gesture of receiving a brand — emblazoning upon one's being the name of that to which (or to whom) one belongs. The name, the identity, the faith itself, become political brand-symbols whose meanings bleed over into the realms of the sacred and personal.

It's not as though such appropriation is only a "conservative" gesture — this can also happen in the radically progressive, anarchistic Christian spaces I've been moving in, like the Catholic Worker — a nearly century-old anarchistic Christian movement dedicated to radical application of the Gospel through works of mercy (growing food and serving it to the poor). Despite this radicality, we too are capable of brandifying ourselves — Dorothy Day herself can become a kind of brand name. I could brand my own Catholicity, returning to social media as @progressivecatholic or @nathanthecatholicworker, encapsulating my commitments and belonging in a handle. I'm not saying this would be wrong or even bad — I'm simply noting that a handle is an identity marker to hold on to, one that allows us to be found where and as we want to be found, both revealing and concealing the one who holds it. (Years ago I agonized about what handle to use for my artistic work, wanting something that didn't seem too self-obsessed, and ended up with @nathanology_ — the most self-obsessed possible outcome, the study of myself. As St. Paul says, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate, this I do.")

Are JD Vance and I called to St. Augustine, are we called to this faith in the first place? Or are we both, on different ends of the political spectrum, constructing ourselves anew through its symbols? When my friend told me this I felt a sense of embarrassment; I had also felt that a year or so earlier when I found out Shia LeBoeuf was becoming Catholic — I confess to having thought, Well, this suddenly doesn't feel as special — now I'm afraid I'm part of a trend.

But these very scruples are evidence of the way hyperreality poisons our ability to have genuine encounters with the Real — to be called and to obey, which literally means to "listen to". When every voice becomes suspect, when every inspiration is construed as either a mental phantasm of our neurology, or of algorithmic determinism, or an echo of an ideology — how are we to live, we who are creatures of communication and meaning? It's not that we can't hear God; it's that we convince ourselves it's only our own voice, and/or everyone else's. It is possible to turn even the self-awareness of one's own Narcissism into yet another moat around the individualized self.

Eventually my apprehensions were dissolved — thanks in part to some kind advice from my confirmation sponsor (the system works!) I came to feel that for both me and JD, grafting Augustine into our own names actually displaces our personal identities, in a generative way — our own names are relative to a name we share, just as our individual selves are relative to the shared being in which we reside, in Christ.

Matter and Metafication

There is a particular form of hyperreality that I call “metafication”, from the Greek "meta" meaning "beyond". — This is the phenomenon whereby the layers of digital self-representation into which we’re invited by Meta and platforms, while they connect us socially, also disconnect us from our bodily selves, from the encounter with Ultimate Reality that occurs in our physical matter. We are physical beings, and the first place we find our Creator is in our physical experience of being creatures. In metafication, we are drawn beyond ourselves, we are not at where we physically are, but @ourselves, more a mask than a body.

It is from this — from metafication — that I feel I have been, and am still being, saved. My process of conversion has been coterminous with a gradual disengagement not only from social media, but from my egoic entanglement with my own identity as a creator — as an artist and writer. I'm still creating — but my sense of purpose has shifted from the creative act itself, to that for the sake of which one creates — for God, as encountered in the embodied community of fellow beings.

So yes — this conversion has been a very bodily experience. Catholicism entails distinctly material practices — it is a “smells and bells” religion, as the saying goes — the physical motion of the sign of the cross, the feel of rosary beads in the fingers, the crack of the body of Christ in the teeth. It matters what you do. The word "matter" is from the Latin materia, in turn from mater, meaning mother — and the Church herself is understood as Mother, in conjunction with Mary, the Virgin Mother who remains intact in spite of bearing the infinite, just as matter-energy can be neither created nor destroyed — and in praying to her I have felt presence in my physical heart.

I have felt this too in the Eucharistic Adoration. In beholding this little bit of matter, this arbitrary bit of matter — to recognize in it the face, the one maskless face of the Source of all that is. In this matter, I recognize its precondition: the source of its form, that which offers to matter-energy its possibilities of concrete existence — that eternal source born anew, specifically in this Here and Now, in the particularity of this space.

In this Adoration I at last behold something more interesting than myself — than my Instagram, than my writing of these words, than my capacity to re-present what is present: the sight, in this host, of the Word that is not a sign — which allows me to vanish from my projected identity into present experience, this being that is everywhere and yet especially here, as it has found me. To be re-branded in this Name — of the one whose being emptied itself, and in that emptying — the emptying of all signification — became "the name that is above every name," Jesus.

Evangelistic Invitation

It feels strange to even say these things — to expose in these words and on these screens the moments of my own mystic interiority, to expose them in their fragile ineffability — to not only feel, but profess.

We all play different roles in evangelization — Peter was the Apostle to the Hebrews, Paul to the Gentiles. We speak to what we have felt and understood. Maybe I’m an apostle to artsy neurotic eco-content creators with deep ambivalences about the internet.

What then do I profess?

I profess that nothing is more precious than this material experience of the source, and so nothing could be more important than inviting people back to it. This, it seems to me, is the current frontline of evangelization: not the mere inculcation of doctrine (though that remains important) — but an invitation to that return. If we're going to be meaningfully saved on our devices, we need in a sense to be saved from them — to respond to the call to trace back down beneath the layers of metafication, to linger in love with the elusive real.

This isn't just abstract poeticizing — it's a mission in operation! We recently had a beautiful retreat here at Agape Community, a lay Catholic eco-homestead in rural Massachusetts. Undergraduate students from Iona University and College of the Holy Cross attended, and were invited to leave their phones in the chapel for the duration of the week, as a kind of sacramental threshold-passage. Across the board these 19- and 20-year olds attested that this — a week of phoneless presence together — was the most impactful aspect of the experience.

Ultimately though the problem is not the devices themselves, but the way they amplify constructed identities and solidify our divisions, especially political ones, which persist regardless of medium. This, in spite of all the politicizations that current media so readily enable, is the thing that Catholicism seems uniquely positioned to transcend — because unlike any other Christian Church in the U.S., it contains within itself such polar opposites of political orientation.

I witnessed this too, during another stay at Agape, when I met an avowedly hyperconservative Catholic man from a nearby traditionalist parish. Agape's ostensible politics are radically leftist; nonetheless their tangibly sacramental ecology — autonomous solar energy, composting, communal gardening — endears it to its radically rightist neighbors. He was like “everyone here voted for Trump,” but then when I mentioned Agape he was like "I love that place — they have the composting toilets!" Shared material practices and theology transcend ideological packaging.

What do we find when we step back from the representation of our identities, in the political sphere, and online? When we get rid of masks, we get matter — we get the clay of which the masks are made, and the mysterious matter of the fact that it is, as opposed to not being.

And so here's another strange thing, confirmed upon being confirmed: I don't want to be on the right or the left anymore. (If I did I would have stayed United Methodist, a church whose theology, politics and moral perspective I largely agree with, but which, when I was first becoming Catholic, was in the process of splitting up.) At this point I don't even want to be agreed with, I just want to be with. I'm not looking for unity-in-agreement, but unity-in-difference, which accords the actual, organic, heterogeneous structure of reality. This is the logic of the body, and the logic of the family — and perhaps the only viable logic for a post-liberal world: not consensus, but communion.

We now have a pope who seems eager to foreground this communion, coming on the heels of a pope who had emphasized the imperative of ecological conversion. Nothing could give me more hope for the Church, and for the world, than the prospect of those principles being unified.

And so yes, I invite you — come investigate this tradition, this Body, that has occasioned such unforeseen transformations in my own orientation to being. Come grow, harvest and serve food at the Catholic Worker — come stay at Agape — come to an Adoration and pray — come and see.