Someone asked me the other day if I “identify” as a Catholic, which I thought a curious way of putting it. It may have been out of a desire not to offend. Which, for the record, is not all that easy to do with me, especially not on this topic. Some of my dearest friends persist in walking on tippy-toe around the whole subject of religion, though I know many of them happen to disagree strongly with me. Not to cast any stones: I have planted the tree of conflict avoidance in many a garden, and eaten the fruit of melodrama thereof. But I do like a good argument, and I do like to be told when I am full of “it”.

Anyway, it’s just not possible to avoid offending someone (which in the absence of any belief in objectivity is often confused with being offensive). Far sharper wits than I have made game of the increasing amount of verbal contortion required to avoid giving offense these days, you know, the fine distinctions between being “differently abled” and “temporarily abled”. In the end all of these identity politics come down to gnosticism, to the notion that the identity conferred on us by biology and culture is ultimately insubstantial, and that the only “is” is what each person decides it to be. Thus the correctness of “identify as” when “is” implies any degree of passivity.

Times being what they are, and America being, as Harold Bloom observes, a deeply Gnostic place, I suppose it is only inevitable that those who have never experienced a religious conversion should see it as one of the many forms of self-actualization. And though I would not quibble with either “self” or “actualization”, properly understood, I fear that all that verbiage does not quite convey the experience itself, which is a little like being grabbed by the hair and shaken hard enough to be flung out of your skin. In the process you lose hold of a lot of your favorite conceits: much is stripped away. But you do not lose what you are; you do not lose what nature gave you. The truly strange thing is that at the end of it all, after all the shaking, you feel so at home in your own skin that it is hard to imagine what it was like not to be.

(cdm | VineAndBranches)