by Francis Etheredge Profiles in Catholicism
The more I read and the more I reflect on this generation’s search for an identity, the more I realise that growing up is like looking for keys that will unlock the question of who I am and what is the purpose of my life.
However, the clearer we examine the culture in which we live, the more obvious it becomes that questions about identity are like surf boards, riding whatever turning tide there is; and, therefore, gender crises are fuelled by social media and have escalated, along with the media, from a few in 1989 to thousands in 2024. But gender crises are symptomatic of the deeper, unidentified questions of who am I, what is my life about, what purpose does it have? These questions, however, take time, reading, discussion, silence and prayer, guidance and friendship. Instead, young people are very often offered attention seeking devices called i-phones, that are designed to sap the strength of your attention like a virus undermines your health. Therefore, instead of engaging, consistently, in the search for answers, there is the constant ebb and flow of information and various kinds of images.
What we have, then, in the place of a developing, philosophical, psychological and even theological engagement with the questions of life, is a kind of biologism: that the body answers the questions of life. That if a person is distressed, for example, by their gender, then they are in the wrong body. That if a person is unhappy, it is not because of failed relationships, isolation, confusion about careers, problems in the family – it is because of a chemical deficiency in the brain. If a person is troubled about when to give themselves away, but not in marriage, the answer is contraception. Never mind the mentality of a person making themselves available to others or the health consequences of taking unnecessary chemicals that impact upon a person’s health. And then, if the girl or woman becomes pregnant, she aborts the child, as if the agony and distress afterwards are some kind of grief over a body-part, or a socially induced guilt – and not an actual registering of what was unclearly known, namely, that a baby died and there is a mother and a father of a child now “not there”.
So what are the real keys to the real lock and what is opened by them? The real lock, as it were, is the question of identity: Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Who can I make friends with? What makes a good friendship? These are the real and enduring questions which, although often engaged with indirectly, need to be discovered and addressed directly.
What, then, are the keys that open upon the vista of human development? Not soul denying, psychologically quashing denials of subjectivity, but great and challenging demands on evidence, on reason, on asking for adequate answers that lead to more questions and build a real understanding of “Who I am” and “What life is about”. In other words, we need to invite people to question, to think, to engage in critical dialogue with what is on offer as a so-called answer to human identity.
Let the question of what the body is, surface beyond being a biological process with no purposes beyond avoiding pain and seeking pleasure? In other words, let us ask the question of how it is even possible to ask a question? Why, if we are simply “flesh”, as it were, are we even capable of asking a question? Thus, we begin, little by little, to appreciate that even if we are a bunch of wires, what we communicate comes from elsewhere than the wires themselves. If a man phones his wife, the phone does not make the content; rather, the phone transmits the message and, between them, they discuss what to do. Thus, thinking through our conceptions of human being, we begin to discover the edge of the deep philosophical answers of the past that still open us to the questions in the present: that the body communicates the soul: that there is an origin of communication in me, who I am, that seeks to communicate with another “I”.
With these beginnings, let us engage in reading that stimulates our thinking, uncovers our assumptions and makes us investigate the real world, the real “me”, the actual nature of plants, animals and human beings, the immense and wonderful natural world – let us live the investigation and reflect, as we can, on our path of discovery. Let us not jam the wrong keys in the right locks; but, even if we do, let us find a locksmith with the skill and ingenuity to help!
I invite you to start with any reasonably well written book and, if you cannot find one, try The Word in Your Heart: Mary, Youth, and Mental Health:
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