“Now I appeal to you, brothers and sister, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.” (1 Cor 1:10)
Forgive me, at the start of a new year, for sounding like the English major I once was. St. Paul’s words about unity and identity remind me of a novel only snooty book lovers read from start to finish: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The hero, Stephen Dedalus, does what many of us did in our school copybooks or, these days, on laptops: He locates himself within concentric rings of belonging, showing how one young person identified himself and his place in the greater scheme of things. Stephen writes his name, then the classroom in which he presently sits, followed by the name of the school he attends, the town, county, Ireland, Europe, The World. He finishes grandly with “The Universe.”
If you haven’t done this yourself at one time or another, you might try it. What are your circles of belonging? Mine include, among others, the names on both sides of my family tree, the Catholic Church, Christianity, the Americas, the Earth.
At one time I reflexively included Women as a vital category of my identity, but these days I’m ambivalent about claiming gender as too significant. Ditto orientation, race, political affiliation, or nationhood. Should these distinctions be as important as we publicly declare them to be? I’m just not sure anymore. I now prefer to categorize myself as a Human Being and would add myself into Creation as the immediate next ring.
I don’t offer all this as a model for anyone else, because I’m honestly a lot more perplexed about my place in the scheme of things than I was when I first did this exercise as a teenager, when each category of personal belonging seemed crystal clear. Ask the nearest teenager to make a list of their identities and be prepared for some surprises.
In Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus also turns out to be less certain of his place as the sure circles in his notebook first imply. As he rereads his list, our protagonist’s head spins: “It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God.” When I think more theologically about my sense of place, I realize I don’t want to stop with The Universe either; I would situate that realm in the larger territory of Eternity. And, for a believer, Eternity has to be dropped, finally, into Divinity, the widest ring of all.
Belonging is a remarkable business, as Stephen Dedalus discovers. His historical Irish reality was implanted in a divided nation, where personal convictions and loyalties were relentlessly debated around his otherwise placid childhood. Joyce writes: “He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr. Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.” Ah: the more I think about it, the more I wonder if perhaps we should all be reading A Portrait of the Artist again.
The final result for young Stephen, in his search for context and identity, is this: “It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak.” And this, my friends, is where some of us may find ourselves in this new calendar year. Unsure of many things that used to seem so certain. Unsure of our place in time and space. Unsure if perhaps we’re at the end of the world as we once understood it. Not sure about the viability of our environment, government, church, finances, loyalties, society, or security. What contains us these days—if anything?
Maybe this is why St. Paul uses such strong language to call his house churches into fraction-free unity. “By the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul strenuously insists, be of one mind and purpose, remain in agreement and without division. Paul views it as a dangerous thought error for some in the community to imagine another name lays claim to them: that they are disciples of Paul, Apollos, or Peter simply because that person once performed their baptism or presented ideas they find appealing. No, Paul declares, the cross of Christ becomes meaningless if we pick it apart splinter by splinter. Christ alone is all in all, the biggest ring of belonging to which the universe and time itself must finally submit.
The very idea of catholic is to be universal, comprehensive. The church is therefore inclusive by design, not the present fractured mess of denominations, each claiming their window on truth is exclusively correct. Mutual excommunications of the past that rent the church first into East and West and the later schisms that further shredded Christianity seem like effective arguments against the Christian witness. If members of the body of Christ can’t abide together, why should the rest of the world pay the gospel any attention?
Paul was dead right about the seriousness of Christian unity. Jesus made it his final prayer at the Last Supper: “That they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:21) Yet liturgy wars about prayers and postures continue even among Catholics. We take up these positions with more gravity than our Christ-endowed unity. We draw the circles of belonging ever smaller, allowing fear and self-righteousness to continue to pierce and dismember the holy body.
For others, of course, politics or nationalism has replaced religion as the identity of primary concern. Even some bishops seem to prefer to locate the church within the confines of a partisan loyalty. All of this makes me less willing to call myself definitively one thing or another. It reminds me of a therapist I knew who refused to give his patients a diagnostic name for their conditions. “People attach to labels,” he reflected. “The label becomes their whole reality, as well as the excuse and the reason they can’t change their behaviors.” Labels take control. They become more true of us than we are of ourselves.
Which is why, apart from the “name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” I hesitate to draw myself inside any circle of belonging that may unintentionally leave you out. If Eternity is bounded by Divinity, and Christ will be all in all when time and place lose their meaning, Christians cannot be bound to other names, loyalties, or creeds. We can’t retreat behind the bars of narrow allegiances that makes us less free. It seems better and truer to look past the flags and bumper stickers, which place of worship other folks go to and what they may or may not be wearing on their heads when they get there. We must save our most vigorous protests for what is contrary to Christ in our culture without leveling our objections against any minor deity. Because if you and I are both Human Beings, our community and our belonging starts there.
This article also appears in the January 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 1, page 47-49). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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