Permanent Characters

Those of us of a certain age remember the illustration in the Baltimore Catechism when it came to talking about how three sacraments—Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders—imprint a spiritual “character” on the soul that cannot be effaced and which, therefore, renders those three sacraments unrepeatable. The picture was usually of two little kids with Jesus looking at them and a Chi Rho on their chests, symbolizing the character now marked on their souls.

I thought of the theology of character the other morning as I sat in my son’s school for end-of-year activities. A thirty-something woman in a sundress sitting two rows ahead of me had a visibly large Chinese character tattooed on her left shoulder.  

I assume the woman was Catholic because this was my son’s Polish Saturday School and the woman was from Poland. It started me thinking.

An older theology looked unfavorably on tattoos because it considered them a defacement, a quasi-mutilation of the body’s natural beauty. Aesthetically, I have to say I agree. The explosion of ink, especially among women, is something I find singularly unattractive.

But aesthetics is not ethics and, given the real and permanent mutilation that people commit involving healthy organs—whether it be contraceptive sterilization or genital mutilation in the name of gender ideology—I am less inclined to go after tattoos. But it did start me thinking.

Tattoos are generally permanent, or at least long-term. (Amid the contemporary cremation mania, there is also now a “service” where some morticians will “harvest” a loved one’s tattoo, mount, and frame it. (In the case of those who tattoo their derrières, it gives new meaning to saving your posterior for posterity.) Think about that: a piece of your relative’s skin hanging on your wall. Human flesh as “artwork”—how is this not commodification? 

But getting back to tattoo permanence. When I studied Mandarin twelve years ago, I learned you had to count the number of lines or “strokes” in a character. I’ll admit, learning Chinese at 20 is probably a lot easier than at 50, when one discovers that “extra stroke” you think you see is really just your dirty eyeglasses.  

Now, a character on a thirty-something’s shapely shoulder may be one thing; but, at sixty, one is going to have to ask whether that’s really an extra stroke of the character or a wrinkle of the flesh. Which brings me back to the question of permanence: Do we really appreciate what permanence means?

Perhaps during your “spiritual” phase and/or during your fascination with the “mystical East,” 和平 (peace) was appealing. But why do you expect it to be as equally meaningful or appealing thirty or forty years later, especially when you are otherwise not part of that culture? Or, like that birthmark you’ve grown used to, do you just tolerate that it’s still there?

In other words, has our readiness on a momentary impulse to do things that last undermined our appreciation of the seriousness of the idea of “permanence?” After all, if I’m going to have something etched into my body, ought it not be something I’ve pondered about long and hard, not necessarily found in a tattoo parlor catalog after a little too much to drink? If I am going to walk around with something inked into my flesh for several decades, ought it really not profoundly express something essential about me? Has our readiness on a momentary impulse to do things that last undermined our appreciation of the seriousness of the idea of “permanence?”Tweet This

Somehow, I doubt that’s usually the case.

Which brings me back to the sacramental characters. Perhaps they’re not visible (which is why the translation of the Creed now speaks of things “visible and invisible,” not just “seen and unseen”). But that doesn’t make them any less real, any less effective, or any less permanent.  

Yet how many Catholics take their sacramental characters anywhere near as seriously as the Mandarin character they tattoo on their bodies? Sacramental characters, after all, afford a permanent role in the Body of Christ: child of God, soldier of Christ, alter Christus. That baptismal character, for example, is why a Catholic’s marriage cannot not be a sacrament, why any attempt to marry outside the Church (without dispensation of form) is no marriage. There’s no little number of revisionist theologians—more in Europe than in America but not unrepresented here—who would deny that teaching of the Church and claim a Catholic can enter a non-sacramental “marriage.”  

Maybe we can draw an analogy from that old tattoo. Having been gotten not out of profound reflection but because it was “a dare” or my friends were doing it or whatever, the 和平 no longer means anything to me. That doesn’t mean it’s gone away; the fading and wrinkling ink is still there, even if I no longer attribute the “meaning” I gave it in my twenties. Isn’t that often the same, say, with the sacramental character of, say, Confirmation? 

The sacrament intended to complete my fullest incorporation into the Church in practice becomes the “sacrament” of ecclesial exodus until nice pictures are needed for a wedding backdrop or a first child needs baptizing. And, presumably, I spent more time preparing to receive that character than the typical Chinese character tattoo.

Or have we thought equally superficially about both?

What we do, and what a society considers “beautiful,” often speaks volumes about deeper, underlying values assumptions. Does the proliferation of tattoos that, over time, seem typically to become meaningless artifacts, even though they still perdure, nurture an impoverished sense of permanence and meaning?