Who are you? Who do others say that you are?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 03, 2025 | In Reviews

It is hard to argue against the proposition that the number one problem afflicting people around the world, at least in affluent societies, is a crisis of personal identity. In agrarian societies, where people find themselves quite literally “grounded” in the demands and rhythms of nature, this crisis may often be far less acute. A deep immersion in both the cycle of life and productive labor tends, I think, to protect us from that “untethered” feeling which lies at the heart of so much modern discontent and even self-doubt. A stable yet vibrant multi-generational family life also tends to foster that stability of identity and purpose for which we all yearn. But such natural connections and fruitful limits are often lacking today.

Instead, there is a growing feeling that we are adrift, that our lives are essentially meaningless, and that any sort of confident repose within our own being is actually impossible. Without this background, it is difficult to explain the modern emphasis on both identifying ourselves with our most felt attachments or “drives” and insisting that others affirm these attachments or drives as constituting a personal identity to be honored and celebrated. The one thing we can say about this, to speak honestly, is that such a grasping for a nominal personal identity, along with a demand for its recognition as good, is all rather depressingly thin. The assertion of a desire or a tendency is neither a proof of its goodness nor a reason to honor it…and the effort to insist that it must be good and honorable can only deepen our fundamental despair.

For within such assertions we still do not know who we are, or even what we are for.

Fatherhood

I suspect most of our blatantly self-assertive attempts to feel secure in one identity or another stem from a loss of a sense of fatherhood. As a society largely cut off from extended family through urbanization, rapid transit, and what we might call corporate atomization—a society, indeed, in which family life has largely broken down—we place a far higher premium on personal identity simply because we tend not to be personally grounded in any larger identity. We are like atoms banging around in a confined space—but we draw very little sense of identity from either the space or the banging. So we tend to latch onto other sufficiently similar atoms to form molecules, and we insist that all the other molecules, that is, every other group, must recognize our molecule as “good”.

Since the highest order a Godless world knows is the political order, all of this tends toward the creation of what we call “identity politics”, which becomes society’s way of affirming whoever is sufficiently well-organized to demand affirmation. But politics and paternity are not the same, and what we find in the end is that happiness does not derive from political affirmation—for the simple reason that happiness, in fact, actually derives from paternal affirmation.

It seems to me that it is precisely this insight which lies at the heart of Fr. Gregory Pine’s new book from Ignatius Press, Your Eucharistic Identity: A Sacramental Guide to the Fullness of Life. For it is the essence of the reception of Communion to become one with Christ precisely as a son or daughter loved by the same Father.

Fr. Pine’s starting point

This is precisely where Fr. Pine begins. Right from the start he emphasizes that we cannot craft an identity, we must receive it. Moreover, our active participation in that reception is above all Eucharistic and therefore filial. Fr. Pine explains the Prodigal Son in exactly this way—as one who actually seeks to give up his sonship to craft his own identity, an effort which ends (and can only end) in disaster and despair. Our real identity is a paternal gift bestowed by a paternal love, a point that is commonly missed. Indeed, Fr. Pine points out that even the prodigal son’s big brother takes that love for granted, without understanding the true potential of its miraculous fullness. Backing up a bit, Fr. Pine also points out what ought now to become obvious: Beginning with Adam and Eve, our relationship with God is precisely a paternal relationship, that is, a relationship of dependence ordered to love and, therefore, to happiness:

The Fall reveals our existential state with awful clarity. Like Adam and Eve, we have difficulty looking to the Father and trusting in His goodness. Struggling to receive our identity, we turn in on ourselves and craft an identity. In every generation, we are tempted to slouch toward the posture of our first parents as their sin becomes our own. We have all chosen not to receive our life from God as a gift; we have all chosen not to dwell in His abiding presence; we have all chosen not to look to Him for our identity. Instead, we have chosen to go it alone. In the garden, where the seed of all dysphoria was sown, we see the omen of our current confusion. [p. 19]

It is this understanding that informs the entire book. Our identity comes only from Him, we understand it only through Him, and we develop and perfect it only for him. Again, Fr. Pine: “This is who we are. This is what we are for. We are from God, through God, and for God. What will we choose to do with this endowment? [p. 23]”

Certainly, we can squander it. But the whole point of Fr. Pine’s book is to teach us how to claim and strengthen our personal identity Eucharistically. It is precisely through an ever-deepening and intentional participation in the Eucharist that we unite ourselves to the Divine Son to complete and perfect our Divine filiation with the Father. Fr. Pine describes the Transfiguration of Christ as a foretaste of our own transformation by God through love, citing St. Paul, who addressed the Galatians as “my little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you” [4:18]. For he had already referred to this process in himself: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself form me” [2:20]

Divine filiation

After explaining these fundamental truths about our personal identity as children of God through Jesus Christ, Fr. Pine offers six more chapters which describe the process of growth into Christ that we are to undertake through the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The chapter titles are well chosen (Establishing Contact, Reading the Signs, Offering it Up, Feeding Our Souls, Becoming the Body, and (for at times none of this will be easy) Keep Showing Up. But he begins by stating an important truth: “The sacraments do not bear a generic grace, they bear the graces of Christ’s mysteries in the flesh” (54). Ultimately we must (and can) allow ourselves to be reshaped Eucharistically.

Here Fr. Pine quotes Our Lord Himself: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (Jn 6:56, p. 62). Indeed, the whole purpose of our lives is to find our meaning in just this reality, our Divine filiation, our desire and willingness to grow from childhood to adulthood as beloved sons and daughters of God:

Remember, while here on earth, our aim is to empty ourselves of self-styled identity so that we can welcome the identity of Christ. “You are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 3:23). By setting the right intention and making frequent actions of attention, we offer to the Lord a humble openness, through which Christ can bring about the transformation we so desperately desire. [73]

Chapter 5, “Offering It Up”, is particularly rich in helping us to grasp our essential identity and how we really ought to lay claim to it. Consider the chapter subtitles:

• We Are Not Our Own
• An Offering of Soul and Body
• The Worship of Sacrifice
• A Bloody Business
• Recovered and Offered Up
• The Mass, Our Share in Calvary
• Making It Our Own
• Death to Identity

There is even a fitting conclusion to this review in the last of these subtitles, “Death to Identity”. In the end, we must learn not to claim our own independent identities, which do not exist, but our Christic identities as beloved sons and daughters of our Father in Heaven. As Fr. Pine points out in Chapter 7, this is not a matter of giving up our particular differences, our uniqueness, which our Father loves and which can only be perfected in Christ. As St. Paul put it: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ…. For the body does not consist of one member but of many” (reread 1 Cor 12).

We are called to recognize and rejoice in our identity as beloved children of the Father, from whom we receive everything we are, out of sheer love. Even if we have in one way or another or at one time or another rejected that identity, it is still ours to claim here and now. Or as St. Paul put it with considerable urgency (1 Cor 6:20): “You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

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Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P., Your Eucharistic Identity: A Sacramental Guide to the Fullness of Life: Ignatius Press, 2025. 164pp. $17.95 paper, $11.67 ebook.