In Quincy in the 1870s, the ex-slave Augustus Tolton received letters of rejection from American seminaries; but then came the inspiration for Tolton to apply to a seminary in Rome, where the American political situation would be irrelevant.
After I was attacked in a Jerusalem street on Easter Sunday 1983, the woman at the hospital who x-rayed my arm explained to me: "They thought you were a Jew."
After the Aug. 5 shootings at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, a member of the congregation lamented the confusion of people who think that they are Muslims (and therefore terrorists, in the twisted logic of far too many people).
On Aug. 17, at a gathering in the mosque of the Islamic Society of Greater Springfield, a member awaiting the breaking of that day's Ramadan fast asked invited community leaders what can be done to prevent incidents such as the Wisconsin shootings. The invitees replied that it is not up to Muslims to prove that they have a right to be here; rather, it is the responsibility of the community to confront the ignorance which, like venom, poisons society and renders us unable to appreciate the people who potentially enrich our lives.
Might we benefit from some sort of switching of identities? Any of us might try to carry out a thought-experiment, imagining that the identity which we so jealously cling to is misinterpreted and misunderstood, and that therefore we ourselves go through life unappreciated, or even reviled.
Even without the thought-experiment, we can reflect on many situations in which identities are confused. We find that identity itself becomes ignored as "labeling" takes over. A process of reduction — of imagining "my people" versus "not my people" — provides convenience for all who think they must organize their minds in this way, but the convenience impoverishes.
We imagine that much of the drama represented by the name "Simon of Cyrene" is found in this man's fear that he, carrying the instrument of execution, will be confused with the condemned man.
The condemned man, of course, accepted his situation of complete confusion of identity. He put himself in the place of Simon and all of us. He emptied himself and became the slave of all human beings, that we, chained as we are by the sin which leaves us hateful, might experience a liberation which replaces hatred with an awareness that we are loved.
What is identity? It must be more than the sum of our affiliations and our sense of the "foreign." The fact that our faith proclaims a bond of love between God and all human beings is always cause for us to examine how that love is setting us free in our interactions with all of the people who come into our life. In this process, we may find that our identity becomes a pleasant surprise to ourselves.