A few weeks back, I was driving along Route 42 in heavy traffic. Since our pace was slow, it gave me an opportunity to take in all the other cars around me.
However, it wasn’t the cars that interested me so much as it was the flags, the bumper stickers, the signs, the painted windows: the messages to ourselves.
One particular bumper sticker read, “Honk if you love Jesus.” Now, living my entire life in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, I know full well the response of fellow travelers if I randomly beep my horn on the 42 freeway.
There has always been a great need for us to communicate to each other who we are and in what we believe. Our T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, jackets – sometimes the very skins we walk around in – reveal much about us.
Merely a glance at a passer-by can tell what team they’re for, what kind of music they listen to, where they’ve been and whether or not they’re with stupid. The need to communicate our identity is overwhelming, and we will use any medium available to us.
I can honestly say that I am one of those people. Apparently, I have an obsession. Actually, it’s more of a compulsion. For some reason, whenever I find myself in any particular place, I often give into the hankering to buy a T-shirt.
In one large drawer, I have well over 100 T-shirts organized only by, “Can I stuff another one in there?”
The T-shirts represent places I’ve visited and events I’ve attended. One I got in Toronto that has a stick figure running from a bear says, “Canadian Fast Food.” I have T-shirts with an array of literary heroes such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, to name a few. Of course there’s the Eagles, Phillies, Flyers, Sixers – and my granddaughter’s hockey team.
When I bought a T-shirt this summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that has a giant Sasquatch foot on the front, my 12-year-old granddaughter said, “Look, Papa’s buying another souvenir T-shirt.” It’s not a souvenir, I told her. It’s clothing.
The day finally came where I couldn’t fit another T-shirt in the drawer. It was time to assess what should stay and what should go.
Dumping the drawer on the floor, I made a few discoveries. One was that I had completely forgotten that I actually owned a number of the T-shirts. Another was that there were some that I hadn’t worn in years. But the discovery that made me pause was realizing that out of the hundred or so T-shirts that communicated an aspect of my identity, only about five of them reflected my faith.
I had a plethora of shirts of concerts, breweries, sports, museums, pubs, cities and national parks, but only a few of my Catholic faith.
And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure why. I am confident that I wear my Catholic faith on my sleeve, apparently just not on my T-shirts.
Then I thought about how we identify as Catholics. If someone walked into our home, would they be able to look around a room and immediately know that we were Catholic? Are we more apt to hang a poster of, say, New Kids On The Block than of a holy image? Is there a crucifix in our homes, an icon of the Blessed Mother, perhaps a font of Holy Water near the doorway?
As Catholics, we are to live a Catholic lifestyle, not just on Sunday mornings, but every hour of every day.
And, as Catholics, we are all called to evangelize. Pope Francis said, “There is a kind of preaching which falls to each of us as a daily responsibility.” What better way than to show our faith through the things we hang on our walls, then things we carry and the things we wear.
This past summer when we visited Our Lady of Champion Shrine in Wisconsin, my granddaughter said with a giggle, “Look, Papa’s buying another souvenir T-shirt.”
No, it’s not just a T-shirt, I said. It’s evangelization.
Deacon Dean Johnson serves at Church of the Holy Family, Sewell.
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