Uniquely created in God’s image, we have no reason to feel be-Fuddled

In L. Frank Baum’s book, “The Emerald City of Oz,” he tells how Dorothy and her friends travel around the Land of Oz, visiting various places. One town that they visit is Fuddlecumjig, the home of the Fuddles. Being natives of Oz, the Fuddles are fairy people whom we will never meet in our prosaic world, for the Fuddles are jig-saw people, that is, they are made up of 3-D pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.
 
You can imagine this if you think of the 3-D puzzles we can put together, like Notre-Dame, Big Ben, Camelot Castle and Neuschwanstein. Well, the Fuddles are that kind of puzzle, only as you put the pieces together, you find that you are looking at a living human being. In fact, as you assemble someone’s face, one of the eyes might wink at you!
 
Unfortunately, the Fuddles have an innate weakness: when startled, they go completely to pieces, and the various pieces scatter themselves over the floor where they lie until someone comes by and fits them together again.
 
I write this because I am sometimes made to feel that I am a Fuddle, something made up of a lot of different pieces fitted together that can easily come apart. For example, I feel this when I am at the doctor’s office filling out one of those long questionnaires that not only ask about my illnesses and medications, but also about my ethnic background, my psychological tendencies, my attitudes, my gender preferences and other bits and pieces of me that I see as part of a whole and not as puzzle pieces to be put together. Even the dentist, while not delving as deeply into my DNA or my psyche, can ask searching questions about how I relate to my teeth. One priest we know answered the question, “How do you feel about your teeth?” with the reply, “I need them to preach with.”
 
I refuse to be reduced to a Fuddle! I am not the sum of my various pieces. I am a unique human being created in the image of God. Of course, there are different facets to my being and my personality. On one side of my family, I am Scotch-Irish, and on the other Southern Italian. That may sound like a combination as likely to unite as oil and vinegar, but God’s grace can make of it a harmony of opposites, and the strengths and weaknesses of one side are called to balance out the weaknesses and strengths of the other.
 
I refuse to let anyone reduce me to a single facet of my being as though that one facet is what makes me unique. Identity politics is common nowadays and there are innumerable variations of it: liturgical, political, sexual, racial, ethnic, but being Catholic makes us more than any form of identity politics. Each of us is the unique harmony of all aspects of our being, a harmony that images the relationship of the Trinity within themselves, a harmony that expresses the amazing richness of each person far more wonderfully than any one facet ever could.
 
Created in the image of God, we can’t be reduced to any one facet of our being. We are each divided within ourselves, and we each need God to heal us of any inner division. Then he can fuse us into a harmonious whole. The beauty of diamond flows from the harmony of its facets. Light enters the diamond, and it is refracted from facet to facet, growing more brilliant each time it changes its path. The facets need to be perfectly harmonized, or the light’s path will be distorted.
 
Every facet of our being should refract the light of God’s graces, and every facet is necessary for us to shine with the full radiance of his love. Nothing of what we are should be rejected, for God made every facet of our being and he is at work to harmonize them all to shine with the greatest brilliance.
 
Sister Gabriela of the Incarnation is a member of the Discalced Carmelites order in Flemington. Learn more at www.flemingtoncarmel.org.