Tattoos are on the rise in the United States. A recent Pew survey showed that 33 percent of Americans have at least one tattoo, and 41 percent of people under the age of thirty have been inked. The industry is projected to grow immensely over the next few years, and workplaces commonly accept visible tattoos in their dress codes. The trend begs the question: why are people flocking to this formerly taboo practice?
Research shows the rise in tattoo acquisition is not a vain indulgence, but a desire to express meaning and purpose. The most common reasons people get tattoos are to memorialize a loved one, mark a significant experience, or express their beliefs. Far from an exercise in egoism, tattoos point to the desire for an integration of the ethereal with the tangible. The need is so immediate that exterior signs and symbols will not suffice but must engage the body.
This desire was the subject of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back.” In it, O’Connor sketches out two main characters: O.E. Parker and Sarah Ruth Cates. Their personalities could not be more different. Sarah hates cars, tobacco, whiskey, and makeup. She refuses to season her food or enter a church building. She considers it all vanity and quarantines herself from the world. Her stern and self-righteous personality makes her a miserable and lifeless woman. Sarah Ruth is the heresy of iconoclasm personified.
Parker, on the other hand, adores the pleasures of the physical world. He drinks, swears, and fights to his heart’s content. He follows his fancy wherever it leads him, and fills his body, save for his back, with tattoos. Each tattoo is chosen in haste, satisfying a momentary desire for excitement. Instead of telling a coherent and beautiful story, Parker’s tattoos tell the story of a man with no purpose or direction. He looks in the mirror with self-loathing, quells the sting of regret with more tattoos, and buries himself deeper in discontent. Divorced from any spiritual awareness, Parker represents the pursuit of sensuality.
A sacramental understanding of creation and the body is the remedy to disintegrated humanity.
The characters in “Parker’s Back” reveal the insipid fruit of divorcing the physical and the spiritual. Sarah Ruth is ugly and isolated in her spiritual cell. Parker is disillusioned and unsatisfied by his physical pursuits. Their polarity has made them discontent, which explains their confounding, mutual attraction: they need each other. The pair endure a miserable marriage, both stubbornly refusing to assent to the other.
The desire to integrate the mystical and corporeal is a primal and natural part of our anthropology, but it is strained in our culture. Gender ideology segregates the body from identity. The perceived discord between faith and science muddles the relationship of theology and cosmology. Consumerism has made a commodity of the natural world, isolating human beings from their place in ecology. Social media capitalizes on our desperation for connection while keeping us physically separated. The discontent experienced by O’Connor’s characters—which extends to our own lives—is the fruit of sin, Gnosticism, hedonism, iconoclasm, and all manner of forces which drive a wedge between the body and soul. Only an incarnational and sacramental revelation can heal this vexation.
A brush with death eventually awakens Parker to his spiritual poverty, and he comes to understand the identity and power of God. Parker is not content to keep this revelation to himself, but hastens to express and seal it. He has a tattoo of a stern Byzantine Christ scored across his back. This is not an act of egoism but assent. Parker allows Jesus into his life by opening both his soul and body to the work of grace.
Parker’s tattoo is a sacramental sign of his conversion, of his assimilation to Christ. When he presents the tattoo to his wife, she accuses him of idolatry. Refusing to recognize the goodness of the body, she raises a broom handle to pummel both Parker’s back and the image of the face of Jesus. The story ends with Parker crouched against a tree crying like a baby. Parker has become, in his very body, the icon of Christ crucified.
O’Connor’s characters illuminate the need for a sacramental theology of creation and the body. Humans are body-soul composites made to experience and express their spiritual lives in their bodies. The visible world is sacramental; it communicates God’s identity and power. The covenants are fleshy, requiring the sacrifice and splitting of animals, circumcision, and eating the Passover lamb. When God instructs the people in worship, he does not tell them to simply imagine the divine. Rather, he instructs them to build a tabernacle, place objects within it, burn incense, and speak prayers. In the sensuality of creation, covenants, and worship, God establishes and maintains a relationship with his people.
The integration of the physical and spiritual reaches its pinnacle in the person of Jesus Christ. Becoming human and remaining divine, Jesus sanctifies the body and the natural world. His incarnate body is conceived within the ecosystem that he, himself, spoke into being. The grit of humanity, which we might think too vulgar to be associated with the divine, Jesus enters into and hallows.
We see in Jesus the icon of sacramental theology, whose ministry continues today in the sacraments. We feel the cold splash of the baptismal waters and smell the Chrism that drips down the forehead of the confirmandi. We taste and digest the Eucharist, speak the words of our confessions, and consummate marriage. The sacraments, the continuation of Jesus’ ministry, teach us to know and live our humanity in its fullness.
A sacramental understanding of creation and the body is the remedy to disintegrated humanity. We are created to know, love, and serve God, and these things can only be done by engaging our hearts, minds, and bodies as one. The spike in tattoo acquisition is an attempt for the secular world to recapture its sacramental nature, but it is not sufficient. The Word made flesh must teach us, through the Church, the beauty of an integrated, human life.