In days to come,
the mountain of the LORD’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain
and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it;
many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us climb the LORD’s mountain,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may instruct us in his ways,
and we may walk in his paths.”

— Is 2:2–3 (from Reading 1 of the First Sunday of Advent)

I’m one of those rare millennials without a tattoo.

Okay, maybe not. A quick Google search tells me that 41-47% of my generation is tatted. I’m in the majority. Still, tattoos ride on the bodies of something like 32% of Gen X and only 13% of Baby Boomers. So, there’s a huge uptick in ink on my generation’s skin.

I suppose I don’t have a tattoo because once a guy with sleeves walked in front of our stopped car, and my dad looked me in the eyes and said, “I’ll beat your ass if you get a tattoo.” At the time, I didn’t want to find out if he was serious or not. I also distinctly remember sitting in college class at the local university (there was some arrangement between my high school and the college that allowed upperclassmen to take a few courses each semester) when the topic of tattoos surfaced. My teacher wasn’t a fan of them. Fox, a huge kid and probably a football player, expressed his agreement with the professor by noting that “a girl will get a dolphin tattoo and then as they she gets older it will become a whale.” This, too, caused me to stop and think about the way skin, aging, and tattoos must relate to one another and this gave me pause.

So, I don’t have a tattoo, but many do. People have arguments for and against and I’m rather agnostic on the topic. I’ve read exactly zero studies as to why people my age get tattoos. I’m sure the reasons are legion, but I have to believe the reason that lies underneath all the others has something to do with the permanence of a tattoo. If this wasn’t a significant factor, I don’t know why you’d go through with getting one.

A tattoo endures and persists amid the sands of time. It may be impacted by wrinkles or weight gain, but it’s still there. It’s consistent. One’s preferences or relationships that motivated this or that particular image or word or phrase, those might change. But that tattoo remains. It sticks with you as a reminder that you are still you and your past is part of your present, too.

I wonder if, for many people, a tattoo is something like a sacramental — a kind of fleshly indelible mark — that reminds them of something stable in the midst of an unstable world and the inevitable deterioration of the human body. The tattoo points to something lasting while most things fall away. But, in the end, a tattoo is only skin deep and the flesh that serves as its backdrop, that flesh, too, will decay. Our finitude takes out the tattoo in the end, no matter how meaningful it is in manifesting an infinite desire right now.

Tattooing points to a desire for something lasting, something stable and permanent, and something that will change me, stick with me, and remind me. There’s even a desire, I suppose, for the process to be hard, that I would have to endure some sort of pin-prick trial in order to have “it,” whatever “it” is.

While it’s no longer taboo or countercultural for people in my generation to be “gettin’ ink done,” it is countercultural to become Catholic. Yet people my age (and younger) are becoming Catholic. Sure, it’s a minority movement. But why are we seeing an increasing number of young people turn towards Catholicism? In sum, I think it’s for a similar reason that people get tattoos, but a deeper one.

In my role in Church work, I am privileged to handle initial conversations with those who want to become Catholic. When asked about why they want to become Catholic, I’d say the overwhelming desire people express is a desire for consistency. They desire stability in the midst of the instability of our society. People seem tired of the inconsistencies they find in Protestantism, or they’re concerned about the nihilism of the culture, or they tried moral relativism and it didn’t work out very well. When you can just move the line all the time you realize you stand for everything and nothing all at once. They’ve voiced a frustration with our “self-made world” and they find it empty. They encounter it in Protestantism and in the culture at large. They see people and groups of people swing hard from one pole to the other. They, too, have been “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4:14). And they are looking for a rock, a safe refuge, and a secure base. They’re finding it in the consistency of the Church.

This is an amazing development. That which probably comes under the harshest cultural criticism — that the Church is slow to change, not up-with-the-times, antiquated, or whatever — is precisely her “selling point” as society loses its collective mind. In the Church, people find stability, consistency of teaching, and a challenge of being initiated into something way bigger than themselves. They find a sense of the sacred, ritual, and the possibility of self-transcendence. Most importantly, they come into contact with the person of Jesus Christ — in and through the Sacraments, the proclamation of the word of God, the priesthood, the people, etc. As one young lady who wants to become Catholic put it, “I’ve been to other churches. But, I believe the Catholic Church is the Church Jesus founded and it’s the way I can really come into contact with him.” Not a convenient caricature, figment of the idealist’s imagination, or the fancy of the leader or elders, but the real Jesus.

Let’s get back to the tattoo analogy. When people are initiated into the Catholic Church, in both Baptism and Confirmation, or when men receive Holy Orders, they are sealed by God with an indelible (i.e., unable to be destroyed or blotted out) mark on their souls. The Catechism elaborates:

The seal is a symbol close to that of anointing. “The Father has set his seal” on Christ and also seals us in him. Because this seal indicates the indelible effect of the anointing with the Holy Spirit in the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders, the image of the seal (sphragis) has been used in some theological traditions to express the indelible “character” imprinted by these three unrepeatable sacraments. (CCC 698)

The Sacraments do what tattoos never can. Tattoos, in the end, are finite and temporal works of art that manifest the infinite and eternal longings of the human heart for something permanent and lasting amid the changing and decaying world. The Sacraments of the Church are finite and temporal events that make an infinite and eternal mark — they fashion the soul into a work of art. Baptism and Confirmation “tattoo” the soul and initiate the person into communion with Christ, the only relationship capable of withstanding and even destroying the power of the grave — and the chaos of our culture.