What is implicit and what is overt in our presentation of ourselves: in particular I am thinking of our cultural or spiritual identity?

I remember a Salvation Army officer saying that his uniform was helpful in his work, because people knew who he was. Religious sisters working in the community do not now wear the traditional habit. One sister, waiting to meet me at Dublin airport, had spent her time usefully with a woman, who was distressed. I asked, had the person known that this sympathetic listener was a nun. Almost certainly, in Ireland, and the sombre tailoring and neat hair style would have been an indicator. But my question was real – would you know you were with a professionally spiritual person just from being with her, without any external confirmation?
Perhaps it’s because I’m English and from a certain background, I prefer indicators of identity to be somewhere on a continuum nearer to subtle than crude.
But this approach has hazards. I was hearing about psychoanalytically trained workers in the NHS being so careful in not revealing this training that there could be several in the same Trust unaware of each other as potential under the surface allies against the in your face dynamics of the organisation. Can you not sense an intellectual as you can a sexual orientation?
Psychoanalytically informed organisational work should, I believe, be implicit rather than overt. Psychoanalytical understanding helps the organisational consultant to think but, except in some highly specific circumstances, he or she does not expect the client necessarily to share or even be interested in this understanding.
Another example is to do with group relations. It is a powerful – and to me a totally convincing - argument that we are influenced by issues of faith, belief and spirituality in the way we think and act. In society that is why we have churches and retreat centres and the like. And these things influence every aspect of our daily lives. But implicit or overt, that is the question. Overt speaks to the appearance of things. Implicit speaks to the substance.
We have had a sick person in our house, so a lot of different people have come to care for that person. From things they say and implicit data, I know that some are Muslim, some Catholic, others are other kinds of Christian, one is Pentecostal, another a Jehovah’s Witness. Others, I have no idea about. None speaks directly to their faith or belief. And all we are interested in is their capacity to care, and I am content to think that they are helped in this by the way they organise their values.
When I was young and less impressionable than I am now, Father (later Bishop) Huddleston came to our school to preach. He was an awe-inspiring and brave man, but what I remember is his saying he could not do it without his faith, and my thinking that it must be possible to do good without having faith.
Of course I was wrong. We all have mythologies that support us. But I want to distinguish the consulting room or retreat where we go to explore our mythologies and our work in the world where we help people to put their mythologies to good use.
I would like to find out about people through their actions even more than their words. Evidence-based identities – now that would be a fine thing.