Seek and you shall find…

This is my first Triduum without any association with RCIA. For my first, I was a seeker contemplating becoming Catholic, and the RCIA director of the parish I had decided to attend recommended I attend Triduum to get a feel for what Catholicism was all about. It was incredible, beautiful, and I moved forward. For the second one, I was actually in RCIA, and the third one, I was receiving confirmation and communion. For the fourth one, I was sponsor to someone who received confirmation and communion. For the fifth one, I was supposed to be a member of the RCIA team, watching our catechumens and candidates get baptized, confirmed, and communioned tonight, but everything fell apart for me with the RCIA program at my parish, and that, combined with some other insoluble problems, put a pall over my feelings for my parish, despite my love for it and for the priest and my friends there. And all of this disruption made the 30-mile trip each way to get there each week feel a lot less justifiable; so, as of January 1 of this year, I am technically still a member of my parish, but am in fact rather parish-less.

In January, I started to attend a parish (Parish #1) that was only 8 miles away. I had been there several times and I found it nice enough. Also, that parish is where the Secular Franciscans meet and I had gone to a few of their meetings, so I thought all of this boded well for a possible new church home for me. And I like the priest’s approach – very hands-on, action-oriented – we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. I hadn’t yet committed to becoming a member of the parish, because I just hadn’t gotten the little “go-ahead” signal from inside me, the small, guiding voice I use for all my decisions as much possible. But I think that my experience at this parish on Palm Sunday might just pour cold water on the idea of becoming a member of Parish #1. While this priest is great at practical spirituality in action, he seemed utterly out of his element in the more mystical environs of Palm Sunday and the upcoming Holy Week. The palm leaves were just piled on a table outside the church, and there was no procession. What a grave disappointment. And when it came to his homily, it was basically “Christ died for your sins, so if you feel far from God because of your sins, don’t worry, because God forgives you through Christ.” And while that is true, and that is indeed the Good News, it seems to be a rather banal topic for the occasion, which is the run-up to the most mystical event of all of Western Civilization. And since I did tell myself that Palm Sunday to Easter is where you find out what a parish is really made of, that makes me feel like I might not become a member of this one.

For Holy Thursday and Good Friday, I went to another parish (Parish #2), also 8 miles from our house. I had been to this one several times before, and actually considered it as a possible home parish before I realized how much I loved the parish I am currently trying to leave. The Holy Thursday experience at this parish was a great improvement over Parish #2  – almost to a fault! The church itself is much larger and more spacious and much more beautifully decorated. The priest, far from being uncomfortable with mystical topics, gave his homily with eyes closed half the time, and it was completely about the Eucharist and the importance of it. I think because my home parish tends to attract lots of highly-educated liberal folk, our priest’s homilies tend to walk a line between mysticism, practicality, and intellectual knowingness, a place that I find very comfortable and easy to feel inspired by. So this homily about the Eucharist, which gave no food at all to a hungry intellect, was challenging to me. On the other hand, the Eucharist is something that I am always struggling with, something I still don’t totally “get” and I want to get, and it was something that was obviously extremely personally important to this priest, so I thought, this is probably a good angle for me. My feeling that this parish was very strong in the mystical aspect of the holiday was confirmed in the lovely chant and procession to the adoration in the chapel, which was beautiful and moving, and whereat I had a genuine spiritual experience/transformation/epiphany, overturning some lifelong beliefs and understandings, which I am still processing.

For the Good Friday celebration, it was still daytime, so that wonderful darkness and focus I feel from having these services in the darkness was not there. The Celebration of the Passion of the Lord was pretty good, but the genuine grief and intensity that I have felt in the past were not there. The cross was quite small, maybe 3 feet tall max, and the people holding it would wipe it off with a napkin every time someone kissed it. I get why, but it was weird and I don’t think very effective for the intended purpose anyway. At my first Good Friday, the parish had a gigantic, heavy, wood cross that the congregation would move over their heads, down all the pews of the church, and you would feel the weight and burden of it. Then they laid this giant cross down and you could go up there and kneel down and kiss it and touch it and do whatever you wanted without anyone standing in line behind you. It was extremely moving and devotional, and really I have never experienced anything to compare with that since. So, although I got a little teary during Were You There When They Crucified My Lord, frankly, I want to feel a lot more than that on Good Friday. As for the homily, he chose “Why do we call it Good Friday? Because it is good that Jesus suffered this death and suffering for us”, etc., which again made me miss my current parish, where the priest would never fall for that simplistic mistake (this did make me reflect on how different parishes have to appeal to the demographics of their congregations, which is interesting per se, but it’s not really what I want to be thinking of at a time like this.) I had been planning on going to Tenebrae that night, but I felt more tired than spiritually fed after the Good Friday experience, so I skipped it.

And so we arrive to today, Holy Saturday – Easter Vigil, as soon as the sun goes down. I had planned on going to Easter Vigil tonight at Parish #2, because since 2012, that’s what I have done. And again – my first Easter Vigil was unbeatable. The music, the images, the emotionality and the fire and the darkness, the sheer length of it – I have never experienced anything like it before or since. But I feel emotionally tired tonight, for reasons not having to do with any of this, so I’m considering skipping Easter Vigil and instead going to Easter Mass in the morning. I guess the question is: will I get spiritual food if I go tonight, or will I become even more drained?  (I may go regardless.)

And underlying that question is: will I ever find another parish that will actually feel like my spiritual home again? Stay tuned.

 

 

 

The question of whether Jesus existed

I have many atheist friends on Facebook. Most of them never say much about their lack of belief, but there are a couple who seem to feel a type of moral zealotry about denigrating religion, Christianity in particular. One of them expresses this by posting many links about the wonders of science along with the occasional snotty anti-Christian meme or comment. Another one makes fairly regular, randomly scattered comments about how irrational Christianity is and how bad and stupid it is to believe in it. Today this particular person posted a link to an article about a scholar who examined a number of historical records and came to the definitive conclusion that Jesus never existed. When I countered his argument, he referred me to two fringe scholars/writers who claim to have proved that Jesus never existed. I asked him if he thought that proving Jesus never existed would cause Christians to give up their faith. He said no, because being a Christian is irrational, therefore rational argument will not persuade them. Not wishing to argue, I left it at that.

When I hear these arguments about Jesus never having existed, my first response is that it doesn’t really matter if there really was a Jesus or not – the teachings attributed to Jesus are inherently valuable, no matter what their actual source. My second response is that whatever the facts of the physical existence of an individual named Yeshua in that time and place, there is a consistently striking – almost shocking – consciousness and perspective that comes through in the statements attributed to him, one that fits perfectly with other manifestations of God-consciousness, such as the Tao Teh Ching and wisdom from other Eastern religions, and I do not believe that the consciousness expressed in those words and stories could have been manufactured out of whole cloth by a scheming human mind. And my third response is: of course Jesus existed – I know him!  (irrational, as charged).

However, despite my feeling that the existence of a specific person named Jesus is not utterly necessary for me to be the Christian that I am, it still bothers me, a lot, when I see people trying to prove that Jesus never existed. I was wrestling with why this should be, especially because I do encourage people to seek out the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or difficult, so it shouldn’t be any different in this case. But in this case, I think the thing that bothers me is that the impetus for this project is based on an incomplete (or totally missed) understanding of Christianity. It is not an attempt to seek out truth for truth’s sake, but a targeted mission to destroy something based on a faulty understanding of what it is. It is actually an attempt to codify and legitimize an obscuring of truth.

It is not hard to understand why there is not an abundance of historical evidence for the historical Jesus – in secular terms, he was a nobody. He was one of many Messianic street preachers and teachers, the illegitimate son of a carpenter. His followers – fishermen, street people, the poor, the sick, collaborators with the Roman occupiers and others on the margins of society – were also nobodies, people of little to no, or even negative social status. Historians of that time had reason to record the names and actions of Caesar Augustus, Quirinius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, and all the other political leaders of that time. But there was no reason for them to record the actions of a cryptic Jew rousing the rabble in some backwater Roman province. The ones who wrote it down and preserved it and passed it on were the ones who knew him and loved him, and those who knew and loved those who knew and loved him. Basically, a bunch of nobodies, whose names we don’t even know for sure and whose lives we know nearly nothing about.

Given this, the fact that angry atheists feel they can prove that Jesus never existed actually fits in perfectly with everything about Jesus and what he did.  God incarnated into humble circumstances, and everything he did in life aimed at “putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble” (the fact that the mighty actually officialized his teachings into a state religion and the powerful henceforth adopted it without actually understanding it does not change the truth at the heart of what Jesus taught with his life and words). So, the fact that the physical Jesus is a historical nobody as well only fits in with his own teaching and narrative – it wasn’t power, but love that carried his teachings forward – at least at first. So, no, you won’t find him in the history books as an important person whose deeds were to be recorded for posterity. But his spiritual imprint was such that it outlived all the governments and civilizations that co-opted it and used it for their own purposes, and that is the clear truth that those who wish to destroy Christianity refuse to acknowledge.

And finally, as Christians, it’s up to us to undo the wrongs done fraudulently in his name by the mighty and powerful, by adhering to his true  teachings and eschewing the desire for power over others, to become nobodies (in Zen Buddhism, a “true man of no rank”) and carry out our words and actions in truth, love, and trust.

 

 

On the body

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

I remember once talking to a friend about a time when I felt suicidal. I was taking a university course on Modern European History,1900-1945. I was being bombarded every single day with the horrors of European history – two world wars, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, new and innovative ways of killing, the horrible deception of bringing innocents onto the battlefield to fight for imaginary valor and values, the senselessness of it all – and it had started to get to me. I remember laying on my bed, staring at the wall, wondering what the point of it all was. If human beings were capable of this sheer amount and concentration of horror, violence, and atrocity – why be here at all? Why even be a part of it?

This wasn’t the first time I had felt suicidal – I have a memory from when I was a teenager, of holding a large number of pills in my hand, considering whether I should take them. In my mid-20s, I forced myself to get online and talk to someone in order to keep from harming myself. These moments were the result of the nihilism and self-hatred instilled in me due to my upbringing, and not related to anything outside of myself, like man’s inhumanity to man. For reasons I can’t explain, I ended up not actually taking action at those times. I just knew it wasn’t something I shouldn’t actually do, no matter how much I felt like it at the moment.

But with this particular incident, which happened in my mid-thirties, I was better able to delineate what I was feeling and why. It wasn’t that I really wanted to die – I just wanted to be oblivious to these awful feelings, these awful realities. And something else, something new, had occurred to me then as well. The awareness quietly flooded into my mind that my body was its own being, that it had a right to live, and that that right had nothing to do with me or what I wanted. I felt very strongly that it would actually be wrong for me to kill it, just because I personally was having trouble coping with life. I was aware of my body as being a unique living organism, whose life was to be respected and cared for apart from myself, and that it was healthy and vibrant and in the midst of untrammeled life, and I essentially had no right to kill it. And that realization cleanly ended all my thoughts of suicide forthwith.

So, during a time when I had dropped out of RCIA because I couldn’t intellectually square Catholicism with what I already knew, and I wasn’t yet willing to allow aspects of myself other than intellect to take their rightful place there, I was recounting this episode to a friend. And when I told this friend about what I had realized about my body, that it had a life of its own which I had no right to take, and so suicide wasn’t an option, he remarked that this was a very Catholic way of thinking. That was one of the moments that made me question my decision to drop out of RCIA, that maybe there was something to being Catholic that wasn’t exclusively to be found in intellectual comprehension and consistency.

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One of the things I have loved about Catholicism is the valuing of the physical body – from the crucifix to the Eucharist, from the statues and relics to the rites and prescriptions for fasting, the physical body is not something to be minimized and forgotten about, but to be enthusiastically included in a spiritual and holy life. As someone who deeply appreciates beauty and sense pleasures, and who also seeks meaning and unity in everyday acts, the fact that the Church uses physically-manifested aspects such as beauty, pleasure, attraction, and desire as tools to bring us closer to God and closer to each other is something that deeply resonates with me. I experience it as extremely life-affirming and holistic. When I am at a non-Catholic church, seeing the empty crosses everywhere, lacking Jesus’ body – it makes me feel sad and empty. The fact that he gave up his BODY is what makes all this possible – why should we discreetly tuck his body away from our sight?

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I have had a complicated relationship with my own body. I was raised by a mother who had severe self-hatred of herself and her body, and, as usually happens that got injected into me, the oldest child. This sense of self-hatred and low self-esteem led me into situations as a teenager and a young woman that further degraded my body and my sense of myself, and this of course led to further twistedness in mind and heart, which I’ve had to wrestle with and heal. Cultural messages, too, that our bodies are insufficient unless they conform to some imaginary standard, and that it is okay and even desirable to objectify people and their bodies for our own pleasure – these also have impacted my ability to have a healthy relationship and appreciation of my body. And for all this, I find solace in the Church. As I stood up in front of the congregation last weekend with my candidate at the Rite of Sending, with my body essentially on display, I was aware that I was in a place where my body was seen as having inherent dignity, not as a tool for the pleasure of others, nor the judgement of others, but as a pure creation of God, with its own inherent value and worth that has nothing to do with its conformity to an ideal or what it can do for anyone else. Sadly, I also thought of the children who were sexually abused by priests, that their bodies should have been given this dignity and safety too, but instead they were harmed in one of the worst possible ways, in a place where they should have been the most safe. I hope those people, and everyone else who has ever been physically or sexually abused, can partake of the kind of healing I experience when the members of the Church are truly acting according to its teachings. I can’t think of anywhere else where such an experience is possible, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

Dealing with authority

Two memories are lingering in my mind tonight:

1) A friend and I discussing authority, the various levels of respect for authority. I told him that I generally don’t take authority seriously, probably because my parents were lousy authorities, and so I learned that authorities were not to be inherently respected, just tolerated until I could get away from them and do my own thing, according to my own inner compass.

2) Talking with my RCIA director about why I wanted to become Catholic, and his telling me that above all, Catholicism tests your relationship with authority.

It’s ironic that someone who doesn’t think much of authority went and became a Catholic. I think for a long time I just kind of set my disagreements and doubts aside, but lately I’ve been struggling lately with the authority of the Church.

I’m sure this was set in motion because we did IVF to get pregnant last year, and while we were in the middle of it, the Pope said publicly that IVF was a sin against God. It still hurts me in my heart and my gut to think of those words, how cruel they are. I will say outright that I disagree with most of the Church’s teachings around sex and reproduction. I believe I understand what their reasoning is, but I believe that reasoning is faulty. However, since I am not gay or single or divorced, it didn’t affect me directly, so I could just keep my disagreement distant and abstract. Now, the Pope, whom I love so much, is telling me that my efforts to have a child are a sin against God. Now that’s personal. That hurts.

The reason why I never had kids before was because I was born into a family environment that left me emotionally and mentally traumatized, with few life skills, and utterly devoid of the basic skills of human relating. If I am a capable and competent person, if I now find myself in a healthy, loving relationship, with a good job and a happy life, that is 100% due to my efforts and that of my husband and other kind people along the way. Other than giving me my great genetic health and my basic gift of high intelligence and sensitivity, their actions have done more to impede from achieving those things than assist me. Because of this, it took me until I was already nearly 40 until I felt like I had worked through the trauma of my childhood and young adulthood to be feel like I was capable of taking care of someone other than myself. And by then, guess what? It was too late. My eggs are now too old.

I struggled with whether we should have children or not – for a long time I didn’t want to, precisely because I felt like I could barely be functional in life, let alone being responsible for another one. Then I was afraid I would be a neglectful mother, like my mother was. But becoming Catholic helped me with that – the fact that I both loved and resisted the image of Mary led me deeper into my own psyche, into the idea of the mother, the idea of me as mother. After years of seeing my body as something that existed for the use of others, then something to be hated, then something to be avoided and ignored, I finally was able to perceive my body as something warm and loving, something that could grow and nurture and give birth to and feed a child.

I prayed and prayed, and asked God if it was His will that we should try to have a baby. Was it right? Should we? Then one day I was in church, with my husband beside me, and I said to God: “Is it your will that we keep doing this, that we keep trying to have this baby? Because if it’s not your will, you’re doing a lousy job of letting me know. Put your answer in my heart, so I can know.” And guess what? The answer came, and it said, “Isn’t my message already in your heart? In your heart you want the baby. That’s your answer.”

So, God puts me with a crappy family who stunts my growth as a person for decades, then puts the desire in my heart for a child after I’m already too old to have a child without assistance – then his spokesperson tells me that to get assistance in having a child is a sin against God? Please ‘splain, Lucy, because this makes no sense at all, unless God enjoys putting his devoted servants into rooms full of funhouse mirrors and toying with them.

It can’t be that God really is against IVF, and that’s why we lost the baby, since I personally know Catholics who have successfully had babies through IVF. Does God find those innocent babies to be a sin against Him?

So I think the question here is – what do you do when God’s will and the Church’s teachings are in conflict? Am I supposed to bow my head and my heart in obedience to the Church and ignore God? I think the answer is, you’re supposed to follow your conscience, your well-discerned conscience. Okay, but it makes me sad, because why should God be against life? Is God such a jealous God that He can’t stand us to use our God-given rational knowledge and science to further life, to help life come along? We aren’t replacing God – we can put the sperm and the egg together, but we can’t control whether they fertilize or what happens to the embryo after that. Why and when these things happen is still a mystery – it’s still absolutely up to God, no matter what. We have no control over that. And why would God put someone in a specific situation, plant a burning desire in someone, and then tell them they are wrong to pursue it? It seems wrong, all wrong to me. I don’t believe our God is a petty, jealous, fearful God. I don’t think God makes mistakes. And I think the Church needs to trust that human variation is a part of God’s plan, and we – the infertile, the gay, the transgender – we are not mistakes. We are the way God made us, and we deserve to live full lives, not partial ones. And the Church needs to rethink its view that God made us all wonderful, unique individuals in every other way, but like little cookie cutter robots when it comes to sexuality and reproduction. I’ll have more to say about this later.

Loss and prayer

As my prayer become more attentive and inward
I had less and less to say.
I finally became completely silent.
I started to listen
– which is even further removed from speaking.
I first thought that praying entailed speaking.
I then learnt that praying is hearing,
not merely being silent.
This is how it is.
To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking,
Prayer involves becoming silent,
And being silent,
And waiting until God is heard.

–Søren Kierkegaard, quoted by Joachim Berendt in “The Third Ear,” translated by Tim Nevill (Shaftsbury, England: Element Books, 1988).

This largely describes the new stage I’m at these days with my prayer. It’s not because I’ve become more spiritually advanced or selfless – far from it. It’s because I know now that God doesn’t answer prayers. Well, at least not all of them.

My husband and I spent basically all of 2014 undergoing fertility treatment. After months of medications and procedures, in November we got pregnant, and we were full of joy and wonder like neither of us had ever felt before. But 3 short weeks later, they told us that the baby’s heartbeat was weak – too weak. And the embryo itself had shrunk in size. The doctor had never seen a case like this turn out to lead to a healthy birth. Still, we held out hope. I scoured the internet for stories of people who were in our situation and had a baby anyway. It wasn’t likely, but there was maybe some tiny chance that baby could make it. Nevertheless, 1 week later, a sonogram showed no more heartbeat. A few miserable days after that, we lost the pregnancy.

I (and many others) prayed a lot over this pregnancy. I prayed for it to happen, and I prayed for it to be healthy, and I prayed for it to result in the birth of a healthy, normal child. I prayed the Novena of St. Gerard, I prayed the Novena of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and I prayed directly to God and Jesus. But it seems that God can answer my prayers when I ask for some things, but other things – hugely important, sensitive, life-changing things – He chooses not to grant. In short, this miscarriage really dealt a blow to my faith. It’s easy to feel positive and faithful when nothing really bad happens to you. But then when it does, and it was something you had been praying and praying about, like I did – that is really a very bitter feeling.

I know that I could tell myself things like “Well, when God closes a door he opens a window!” or “God only has three answers to your prayers: ‘yes,’ ‘not yet,’ and ‘I have something better in mind’.” But, in the face of real loss, those things feel like unreliable or falsely comforting platitudes. Maybe they could help if you didn’t get the job you wanted, or the house you wanted  – but when you lose a pregnancy that you have struggled so hard for….those things aren’t so soothing at all. I would like to take more comfort in them, but I don’t want to just tell myself soothing stories, if I’m not really feeling the truth of them.

The result of this was that I stopped going to Mass for several weeks. Basically, I still loved and wanted to be with God, but frankly, I was mad at Him and didn’t want to see His face. I certainly didn’t feel like going over His house. I stopped my daily prayer, too. I felt bitter, ironic, about it. All of that prayer, just to have the most wondrous thing we ever did snatched away, right out from under us. And I had believed, too – I believed “Seek and you shall find, ask and it shall be answered.” And I asked, and I sought, and what I got was screwed.

After some time had passed, I started praying again, irregularly. That felt better. I decided to just tell God I was mad at Him, and that seemed to work really well. No Miss Goody Goody in my prayer life – just my real self. And then I started going to Mass again, and that felt better too. The pain and bitterness and anger started to subside, and I felt mostly normal again. Not the same as I was before – something had been lost, and I don’t think it will be coming back. But something new may be arising.

I have started to rethink prayer, particularly the whole “ask God for stuff” part. This experienced has showed me that if I ask God for little stuff, or stuff I don’t feel incredibly intense and/or conflicted about (good wishes for other people, things going smoothly in my everyday life, etc.), those things will happen. But if I ask for big, important stuff – stuff that is of monumental importance to me – it basically doesn’t matter what I want. Ironic, huh? So, partially out of bitterness, partially out of feeling stupid and caught out, and partly out of trying to learn from experience, I have stopped including “asking God for stuff” as a part of my prayer time. Now, I recite/sing the Liturgy of the Hours, and then – I am silent. I am open. I am listening. I still say some formulaic prayers after that, like the Hail Mary and the Prayer of St. Francis, but no more “God, could you please give us a baby or help me lose weight or help me find a new career.” I’m done with that.

Although this shift has definitely arisen out of bitter experience, I do feel that it is somehow a maturation of my prayer life. To supplicate to a Deity and ask It for favors seems….I don’t know, primitive? Like asking the Rain God to bring rain, and the Sun God to watch over our crops, etc. To recite and reflect upon ancient texts, and then to just be open and alive and vibrating and listening to The Creator, confident in being a beloved creature and feeling that it is simply enough to be in alignment with The Creator, without asking for anything in particular for one’s self except the chance to be closer to God – that seems like a more mature faith to me. I’m not necessarily saying I feel any more mature or better than I was before – mostly I just feel burned, and I don’t want to get burned again. But I guess my faith has returned to me in a new way, in a new way of relating to God.

One interesting side effect of all this is that I feel a new resonance and understanding of the Psalms, which are such a large part of the Liturgy of the Hours. Previously, I had recited them, though I felt I could not relate to all the Old Testament propitiation and self-flagellation, and I have a hard time seeing the message of unconditional love that Jesus brought forth in all these texts about sin and sacrifice and holocaust. I continue to do it though, because I have trust that somehow this is beneficial to me, because I trust that this spiritual system knows what it’s doing. But lately, the Psalms are starting to make sense to me, because they are all written in the voice of people who have lost what was basically the center of their lives, the thing that gave them meaning as a people – they lost their Temple, twice! – and it left a vacuum, a void in their spiritual and communal lives that could not be filled. Suddenly, I can relate to that kind of loss. Now I sing those psalms with real feeling, by far more than I have ever felt before.

I’m not really a believer in the idea that horrible things have to happen so that good things can come out of them. To tell the truth, if that’s God’s plan – then I think God is kind of a dick. Still, I will accept any depth or richness I can gain from the loss I experienced. I would happily give up relating to the Psalms, or having a more mature, if chastened, faith and prayer life, in exchange for having my child be healthy, alive, and in my arms. But if that’s all I can get right now, I’ll take it.

Another sticky question

How can we keep the joy and immediacy of Jesus’ presence during Easter with us throughout the year?

Sticky points about being Catholic

Now that I’ve been Catholic for two and a half months, I have some sticky thoughts and questions about the everyday reality of being Catholic.

One thing I started to wonder about yesterday is, why don’t they make the host taste good? Why does it taste like an uncomfortably chewy-sticky tasteless cracker? The wine tastes good – why not the host?

Also, I feel like everyone drinking out of the same cup is unsanitary. I suppose the wine maybe kills some germs, but what about backwash? There were two Sundays where I just didn’t even drink the wine because I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

I’m also struggling with the reality of transubstantiation. Although I have done a lot of fancy mental and emotional footwork to try to believe it and feel it, the fact is, I can’t quite get there yet. I’m not quite sure how to get there, either. I really wish we still had an RCIA group to talk to about things like this.

I definitely feel a lack in my spiritual nourishment right now. I have been praying the rosary, and doing my own prayers, but I miss interacting with others in a shared sense of seeking and openness. I want to be a part of something like that again. I think when RCIA starts back up again I will just start attending the discussions, and hopefully I will be assigned as a sponsor.

Well, I did it. I am a Catholic. I suppose it’s inaccurate to say that I did it – God did it. I just listened to what God was trying to tell me, went where God was trying to lead me.

Easter Vigil was intense and wonderful. After I was confirmed, I felt a strength and expansion welling up in me that I did not expect to feel. And afterward, I felt different – calm. Whole. Peaceful. Like something that should have happened a long time ago finally did.

My confession experience was a bit unpleasant – the priest (from another parish) did everything but look at his watch, roll his eyes and sigh. But, I’m glad I did it. I was afraid to do it, so I’m glad I overcame that hurdle. Next time I think it will be easier.

I have been struggling to maintain a prayer life. Well, I have been struggling to maintain any kind of balance in my life, so it makes sense that some things are going to get lost in the shuffle. I recently started to regain some of that balance, so I think the prayer life will fall into place as well.

I will be taking classes this summer on Basic Catholic Teachings at the diocese. It’s their foundational course for all the other ones they have, including catechist training, which may be in my future.

I wanted to say something deep and meaningful here, especially since it’s been so long since I posted, but right now, I got nothing but God bless you J

halfway through Lent

Well, it’s halfway through Lent, and I am doing pretty well with giving up meat. There was one time that I forgot and had some barbeque, and then there was the day that I had a medical procedure done and needed to eat something substantial. But other than that, I have stuck to it quite well. I used to be pescatarian, vegetarian, and even vegan at various phases of my life, so not eating meat isn’t the biggest leap I could have made (though people here in Texas sure seem to think it is a gigantic sacrifice!). It’s been good to have to get creative about what I eat, and I’m certainly eating more fish than I have in a long time. Still, I am starting to get to the point where I am looking forward to Easter so I can add meat back into my diet. 

And so what spiritual result am I getting out of this sacrifice? Well, having to rearrange my diet and not partake of something I enjoy does keep my purpose foremost in my mind. And my purpose is? I suppose it’s a spiritual practice. It reminds me of Christ’s sacrifice, and it reminds me that it’s okay to forgo personal pleasures for a greater purpose. It makes me feel good that I can express my devotion in some way. 

If I think about it, I don’t expect to totally “get” what Lenten sacrifice means my first time out. Understanding will happen over the years. Right now the most important thing is just to participate. I haven’t really done anything special with prayer or almsgiving. I am just starting out, so I think it’s okay to just deal with the sacrifice aspect of it this time around, and start to add in the other practices as time goes on.

I’ve been thinking about what ministries I want to participate in once Easter has come and gone. I have two or three in mind, but I need to pray about which one I should agree to commit to. I really can’t wait to get involved. I feel almost like it’s what I’ve been waiting my whole life to do.

devotion and prayer

I have heard several people this past week talk about making time for prayer in your life. A couple people talked about saying the rosary or others prayers during their commute. One lady said it was like “making your car into a monastery.” Another one was talking about when she prays, and she said “whether I’m sitting or standing…” and I thought, “What about kneeling?”

I don’t think that would have struck me at all like that if I hadn’t begun some kind of prayer life for myself, and experienced the raw exposure and intense devotion of really taking time to do absolutely nothing other than commune with God. I have done the rosary in the car, or prayed while lying in bed in the morning before I get up, or talking to God while I walk around doing something else. But none of that can compare in any way to how it feels, and what the effects are, of getting on my knees and doing nothing but praying. You are available to be pulled out of yourself, to be put literally at the mercy of God, for whatever God might have in store for you. When you’re driving, you have to keep possession of yourself, or else you could die. If you’re walking somewhere, you have to pay attention to where you’re going. If you’re laying in bed, well, you were just lying there anyway – there is not a deliberate intention to give yourself over to God. And the most effective way for God to help you, for you to be close to God, is to lose yourself in God, to offer yourself up completely to God. I think if you pray while engaged in some other activity, no matter how mindless, you aren’t fully available to God.

family

Today we had our Rite of Penitence. It was also very meaningful for me because today was the day that I submitted by Certificate of Baptism to the RCIA team. I had requested my baptismal certificate last year, intending to submit it to my old parish, before I knew we would be moving. I had been waiting a long time to finally submit it. I think one reason that it means so much to me is that that my baptism as a 4-month old baby was the start of a process that has been incredibly important to me, that I knew I wanted, but that I had been unable to complete until now. I have wanted this since I was a little kid, and now….it’s going to be official. They have my certificate. It’s happening. It’s a big day for me.

The Rite of Penitence was beautiful as well. As I knelt in the aisle with my RCIA family, and felt myself surrounded by the priest and the parishioners, felt their bodily and spiritual warmth surround me and pray for me and welcome me, I couldn’t help but tear up. Again – finally, what I’ve wanted. To be in a family, a family of people who all hold something incredibly dear, whose center is in something meaningful and deep and centered around spiritual growth – so far from the chaos, disorder, and nihilism of my birth family.

In fact, family is one thing that has become a theme of this Lenten season. My husband and I are moving closer to starting fertility treatments to have a child of our own, and at the same time, we have been getting a foretaste of parenthood by becoming “aunt and uncle” to some neighbor girls, aged 10 and 12. We are really getting a taste of parental leadership, guardianship, teaching, limits – and love. It is perfectly timed with the road we are about to embark on to become parents ourselves. I am also making decisions regarding my birth family, from whom I have been estranged for over two years now. I have been praying over this for a long time, looking deeply into myself, talking it over with friends and chosen family, and finally, this last week, I decided to stop hoping and waiting for them to meet me in the place of love and vulnerability where I need them to meet me. I’m letting them go – giving them up.

In this regard, I take comfort from the example of my patron, St. Francis of Assisi, who publicly rejected his father, and Jesus also says we have to “hate” our family to be a true follower. I certainly don’t think Jesus meant literally to HATE your family, but I think he meant that you can’t be attached to being the way your family wants you to be, or following their rules and laws as the ultimate standard, because Jesus has brought us a new way and a new rule that must take precedence, and even wipes out all of those other rules, even those that exist in our most intimate connections. In my case, time, experience, and prayer have shown me that being in relation with my family actually takes me further away from God and everything that God wants me to be. So I unfortunately must sever my ties to them, so that I can be what God is asking me – pushing me! – to be. It actually feels much better this way – a relief. I have a path to walk, and I cannot let anyone or anything pull me off it, even if those people happen to be my family. I pray for them all the time, and I ask God to heal their hurt and open their hearts and minds to what is keeping us apart. That is the most I can do for them without harming myself, at least at this point in time.

So, this period of my life is one of letting go of an old family, and starting a new family – a biological family, a chosen family, a family in Christ.

Lent has begun

The time of catechesis is ended – the time of Lenten reflection has begun. There has been a confluence of extreme business with the beginning of Lent, so it’s taken me awhile to get into the spirit of things. It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to give up. I didn’t want to just give up something like chocolate or sugar – I want to give up something meaningful. I want my sacrifice to mean something, not just be a convenient opportunity to give something up that I probably should be giving up anyway, or a chance to lose weight, etc.

In truth, I asked Jesus in a very intense prayer session what I should give up for Lent (I think I mentioned this before) and he said “lying.” Phew. Well, I think that fits into the “I should give that up anyway” category, so although I did take that advice (command?) seriously, and I am actually attempting to follow it, I don’t think it’s really what I want to give up for Lent.

So, I decided on giving up meat. It’s not something I really want to do permanently, it’s not an issue of losing weight, and it is a sacrifice that has a meaning to me – the body, the flesh, the sacrifice.

I have yet to get on board with the prayer and almsgiving. I guess I should figure out something I want to give to. I think I’ll sit down with my husband tonight and figure out something that we’d both like to give to during Lent. And now that my crazy insane week is over, I can start intensifying my prayer.

On Sunday we had our Rite of Sending – I was so exhausted from my week that I could barely stay present for it. Still, I’m aware that we’ve moved onto the next stage. I am that much closer to finally doing what I have wanted to do since I was a little kid. I don’t know that it’s actually sunk in yet. I’ve been so busy. I feel far away from my Catholicism right now.

Vulnerability in prayer

One thing that I was taught in the RCIA program in my former parish is that when you pray, you should be honest with God. You shouldn’t always just present God with your best self, but your worst self. I really felt the truth of that sentiment, and I guess when I heard it, I believed that I didn’t really have that problem, that I didn’t pretend to be good in front of God. But yesterday I think I proved myself wrong.

Last night, I had this nagging feeling in my gut, the feeling you get when something is very wrong, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt myself wanting to turn to my usual ways of dealing with something like this – either distract myself with the computer or the TV, or turn to my analytical mind to try to “figure out what’s going on.” But, I had been mulling around in my consciousness for the last couple weeks that I needed to really start building a prayer life, so I decided that if I felt bad about something, instead of distracting myself, or turning to my mind to rationalize things, I would pray. I walked away from my computer, turned off the TV, and went into the bedroom and began to pray. I just asked God what that was, and asked God to take it away from me. And then, I just started to break down. Instead of doing my usual “I’m so grateful for X, Y, and Z, thank you, and could you please help me with A, B, and C?”, I just…started talking to God, like God was my friend or my parent. And I cried and a broke down to my real, vulnerable, scared, messed up self, and I showed God what I was, and I let it all out. I just admitted how screwed up and scared and fearful I am, and I asked God to take it all away from me.

I ended up on the floor in the prostrate position, and stayed there in stillness, a meditative state, for a while. Then I felt called to be under the water (thinking of what our pastor had recently said about water representing new life, always), so I went and took a shower. I put on some meditative music, lit some candles and some incense, and just let the water flow over my body and into my hair, and I talked more to Jesus. I asked Jesus what I should give up for Lent. It took a little while, but then the answer came to me like a little post-it note in my head – “Lying”. Jesus told me to give up lying for Lent.

Since I’m not really a lying person in general, I think what he meant was, lying to myself, about myself. Lying to God about who I am, by being such a good girl all the time when I talk to God. And I’m sure more that I’m not even aware of yet, because that’s how Jesus is. He doesn’t just give it to you on the surface, he gives you layers that you can’t really experience until you start peeling through them.

Starting a prayer life

Which leads me to the idea of building a prayer life. It’s something that I have known I needed to do, but have resisted for a long time. There are several reasons for that – one is that, being raised in an atheistic environment around people who thought religion was either evil, foreign, or laughable, prayer was always an embarrassing thing that weird people did. It’s not that I didn’t believe in God (well, I did go through an atheist period when was 15, but that was brief), but the way those people prayed felt, I don’t know – not insincere, but maybe the opposite – painfully sincere, and painfully simple. Simplistic. Asking God to take care of and watch over the most mundane aspects of life, as if God had nothing better to do than make sure no one forgets their lines in a play.

In fact, the main person who I knew who said prayers in our family – well, the sweetness and good wishes of his prayers didn’t match anything about how our family really was. In fact, I get angry thinking of someone saying these prayers, thanking God for our family, and the love in our family, and the food we prepared, when the family was full of hurt and harm that was never confronted, children harmed and ignored and shut down when they tried to get help for it, the unspoken discomforts and angers that built up under this veneer of “everything’s okay, we’re a happy family.”  

So, the fact is that the example of prayer that I was raised with was not anything like what prayer is supposed to be. I think prayer is supposed to be a sincere conversation, a sincere confrontation, a sincere self-revealing with God. And for all I know, the person I am referring to did that in private. But if so, shouldn’t it have had effects? Shouldn’t something have changed? Shouldn’t have we become closer instead of growing in isolation from each other? I think so.

 So, reason #1 for resisting prayer: Bad examples. 

And the other reason? The fact that being in direct, intimate contact with God is…a big responsibility. If I wander around trying to figure everything out by myself, I can probably distract myself from facing some of the more difficult things I need to face. I can continue in my old comfortable patterns without disturbing them much at all, and I can do this for quite a long time.

Why? Because prayer is a powerful practice, if you do it right. If you’re nakedly honest with yourself and with God, about what you feel, about what you want, about what you lack, about your fears – that is powerful. If you are truly grateful for the gifts you have been given – and for me, even the fact of my body is a gift – that is powerful as well. And when you combine those two things, and surrender all of them up to God, when you give God your gratitude and you ask God for God’s help – that is extremely powerful medicine. This is no half-measure – this has the potential for true transformation.  And transformation is not for the faint of heart.

What if?

One of the things that turning off my mind and listening with my heart on this Catholic journey has done is led me to the What If question. So, when I hear some teaching of the Church, and my first reaction to is “That is ridiculous and there is no justification for that,” my conclusion is no longer “That is wrong, I don’t believe it,” but “Okay, what if it’s true?”

So, for instance, there is the whole idea that the Israelites are the chosen people and that God specifically picked them to make a covenant with. My extremely egalitarian and ecumenical spirit rejects that right off the bat – why in the world would God just choose one group of people to be his super special friends, especially if God loves us with the love of the father for the prodigal son? But then I said….what if? What if God DID choose the Israelites especially for a covenant, and they are our spiritual ancestors, and Jesus was the fulfillment of that covenant? How could I make sense of that in a satisfying way?

So what I did was start linking up some themes about Jesus’ life to the situation of the Israelites in the Old Testament. Part of the spiritual depth of Jesus is that he was God, but he came into human form as the lowest of the low – an illegitimate baby, born in an animal’s food trough to a group of formerly enslaved people who continued to be subjugated in their own land by a superior and ruthless power. Not only that, but as an adult, went around defying authority in an extremely authoritarian culture, being intimate (eating and drinking and hanging out) with the most hated and despised members of society, and in the end, he was executed like a common murderer – I mean, how much lower could you go, in worldly terms?

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” Matthew 20:16

But we all know He was God! What does this mean?? Well, in order to teach humans to stop seeing each other through the lens of social categories such clean and unclean, deserving and undeserving, just and unjust, God illustrated the point in the most vivid way possible – by speaking Ultimate Truth through the body and life of an extremely low-caste human.

“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Matthew 5:44-46

So, if God chose to do this in order to help humanity move forward at that point in history, to stop being so violent and set apart from one another, it makes sense, at an earlier time, God would have chosen a group of enslaved people with a weird religion who everyone else looked down on to be his Chosen People. Why? SAME REASON! The first shall be the last and the last shall be the first! God is trying to wake us up and snap us out of this idea that our social hierarchies, that assign more or less worth to other human beings based on things other than our value to God, are meaningless, and that the only thing that has meaning is the Love that God has for us and which we reflect back to him by loving each other, regardless of social veils. And, God’s plan is long-term. God knew we would be reading about these people thousands of years later (well, God doesn’t experience time like we do, so for God it’s all happening now, which makes even more sense of my theory), and so he set this all out for us, for us to become better people, to become more like God and to be closer to God. For then and for now and for the future – world without end.

And that is how I made sense of the whole “chosen people/covenant thing.”

So, another issue that has always bothered me (and what I really wanted to write about today), is the way the Church discourages and looks down upon divination. Since I come from a New Age background, I’m very familiar and comfortable with all manner of divination tools: Tarot cards, runes, I Ching, and all the variations on those things. They have been useful to me in a limited way – I see them as a harmless tool to work with invisible forces to confirm something that you already know in yourself, but for which you need some kind of outside validation to hone in on it, trust it, or pick it out from the general chaos in your own consciousness. I do think that also have the potential to become the recourse of desperation – when there is something you have no way of knowing, but you desperately want to know, so you continually throw runes or do tarot spreads or what have you, looking for the answer that you so badly want.

I think the official line of the Church is that you shouldn’t use divination to try to read the future, or try to use spirits to do the same. Here is a paragraph from the Catholic Dictionary at CatholicCulture.org:

The art of knowing and declaring future events or hidden things by means of communication with occult forces. It is always an act of a religious nature. There is no divination if the religious element is missing, as in any scientific investigation. The occult forces in divination are always created rational powers that the Church identifies as diabolical. Implicit in this judgment is the belief that neither God nor the spiritual powers friendly to God would lend themselves to frivolous practices or subject themselves to any evoking human force. Hence, evoking these powers, whether explicitly or even implicitly, is considered an appeal to Satan’s aid. It is therefore a grave offense against God to attribute to the devil a sure knowledge of the contingent future, which, as depending on free will, is known to God alone. (https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=33143)

So, when I am stumped with an issue that is important and I’m not sure what I should do, or I want something to happen very badly (such as getting pregnant and having a baby) but I don’t know if it’s going to happen, I naturally want to turn to divination. I want to read my Tarot cards or have someone else read them, or I go to my beautifully illustrated I Ching app and see what the coins say about my problem. And ever since I decided I wanted to be Catholic, I have wrestled with the knowledge that it is actually against my religion to do so. But since I couldn’t figure out why, I just kept on with my old habits. Until I decided to ask “What if?”

What if they are correct? What if there is a problem with using divination? Why would that be? Well, as soon as I asked the question, a simple, easy, and obvious answer came to me immediately: Because your answers are supposed to come straight from God, through prayer. Turning to an intermediary tool, whose answers come from energetic origins unknown, requires no relationship with God, no surrender to God, and so necessarily turns you away from God in some measure. It actually deprives you of the chance to deepen your relationship with God through a regular, deep, and intimate prayer life.

Now, I think it is definitely more immediately appealing to flip some cards or toss some coins rather than to go through a focused period of prayer and discernment about whatever the looming issue is. Prayer involves a time and energy investment, the answers aren’t immediate, and it requires a sense of surrender, of trust. Doing a reading is immediate – it makes you feel effective on your own, and there is the little thrill of seeing how something seemingly random can somehow apply so accurately to your own situation. But to be honest, outside of a few stunningly helpful and spot-on confirmations right when I needed them, the answers I have gotten from divination, have mostly been vague. And often, if you do it too much, they just smear out totally and you start to come up with garbage answers. But God doesn’t give garbage answers. When you get an answer from God, its clarity is piercing, cleansing, freeing. So why mess with these intermediaries at all? Why not just go straight to the source?

Now I am not poo-pooing the usefulness or the reality of divination methods. I think something is definitely happening there, and it’s not like I think it’s Satan or demons or something that is giving these answers (although I get the impression that that is what the Church itself teaches, and to be honest I actually have no idea where the answers are coming from, I just don’t tend to think in terms of devils and demons), but I think it’s just something that’s not the pure, direct, relationship and reliance on God that is really asked of us as Christians. And I don’t think that makes it evil or wrong, I just think it makes it – a poor substitute for the true power and clarity that we have at our fingertips through prayer and relationship with God.

For a long time I kept my Tarot and my I Ching apps on my phone. I’d see them there, sitting next to my iMissal, and feel conflicted – why was I going to the I Ching for my answers instead of God? And why was that wrong? For a long time I had no answer, so I didn’t change anything. But today, when I asked those same questions, the answer came through to me, loud and clear: “The place where you should be going for answers is prayer. That’s why it’s wrong – it takes you away from prayer. Don’t use those things anymore. Go to your relationship with God.”

So, I bit the bullet, and deleted the apps. I immediately felt freed up! And I believe this is a sign that I am ready to establish and deepen my prayer life.

Prior knowledge

When I said in an earlier entry that all I knew about Christianity was what it opposers and its fundamentalists said about it, that wasn’t strictly true. I actually did learn about Christianity from people weren’t necessarily opposers, but maybe we could say they were reformers, or wanna-be transformers. I’m talking about things like The Gospel According to Jesus, by Stephen Mitchell, which seeks to find a kind of perennial philosophy behind the words of Jesus. Mitchell does this by deleting everything that he feels is not in the spirit of Jesus, whom he sees as a kind of enlightened being that serious practitioners of any faith would recognize as such, i.e., stuff that the early Church inserted in there to scare and control people. That was actually my first real introduction to the Gospels, although of course it was not complete.

I also read books about the historical Jesus and his time, read about the Jesus Project, and also learned about the Gnostic gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apocryphal Gospels. So basically, I knew everything about Christianity other than what the normal, mainstream person knows as Christianity. I was also coming at it not from the actual experience of being a Christian, but as kind of skeptical, outside investigator, who was simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her subject.

So, when I came to RCIA, I wasn’t a blank slate or someone who had only heard a bunch of exaggerated garbage that I could safely throw away. I think in a way I came as someone who felt pre-aware of the esoteric aspects of it, and thought I was coming to learn the exoteric aspects that I was not familiar with. I think that may be why I was so disconcerted and confused after a few months in RCIA, because I was not expecting the esoteric and exoteric aspects to be so intermingled and entwined as they were. I thought there must be something wrong, because the only way I could conceive of a mainstream religion at that time was that there were the exoteric teachings, which the “sheeple” followed mindlessly, and then there were the esoteric teachings, which were the heart of what it was all about, and which your average practitioner had neither the interest nor the ability to understand. (elitist, I know)

The Catholic Church pulled that rug right out from under my feet, because, essentially, you can be as shallow as you like or take it as far as you like. There is no secret initiation or club where you get the “real” teachings, while everyone else is placated by performing empty rituals. It’s all freely available to you as a Catholic. It’s actually staring you directly in the face in the Catechism. You can either choose to partake or not.

If sex and marriage are so great, why can’t priests do it?

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-urges-cardinals-to-reflect-deeply-on-family-life/

Vatican City, Feb 20, 2014 / 11:24 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis met briefly this morning with cardinals who had gathered for a meeting to reflect on the theme of the family, urging them to consider carefully both the Church’s theology and pastoral practice.

“Our reflections must keep before us the beauty of the family and marriage, the greatness of this human reality which is so simple and yet so rich, consisting of joys and hopes, of struggles and sufferings, as is the whole of life,” he said on Feb. 20.

——————————

This reminds me of last week’s homily. The Gospel reading was Matthew 5:17-37, where Jesus says “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Then he goes onto say, in summary: The law says do not kill, but I say don’t even get angry. The law says don’t have sex with someone who isn’t your spouse, but I say, don’t even imagine having sex with someone who isn’t your spouse, and so on. The idea is that the law shouldn’t be something you follow to the letter because an authority told you to and you don’t want to get in trouble, but something whose spirit you have internalized and that you follow in order to have better relationships with others, and with God.

Part of Father’s homily was a kind of exhortation of how God is present in sexual relationships, how they are a gift of God and should be treated as such, etc. And today Pope Francis talked about the greatness and the beauty and importance of the family, too. But here’s the thing – when you hear them talk about this stuff, after a while the obvious, glaring question that comes to mind is: if marriage and family and sex are so great, why are priests kept from participating in this wonderful plan of God?

Of course, my first impulse is to think that I am right about this and the Church is wrong, but on second thought, I think I will ask a priest about this when I have a chance, and get his perspective on it. I find in general that if you immediately think that you have something all figured out and that the other person is wrong, there’s probably something you’re missing, even if it’s just the other person’s actual, subjective motivation or reasoning.

Making my way back, part 2

I left off my story of how I returned to Catholicism with me going to church for the first time in years, and it happened to be Palm Sunday. Well, I think I left early that Mass, since I couldn’t see or hear anything anyway, being so far in the back, and I can’t take communion. I think I also may have been kind of freaked out – I think some part of my consciousness, maybe the intelligence of my body, was aware of the significance of what I was doing, but my conscious awareness was not yet ready to take that whole reality in and acknowledge it. But I came back the next week, and the feeling was…home. I loved the rhythm of the liturgy, the sign of peace, the statues and candles and stained glass, the paintings of all the saints, the stations of the cross – everything! I felt so comfortable, like I was always meant to be here. And at this wonderful parish, instead of having to awkwardly sit in the pews and try to get out of everyone’s way as they went up to take communion, they encouraged visitors to get in line come up to the front with arms crossed across your chest. Then the priest or Eucharist minister would know that they can’t give you communion, but they can give you a blessing. It was wonderful!

Shortly afterward, I contacted the RCIA leader and asked about getting started. I had already missed the inquiry sessions, where they give you the basics of Catholicism and you figure out whether you want to go into the RCIA program, but in fact, I already knew a lot about Catholicism and knew I wanted to do this. Sister Jane (not her real name) said normally she would require people to go through inquiry, but she didn’t want to get in the way of God’s calling, so, I could just come to the RCIA retreat after Easter. And she encouraged me to attend Triduum services, which are the three days of services during Easter week.

Of course, I was dying to attend these Easter services, especially since Easter is my favorite holiday, and I feel so joyful on that day, even when I wasn’t pursuing any religious goals at all. I went to every single 3-hour plus evening Mass on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil. It was incredibly tiring, and unspeakably beautiful. The reading of the creation story, the adoration of the cross, the washing of feet, the baptisms, the chrism, the confirmations, the fire lighting up the darkness, the candles each person held, the adoration of the Eucharist…it was everything I had ever wanted in a religious event, in a life event. It was what I had been looking for in all these other places, but nothing had ever even come close to this magnificence, this significance, this meaning, this tradition. Do you understand? I had found my identity – not in the sense of identifying myself as Catholic, thinking of myself as Catholic, or telling others that I am Catholic, but in the mathematical sense of identity – A=B. Catholicism is me, I am it. I don’t know any other way to explain in this deep sense of unity.

After that, I started up in the RCIA program at this parish. After about 6 months I left, for reasons which deserve to be discussed in detail in a separate post. Briefly, I allowed my intellect to override this heart-based sense of unity. I questioned everything I was taught, mostly because I couldn’t believe that the awesomeness I was hearing was really Catholicism. I had known so many rigid and tight Catholics, but I couldn’t square their intense belief in a narrow set of rules with the more open and fluid things I was learning at this parish. I thought maybe this wasn’t really Catholicism, but some liberal compromise that makes it seem okay to be Catholic by ignoring some of the less acceptable things about it. And I couldn’t intellectually reconcile things that made no sense to me, like the doctrine that Mary was a virgin her whole life, or that Jesus would come to judge the living and the dead. I also felt a little ill thinking of all the physical violence done to the many beloved saints of the Church, and wondered why this violence and suffering had such a central place, and felt that it was wrong. I wrote Sister Jane an e-mail explaining my position and my decision to leave. She said she would miss me, and took slight issue with my characterization of the parish and the religion, but encouraged me to try some other denominations that might be a better fit for me.

During this period, I decided I would just find some other church, one that was more rational and didn’t have all this baggage. I kept telling everyone that I was going to start going to the Unity Church, a kind of New Age type church that focused on positive thinking. They did have some pretty sophisticated sermons, but I missed the music, and the tradition, and the commitment…I ended up going to one service, and one service only. I kept saying I would go back, but I never did. And I found nothing else that spoke to me, though I actively sought it out.

Then came the fateful day – the day that Pope Benedict surprised everyone by retiring. I remember my husband telling me the news, yelling it from across the house. And my reaction….I jumped out of my seat! I ran around the house exclaiming! What was going on! Benedict! What was going to happen now! And I realized what I was doing and I thought….if you’re not Catholic, then why do you even care what happens to the Pope? Huh?” And then I understood – I am Catholic. Just as sure as birds have feathers or dogs bark at fire engine sirens, I am Catholic. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. So, I decided to stop fighting it.

My husband and I stayed up well into the 2 a.m. hour on the day the new Pope was to be elected. When they announced it was Jorge Bergoglio, I was happy – a Latin American pope! This is different, and needed!!We waited on pins and needles to see what his name would be – my husband was the first to understand the Latin they spoke “nomen imposuit Francesum”….then I was ecstatic! Francis!! My parish was run by the Franciscan Friars! St. Francis was my patron saint! I am a Franciscan! Francis!!! I loved him from the moment he gave his humble speech from that balcony, I and still love him like crazy today.

That day, I wrote Sister Jane and told her that I wanted to return. She welcomed me back instantly. I resolved to return to RCIA with humility and an open heart, instead of the dissecting mind and assumption of prior/superior knowledge that I went into it with the first time around. I also started reading the Catechism, and found out that what they were teaching was, indeed, Catholicism. As Pope Francis has been trying to get through everyone’s heads with a will, it is the rigid, limited, angry people who are far from the teachings of Church, not the gentle, accepting, loving souls I had met and received teaching from at my parish.

About 6 months later, my husband and I found ourselves unexpectedly moving to another state. This meant I had to leave this RCIA program and find another one in our new city. I did some careful research, and found a parish that I felt would offer me the same open, loving, expansive attitude as my old parish did. And boy, was I right! It only took me one visit to realize that I had landed in the best possible place for me. I couldn’t be happier with the parish I am at now, and am currently getting ready for confirmation this Easter Vigil.

Making my way back – side note

I haven’t yet told the story of how I figured out that there might be a place for me in Catholicism after all.

I am a freelance translator– I translate texts from Italian to English. I work for agencies around the world. Most of the work I do involves things like divorce papers, leasing contracts, birth and marriage certificates, and college transcripts. But a few years ago, I answered an ad to translate newspaper articles on Catholicism for the website of a major Italian newspaper. It sounded like a very interesting change from my normal fare, and I was excited at the possibility. I sent in my inquiry and a sample translation, heard back from the agency in Italy, and soon my days and nights were occupied with translating articles about Catholicism.

I learned an incredible amount about the Catholic Church in a very brief time, specifically, the lives and histories of various popes. I learned about the various controversies and disagreements among Catholics, including priests and nuns, over birth control, female priests, and abortion. I translated news about the Curia, about power plays and jostlings for influence and position. I learned about World Youth Day, the process of investigating candidates for sainthood, the stories of John Paul II and the people around him and those who were influenced by him, and I learned about Pope Benedict, his history, and his management style.

A turning point was when I translated part of a Christmas speech by Pope Benedict. It was surprising to me, because I had always seen popes as stiff old men who laid down a bunch of unnatural rules that it would be cruel to expect people to follow. And maybe Benedict is a stiff old man, but what he said had nothing to do with rules. It was about…love! It evoked beauty, and sophistication, and a consciousness that may not have been enlightened in the way I had come to think of enlightened, but in some way enlightened nonetheless. My husband, who was similarly spiritually educated yet not attached to any particular religion, agreed.

The next day, flipping through the TV stations, I caught the Pope’s speech – the same one I had translated! And it was just as beautiful, and it delighted and thrilled me to see the Pope speaking the words that I had just read and taken into myself for transformation into English.

And I think it was at that point I realized that, if priests, nuns, and monks could disagree over what the teachings of the Church should be, then maybe the Catholic Church wasn’t monolithic – maybe Catholics weren’t just in mindless lockstep. Maybe there was a place in it for me – someone who loved so much about the Church, but not its teachings around sex. And that is why, when I got the message from God that I needed to go to church, the one I turned to was Catholic.

Making my way back, part 1

It took me a long time to get back to Christianity, however. I still couldn’t reconcile a lot of its beliefs with my own views – the sexual restriction, the very idea of hell, the idea that a man had to die on the cross in order to “save my soul” – all of it turned me off. And since I knew very little about Christianity, really, other than what its opponents or its fundamentalists had told me, I was at a loss about how to move past these conflicts. So, I just went around them.

First I tried the Unitarian Universalists. I liked the fact that they didn’t have any rigid, illiberal beliefs. I could do what I had been doing up to that point – picking and choosing what I liked about the various religions and practicing a kind of mishmash. And it was true – I absolutely could do that! But, after attending several services at a couple different churches, once again I felt like something was missing. It was all very nice, and they were very kind and earnest people, but I missed the strong BELIEF that you find in the Catholic Church. Yes, the Catholics may have been rigid, but at least they passionately BELIEVED something, and they wanted you to believe it too! In fact, they were so sure about their beliefs that they would REQUIRE you to believe it! Now, on one hand, this went against my very liberal beliefs, but on the other hand, “anything goes” is uninspiring, boring, not meaningful. I crossed the Unitarian Universalists off my list.

I started to look for versions of Christianity that seemed less dogmatic, more accepting – particularly of gay people. I found a United Methodist Church that seemed wonderful – open, fun, the pastor was a classical singer, like me, and he integrated lots of music (and accordions!) into the liturgy. It was nice, but, again, I felt a lack of passion. The people there didn’t seem inspired or moved. They weren’t taken by the throat by the glory of God, which is how I feel and how I want to feel at church. My husband and I tried to get things started at that church, but everything just seemed to fall through for lack of enthusiasm. I started to perceive that the congregation was kind of addicted to the pastor’s colorful personality, more so than their spiritual pursuits, and he started to seem less of a welcome, friendly presence, more sinister. The final straw was when he made a subtle dig at the political opposition from the pulpit – an opposition that my husband and I weren’t exactly part of, but one that we could sympathize with on certain issues that were very important to us. And that was the end of the Methodists.

After that, it was nothing. We moved to another city, and I didn’t even think to find a church there. My husband had experienced a personal tragedy, and I was coping with moving back to the city where my estranged parents lived, and the daily fear of running into them, so these weren’t the best of times. I pursued my career and worked through the damage caused to me by a neglectful and distorted childhood, and I helped him find his way through the pain of loss. And then one day, I felt this stirring inside me, this feeling that I was living too shallowly, too much for myself, that I had no higher purpose in my life at all. We didn’t have children, no family but each other, and although of course we are precious to each other, is that really all there is? And then suddenly, like a little whisper in my head, I thought “I need to go to church. I need to start living my life with love at the center of it. I need Jesus.”

That night, I did some research – I looked online for “gay friendly Catholic Churches”, and to my amazement, I found one in my city! The next day I woke up and immediately got ready for church. I got there a little late and the whole place was packed. The only place to sit in the large, Old Mission style on the outside, Baroque/Renaissance style on the inside church building was in the row of folding chairs set up in the very back of the church. People were holding palm fronds. It began to dawn on me that the day I had chosen to come home to the Church was Palm Sunday.

Born a Catholic

I believe that I was born Catholic. Well, technically, I was – my mother was Catholic, and her parents were Catholic, and they baptized me, the first-born baby of my young parents. But in fact, my atheist father and unspiritual mother raised me as…well, nothing. Not even specifically as an atheist, just – nothing. God, religion, spirituality – it had no place in our home. My father was raised in the Soviet Union by intellectual atheists, and he was raised to believe in, well, nothing. My mother’s definitive statement on spirituality was “I believe in God, and that’s it,” delivered in an irritated tone.

And then there was me. I was fascinated by Catholicism. I found the missal my mother was given at her first communion and I read it until it fell apart. I always asked to go to Mass with my grandfather, who went every day. And I was given a Bible one year for Christmas by my born-again Christian aunt and uncle, who knew that I was interested. I was eight years old, and I decided I was going to read the whole Bible, starting from Genesis (I think I gave up somewhere in the middle of Exodus.). At Christmas time I would dress up and pretend to be the Virgin Mary. I admired my born-again relatives for their religion, how it seemed to give their life meaning and purpose, which felt completely lacking in my own family, where daily life was a ungrounded chaos of meaninglessness and sadness, at least for me.

But other than the gift of the Bible and the few times my grandfather took me to Mass with him, none of the adults in my life encouraged or helped me pursue my attraction to the Church. A few years later, I would lay in bed, terrified of Jesus, because I thought he was going to send me to hell for not believing in him and doing what he said. And as a young woman raised in an extremely liberal family and taking courses at the local community college, I learned that Christianity was something bad, something that killed the Indians and oppressed women and inspired the Crusades, smashed the peaceful pagan religions, burned witches, and oppressed people’s natural sexual selves– in other words, Christianity was pretty much the source of all evil in the world, at least as far as I had been told.

That is what led me to pursue my desire for spiritual unity by other means, through the forms of religion that were more acceptable to people in my milieu – the Eastern religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as the various New Age derivatives of the Eastern religions and Western transcendentalist philosophy. I studied a bit of all these religions, and took wisdom from them, but the only religion that I ever became a practitioner of (other than a New Age system called the Michael Teachings, which is more of a philosophy or a framework than a religion) was Buddhism. I was specifically interested in Tibetan Buddhism.

Looking back on this, it appears obvious to me that some of the things that attracted me to Tibetan Buddhism are similar to the things that attracted me to Catholicism. The beautiful and colorful images, the rituals, the prominent female figures, the Bodhisattvas (the saints of Mahayana Buddhism) – all of these things are essential to my sense of spirituality. So, I went to the dharma center, I found a lama that I really liked, I learned to (and still can) meditate. I had the altars and said the prayers. I believed (and still believe) in their goodness and efficacy. But…something was missing.

I distinctly remember when I realized that Buddhism wasn’t for me. It was Tibetan New Year, and the lama took us outside the building of the dharma center to do a ritual for the New Year. He was wonderful, and authentic, and doing what he knew best, but I felt…nothing. And why did I feel nothing? Because I am not Tibetan. I’m not Asian. This religion is beautiful, but it comes from a culture that is foreign to me, and that is why I don’t feel anything. I knew then that I had to go back to my own culture, back to the West – back to Christianity.