Category Archives: Reflections

Thoughts and musings along the way of this journey.

Pilgrim Dreaming

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Don’t forget about me; I’m still here. I have been having some major issues the past couple of weeks: a collision of being laid low by illness, a mountain of student papers to grade, rising panic about writing my own papers, a thorough sense of being overwhelmed, and my mind and heart being anywhere but there.

The catastrophe is beginning to relent. I got through the first round of student papers last night. This morning I need to attack the second half, go back through both sets to clean them up and write proper comments, and then, hopefully, approach the paper of my own that has had me bound up for about a week.

This morning, I had thought I would stay at home and work all day, but I woke up before my alarm, in time to make early Mass, and I felt the nudge of the Holy Spirit that I should go. And it was such a salve to my soul. One of my commissae (it seems an appropriate enough word to coin: we having been sent together) commented this morning that I seemed “perkier” than I have been. I do feel a great relief. But I’m not out of the woods yet.

St. Peter's from the Tiber by féileacán

"St. Peter's from the Tiber" by féileacán (Flickr)

My heart has been yearning for Rome, more and more each day. There was so much the first time I was there that I didn’t see; so much that I didn’t experience because I wasn’t looking with open eyes. My first journey was the first steps of a pilgrimage; now that I am nearing the end of my entrée, I long to go again, to lay my head in the heart of the Mother Church and receive her blessings as a lost child coming home. I am to the point of actually planning my return. I have been pricing plane tickets for months, and researching hostels. I tacked up my map of Rome this morning. I’ve ordered a couple of travel guides for pilgrims, including this one I’m pretty excited about: A Catholic’s Guide to Rome: Discovering the Soul of the Eternal City. This morning I discovered this great wiki of the Churches of Rome. Tentatively, I am planning a trip for December 2012 or January 2013. Ticket costs will be at their nadir then, as well as the tides of tourism. I will start setting aside some money every month, and with any hope, I will be able to afford a truly grand pilgrimage. My mind is exploring all the possibilities of an unlimited train pass, and all the other saints whom I could honor: St. Francis in Assisi, St. Ambrose in Milan, St. Augustine in Pavia… O, come back, my heart! I have things yet to do here in the States!

I Heart My Parish

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Magnificat, October 2011Yesterday morning at early Mass, absentminded as I am, I laid down my copy of this month’s Magnificat, and walked off. I’m not sure where I left it — either in the pew in the nave, or outside in the piazza where I sat with Audrey eating donuts.

I didn’t realize I was missing it until last night when I got home from RCIA, and was preparing for bed and evening prayers. This is the first month I’ve received Magnificat, but already I’ve grown very attached to it, and was rather distraught to be without it. I prayed on my own, read the Bible for a while, and resolved to go back to the church as early as possible today to look for my magazine.

There were two other Masses yesterday following the early one. It was a crowded day on account of football traffic; several hundreds of people passed through the church yesterday. Anyone could have picked up my book and left with it. And yet when I got there this morning, there it was on the table in the narthex.

And I had little doubt that it would be. I heart my parish. I trust the people in it. Everyone I’ve met here has been good and loving. The Church is full of all kinds of people, sinners and saints alike; but combine Christian charity and virtue, Southern honor and manners, and small-town respect and reciprocity, and you get a generally good and honest bunch of folks here in our parish.

Conversion

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Since I’ve been on this road, I’ve been reluctant to use the term “conversion” in referring to my becoming Catholic, since in common parlance, “to convert” connotes a changing of form or character:

con·vert (kən-vûrt´) v. con·vert·ed, con·vert·ing, con·verts v.tr.
1. To change (something) into another form, substance, state, or product; transform: convert water into ice.
2. To change (something) from one use, function, or purpose to another; adapt to a new or different purpose.
3. To persuade or induce to adopt a particular religion, faith, or belief.
. . .
[convert. (n.d.) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. (2003). Retrieved October 9 2011 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/convert]

And I’ve insisted that I’m not changing form or character, or even changing faiths; I am continuing as what I’ve been all along, a Christian. In many ways, though not formally initiated, I’ve been outwardly and inwardly a Catholic Christian for a while now. I’ve preferred to say that “I’m joining the Catholic Church” rather than “I’m converting to Catholicism.” “Conversion” is a scary word; somehow it feels that if I “convert,” I will no longer be what I was before.

Though the majority around me doesn’t think in such terms, I know, I have always seen through the English to the Latin root: converto — I turn around or turn towards a new direction. I want people to see that my conversion is not a change of character, but merely a reorientation.

Last night, I read at length in the Catechism about the sacraments of penance and reconciliation. I was surprised to read of a “second conversion” — the ongoing process of a baptized Christian in growing towards holiness and eternal life — something that I’ve never heard referred to in any Protestant circle. Sure, I’ve heard of “discipleship” and “maturing spiritually,” but generally the evangelical attitude seems to be, “Poof! You’re a Christian! Now live like a Christian!” My ongoing struggle with sin, even though I was supposed to be a Christian, has been a constant source of trouble and confusion in my life. The Cathechism:

Christ’s call to conversion continues to resound in the lives of Christians. This second conversion is an uninterrupted task for the whole Church who, “clasping sinners to her bosom, [is] at once holy and always in need of purification, [and] always follows constantly the path of penance and renewal.” This endeavor of conversion is not just a human work. It is the movement of a “contrite heart,” drawn and moved by grace to respond to the merciful love of God who loved us first. [Cathechism of the Catholic Church, 1428]

Another name of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation is the sacrament of conversion. It is the process not only by which sinners are reconciled to God and the Church, but through which we are inwardly healed and changed; through which we turn away from sin and toward God:

Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time it entails the desire and resolution to change one’s life, with hope in God’s mercy and trust in the help of his grace. [Catechism, 1431]

I want to be converted, in my whole being. Even more than converting — reorienting — toward the Catholic Church, I want to turn toward God.

The Catholic Church, through its sacrament of reconciliation, understands the need for this continuing conversion in Christians, and how it is effected. I know I have heard some Protestants, the wise ones, acknowledge that growing in Christ is a process; they surely recognize, by experience, what isn’t formally taught in evangelical churches, but should be. So much of my youth was spent in agony, needing to confess and be reconciled, but instead making the same mistakes again and again, never growing, never converting, until I became calloused and complacent.

Today at Mass, as if to confirm this was a lesson I needed to pay attention to and take to heart, Deacon Ted spoke about this ongoing conversion in his homily.

“Not much brand loyalty”

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Last night I attended our Catholic campus ministry’s weekly gathering, to hear a talk by a priest, Father Matthew, who’d been a Protestant convert. He’d spent time as a Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and had even applied for a Lutheran seminary. Describing himself, he said that he guessed he “didn’t have much brand loyalty.” He left me with a lot of food for thought. He seemed to have a good foundation in philosophy, and since he had a good view of both sides of the divide, I wished I could have talked to him longer.

He described himself as a skeptic toward the supernatural, especially toward Marian apparitions and other forms of private revelation. And it struck me how different this was from where I’m coming from. Here was a Catholic parish priest, in a small, conservative, Southern town, admitting to a room full of Catholics that there were things in his faith that he had a hard time swallowing; that his faith waxed and waned; that he even struggled sometimes with doubts about the very Mass he was celebrating. And nobody in the room batted an eye. No one criticized him or expressed disappointment or disapproval. Having doubts and questioning seemed perfectly acceptable and understandable, even for a priest. I would never have expected such acceptance or understanding from an evangelical crowd. He said that the great thing about the Catholic Church and its tradition is that every doubt has already been dealt with by somebody. The reality and efficacy of the Eucharist, he said, had nothing to do with his faith or his weakness, and everything to do with Christ.

Regarding Mary: When he encountered stories of Marian apparitions, the first thing he asked was, do they improve the life of the person? Someone in the audience asked how he dealt with the Marian dogmata in coming to the Catholic Church. He said that with regard to Mary, and to so much in the Catholic faith, you can’t really appreciate it until you’re in the middle of it. It all came down, for him, to his faith in the Eucharist and in Christ’s Real Presence; and when he believed that and longed for that, there came a point at which he had to take a jump; and then everything else followed. He said if you go deep with a belief and struggle with it, it will often end up being among your favorite things in the Church. And in my journey so far, I can certainly say that that has been my experience with Mary. He said he didn’t really know and understand the humanity of Christ until he got to know his mother.

He said that one of the greatest things that drew him to Catholicism was its appreciation for the material aspects of faith. Evangelical and fundamentalist traditions are mostly concerned with a set of beliefs that will get souls into heaven; but Catholicism values things that will bring us closer to God in the here and now, in the material world — beautiful things, such as art and architecture; intellectual things, such as history, tradition, theology. The Catholic faith is wonderfully broad — there is so much you can “do” in terms of spirituality; so many different traditions — but you can’t do everything, or you’ll never find any depth in anything. He himself has followed the Benedictine tradition. It’s a “convert’s danger,” he said, to want to dabble in so many different traditions; but he recommended that if we found something that bore fruit for us, to stick with it and go deep with it. (I know this will be a problem for me — but for now I’m going to enjoy dabbling.)

Regarding his lack of “brand loyalty”: he said that “cradle Catholics” have a deep, emotional connection to the Church, but that as a convert, he didn’t. He said that above all, his was an intellectual attachment, a conviction that the Catholic Church was the true Church of Christ, the oldest and first and the bearer of apostolic succession. “I still choose it because it’s the best among alternatives; but it’s not perfect.” For my part, I believe I will feel much more of an emotional attachment — I already do. I’ve felt an orphan for so long, and admired my Mother Church, and passionately defended her to Protestant critics, even long before I dreamed of making this journey.

Above all, he said, he became a priest because he fell in love with the Mass and wanted to enjoy it as often as possible. “Everybody who goes through RCIA wants to be pope,” he said. And I must confess that this has occurred to me.

Climbing out of the pit

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Today I had lunch with Audrey, and she offered some very helpful and reassuring answers to my questions about Purgatory. And Kristen gave me some very rich and valuable comments to my previous post about it. So tonight I have ample food for thought.

In a pitEven before I began this journey to Catholicism, I had been having vague, inchoate doubts about the Protestant conceptions of grace and salvation. As an evangelical, I always believed that all that was necessary for the forgiveness of sins was to confess them to God and repent. I struggled with the repentance part, but told myself that “everybody struggles; you’re human and carnal; Christ understands that and will forgive you.” I stopped feeling so wracked with guilt; I felt I was forgiven. I prayed and prayed for Him to set me free from my sins; to clean me and change me and help me stop doing what I was doing. But I was never getting any better. I seemed to be trapped; unable to rise above my fault. And I was miserable — not from guilt, but from the very temporal, practical wages of my sin. Something clearly was very flawed in what I was doing.

I think it was out of my longing for true repentance, even if that longing wasn’t fully realized, that brought me to attend my first Ash Wednesday Mass the Lent before last. It was the first time I’d been in a Catholic Church in five years (I had visited once with a friend out of curiosity, and to churches in Rome as a tourist) — the first time ever with an inquiring mind. I knew no one, had very little idea what was going on (I was taken aback by all the kneeling and genuflecting), and did my best to be inconspicuous. When I went forward to receive the ashes, the lay worker blessed me with the formula, “Turn from sin, and be faithful to the Gospel.” For some reason — which I now realize to be the finger of the Holy Spirit — those words struck a very deep chord with me: I was shaken for several weeks. Turn from sin, and be faithful to the Gospel. You mean I can turn from sin? You mean I can be faithful? More than what I’m doing now?

Ash Wednesday

On Ash Wednesday, the penitent receives a cross of ashes on his or her forehead, to symbolize the repentance of Lent.

My second Ash Wednesday, after I’d been attending Mass regularly here for about a month, had an even deeper impact. Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return. It wasn’t so much the experience of the ritual that struck me this time — it was what happened afterward; what I can only understand as God speaking to me. I remembered the words of the year before — and suddenly something clicked into place. Christ died for my sins. So I have an obligation to stand against them and to live for him. And I started taking that stand. Father Joe had said in his homily that for the Lenten fast, we should give up the thing that was most standing between us and God. And I did just that: I gave up my complacency in my sin. And Lent this year was a greater time of victory than I had ever before known.

Before, I wasn’t really “struggling”; I was rolling over and letting sin have me, since I believed it was my nature. All those years, I prayed and prayed, “Lord, I’m dying here. I can’t get out of this pit; I’m trapped; won’t you pull me out?” And I felt so frustrated and despondent that he never seemed to help me; that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get out. It was only recently that it occurred to me: all that time, he was saying to me, “I’m offering you a rope for you to climb out; why won’t you take it?”

ClimbingI’m not a theologian; so it’s only out of my practical, personal experience that I say that the Protestant conception of salvation by faith alone got me nowhere. I had faith in Christ, in his divinity and Resurrection; I had faith that he had saved me from my sins; and yet that faith was doing nothing to set me free. Maybe if I had died, I would have gone to Heaven (or at least to Purgatory); but more pressing, my daily struggle with sin was making my life a living hell. In that moment on Ash Wednesday, it hit me that having faith wasn’t enough; I had to do something. When Protestants pick at the Catholic position of salvation by faith and works, it’s usually presented as if Catholics believe, in a Pharisaical sense, that their “good works,” their observance of rituals, is going to get them into heaven. But that’s not it at all. The “works” just means that I had to do something; that I had to cooperate with Christ in my own salvation; that I had to work at it; that he wasn’t going to just zap me and make me a saint. Instead of just begging him to pull me out of the pit, I had to take the rope.

“Peace be with y’all!”

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Today at Mass I sat near a man with a thick Southern accent. And it brought a smile to hear him say, “Lord, have mercy.”

One of my favorite things about our parish is the juxtaposition of the Catholic Church, a deeply traditional institution, with the American South, a deeply traditional place and people. I am passionate about my Southern identity and culture. I love to see very Southern, traditional people embracing an even older tradition.

In many ways, Catholicism is still a relative newcomer and an outsider to the uplands of the South I call my home. It is much more prevalent in the older, coastal cities such as New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile, which were settled by the French; it has been slower to penetrate into more rural regions. Of all the states in the U.S., Mississippi and Alabama have the two smallest percentages of Catholic adherents among their populations as a whole (about 7 and 6 percent). The Church is viewed with some skepticism and even hostility by many evangelicals and fundamentalists. Here, the predominant tradition — going back more than two centuries, to the period of settlement in these states, and even beyond — is evangelical.

I have deep roots in that heritage. I’m proud to have at least half a dozen Baptist and Methodist ministers in my family tree. It troubled me, at first, to consider departing from that. But now, I find it fitting. Catholicism may not be an essential part of the Southern tradition, yet — but one of the key aspects of the Southern identity is that it embraces, incorporates, and celebrates traditions of many forms and origins: our food, drawn so much from slave culture and from a variety of other cuisines; our music, again influenced by African, European, and Caribbean sounds; our customs, such a blending of the Celtic and English and our very own cultivation. The South is a great big cultural melting pot; nothing that enters it stays the same, but takes on a distinctly Southern character. Already, we Southerners are embracing Catholicism and giving it a very Southern flavor. Catholicism joins well with Southern hospitality. And it is fitting that a people who value tradition as much as we do should be a part of the tradition of Christ. Peace be with y’all!

Bridging the Gap

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I realized what it is I’ve been trying to do, through my constant, ecumenical assertions that “all who call on Christ’s name are Christians.” I truly believe — I have to believe — that Jesus saves those on both sides of this divide, if they faithfully follow Him and serve Him. I do not believe that He would abandon those who have fallen away from the Church and its sacraments, just as He didn’t abandon the Samaritans (John 4). I have no doubt whatsoever that my grandparents are among the saints, along with many other dearly beloved kin and ancestors. And I don’t want to abandon my heritage, the milieu I’ve been steeped in and that has shaped me. My homeland, my people, are so closely and so inextricably tied to Protestantism — and I don’t want to let go of that. I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between the two, between Catholicism and Protestantism; that by denying any difference between the two, by affirming their sameness, I can somehow remain both.

And I’m not sure I can do it. This recent, hostile conflict has caused me to reconsider some things. I think I am always going to maintain an ecumenical perspective and hope — a belief that in His infinite mercy, Christ saves all who call on His name, even those sheep who have wandered away with misguided shepherds — but I cannot insist that all churches are exactly the same. The faults in my own logic became glaringly clear as I wrote that last entry, and more and more so the more times I read it. My argument wore the thinnest, I think, in my suggestion that Protestant ministers, just by their virtue of having read the Bible, are just as much the successors of the Apostles as the Catholic bishops, whom the Apostles willfully and thoughtfully appointed.

Pope Benedict XVI has commented that Protestant churches are “not true churches” — a widely-quoted statement that deeply bothered me, and in fact turned me off from Catholicism for several years. But I hadn’t actually (and I guess, still haven’t, since this is only a news brief) read the full context of the statement until tonight:

Noting that churches and ecclesial communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church “suffer from defects,” the doctrinal congregation acknowledged that “elements of sanctification and truth” may be present in them.

“It follows that these separated churches and communities … are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation,” the congregation said. “In fact, the spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.”

…

Yet, Christian communities “born out of the Reformation” do not share that union as they “do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of orders,” the Vatican congregation said.

“These ecclesial communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called churches in the proper sense,” it said.

I agree with these comments, and find them much more caring than I believed them to have been — though I think the “not proper churches” phrase was a bit careless and probably ill-advised. (The moral of the story: read more than Wikipedia when you’re examining something of such import.)

It’s history, as much as anything, that has brought me to this point. And even if my American ancestors and the people I study were by and large Protestants, in rejecting that faith for myself, I in no way want to reject theirs, or reject them. There are, without a doubt, many strands and elements of Protestant Christianity, in fact some that I’ve grown up with, that I do not hesitate to distance and dissociate myself from. I can’t, and don’t want to, hold on to everything.

It’s the core message of the Gospel, the love of God, that is universal; it’s the divine mercy of God that saves, not anything that any of us do by our own power. Even if I let go of Protestantism, I will maintain that Protestants are Christians and that many are held by God’s saving grace. I will continue to strive to bridge the gap: not by being on both sides of it, but by teaching my Protestant brethren about the Catholic faith, dispelling their misconceptions, and encouraging acceptance and reconciliation in whatever way I can.

A Catholic being born

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Tonight began RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults — the official first step in becoming Catholic. But in truth, I’ve been becoming Catholic for a long time. I’ve been attending Mass for about a year. Looking back over my life, there have been countless harbingers to herald that this is the direction my road would take, signposts to show the way. This step is the culmination of a lifelong journey.

Tonight at RCIA, they passed around a notepad asking us to sign in, giving our names, whether we’d been baptized or confirmed, and our current religion. I am a Christian; I have been most of my life. But I’ve been wandering for a long time, and for the past year, I’ve labeled myself as a “Catholic seeker” or one “pretending to be Catholic.” Offhandedly, I scrawled Catholicus nascens — a nascent Catholic. I didn’t really think about that phrase’s full import until after I’d created this blog and sat down to write this entry. Catholicus nascens is literally a “Catholic being born.”

I wasn’t born a Catholic, a “cradle Catholic,” as many people are. This doesn’t necessarily feel like a rebirth to me; if anything, I feel like I’m finally coming into the faith I was born for. But I guess that’s what this process is, and why the title is apt. I am a Catholic coming into being, a Catholic being born. This time will be a time of the joys of discovery, the heights of exultation, the peace of everything fitting into place; but also the pains of labor, the darkness of doubt, the uncertainty of the unknown. I believe I will emerge into the light.

In these pages I will chart the progress of my journey of faith. Whether you find me randomly or I invite you to join me, you’re welcome to follow along and share your insight. I’ll share what I learn and experience, and reflections on the signs and events that have led me to this point.