My posts here, after starting so strong and frequent last semester, have slowed to a trickle now, it seems. I regret that. The troubles and stresses and demands of school have dogpiled on. And, more significantly, I am grappling with serious depression. Growing up, I always heard that “Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and …
Category Archives: Struggles
Broken Communion
Today I’m troubled by the first major challenge from my parents to the Catholic Church: not so much, thankfully, to my personal journey, but ostensibly to the Catholic practice of closed communion. My father feels offended to be excluded from the Catholic Eucharist. As a baptized Christian, he feels he is privileged to partake. He …
“Coming out”
I apologize to all of my reader(s) for having fallen off the blogosphere. School and research and paper-writing has swept me away entirely. I have posts burning holes in my head that I have wanted to share, but I’ve been unable to justify taking the time away from work to write them. The second part …
Seeing the stars in the sky
In the Isaac Asimov story “Nightfall,” the inhabitants of a planet that knows perpetual daylight, orbiting multiple suns, are overwhelmed the first time they witness a total eclipse, and see, for the first time, the multitude of stars in the sky. Tonight I realized how many Catholic blogs there are out there. I’ve never been …
Apologia
I’ve been dragging for a few days, and haven’t felt like posting. I don’t feel much like it now either, but feel I should keep it going. I have several good posts outlined: one on authority; one on the Real Presence; and the next chapter of my journey. Hopefully I will feel like writing them …
Sin and Punishment
Tonight I’m struggling with Purgatory. I guess I haven’t really thought much about it before. Like Mary did, it came upon me rather suddenly. Father Joe mentioned Purgatory briefly at RCIA on Sunday. I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of salvation, and the differences between the Catholic and evangelical Protestant conceptions of it. I’ve …
The waters have come up to my neck…
69 1 Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. 2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. 3 I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. …
Premises
Today was a long day. I had several posts I spent most of the day plotting in my head, but when I got home, I was met with something far more exigent: the first real, vehement opposition I’ve met from a friend to my becoming Catholic. She raised a valid point: To what degree have …
Kyrie, eleison
Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison. The Kyrie is an early Christian prayer, with antecedents even before Christianity, with which we open our daily Mass most days at our parish church (we sing it after the Confiteor, “I confess,” in our Sunday Mass). It’s transliterated from the Greek, Κύριε, ἐλέησον — “Lord, have mercy” — and borrowed …