Re-reading Chesterton’s1 Orthodoxy for the eleventy-seventh time.

Every time I read it, the burly swamp-oaf of a man pops out of the pages to blow cigar smoke in my face, demanding I pay attention to some particular chunk of the book.

This time, it was the chapter exploring different arguments against Christianity.2

He goes into great, smartass detail about all the intelligent criticisms that have been made of Christianity over the past ages - as only a man who has lobbed the criticisms himself can.3

In short, Christianity is too:

• pessimistic and gloomy (a gray land of the damned) / optimistic and delusional (la-la land)

• Weak and cowardly / warlike and violent

• Fundamentalist / syncretic

• Prude / sex-obsessed

• Imperialistic / insular

• Ascetic / libertine

• Sexually repressive / sexually coercive

• Fractious / monolithic

• Antisemitic / Zionist

…et cetera.

Also, I realized today that I used to make these paradoxical charges vehemently while at the same accusing Christians of hypocrisy. Oops! I guess it’s Opposite Day! In my case, and apparently in G’s case as well, these opposing criticisms were held to both be accurate at the same time - exclusive, but both somehow valid.

As someone a bit wiser and far more foolish than I was in youth, I can tell you: I still support all of these charges 100%. I’ve come to believe that the whole logic-puzzle approach to things, A ≠ (¬A), is bullshit. Water is a liquid and a solid, light is a particle and a wave, Cheerios are for breakfast and dinner.

Chesterton became fascinated with the idea of a strange, misshapen phenomenon of which these could all be true, thinking that only something huge, bizarre, and otherworldly could have such contours. He came to the conclusion, over years of brandy-soaked bickering, that these charges do not apply to Christianity - they apply to humanity. I came to the same conclusion two-hundred and some years later, probably over a Jack Daniels bottle, feeling like rock-and-roll Yoda.

Absolute Boobery! Pride! And then: humiliation as I realized that several of these charges are against me also.

That’s why I need Christianity. I shit you not: a few months ago I caught myself daydreaming about some very specific heads in guillotine baskets while at a nonviolence seminar4.

If it’s true that Jesus of Nazareth was the only guy ever to be immune from this bipolar baloney - if it’s true that he was only one thing, all the time - I have to stay close to him, take notes, pay attention, ask for tips. And I like sitting together every Sunday with hundreds of other turds who are trapped in this moral whiplash cycle, admitting together that we’re trapped in it but there’s hope for us yet.

Anyway: Chesterton explains all of this so much better, and funnier, and more clearly, in Orthodoxy. Five stars, would recommend, will read again.

I met her for coffee today and she told me something surprising about that moment: before she got to my forehead, she felt self-conscious at the front of the church, as though she were on stage performing the whole thing. When thumbing the soot onto my own particular greasy forehead, she said, something changed. She could “feel” my faith and she was suddenly aware that it wasn’t her doing the ash distribution at all - it was God doing it through her.

She said some more nice things, but that comment really got me. It was kind of embarrassing. I’m quite bad at taking compliments, so I thought some of my discomfort might stem from that. I reflected on her comment as I drove home. “Maybe she’s a little more nuts than I thought and thinks I’m magical or something,” I thought. “Am I magical?” I wondered for a sick-ass second.

And then the same epiphany happened to me! The change in her perspective had nothing to do with me whatsoever. Turns out, I’m not magical at all1. A little sentence from St. Paul2 popped into my head:

“It is not I, but Christ who lives in me”3

I now suspect that somehow, the breath of God (Holy Spirit/Wild Goose/Holy Fire/Magic and Source of All Magic, whatever) was blowing through me to her: accidental evangelization; some sort of jolly contagion. And somehow, by this weird Pauline arithmetic, the breath blew through her and back to me so I could learn the same thing she did: this whole situation has nothing to do with me - in the best possible way.

Isn’t this what every Christian dreams of? That somehow they can step backward in their lives and the crazy love of Christ will step forward and light up all the hearts around them? Without having to hand out pamphlets, wear a sandwich board/khakis, or spew lingo at someone?

Whatever faith I happened to be emanating at that moment wasn’t mine. It wasn’t made of “vibes.”4 It didn’t come from my forehead or my goober face, whatever arrangement my overly-earnest features had assumed. The twitchy faith I had in that moment was given to me, implanted like a microchip, independent of my will.

I didn’t create it! In fact, I fought it tooth and nail for a long time until I finally flopped down and surrendered. Christians have a pretty awful reputation in the circles we travel in so for a long time I didn’t talk about the faith with anyone other than my husband5. Then, and I’m ashamed to say, sometimes now, it feels like a too-small sweater your grandmother gave you, but you wear it over to her house anyway because you love her.

Now, I happily realize that despite my best intentions to blend in with the rest of humanity, my faith shows sometimes. Madam, your slip is showing!

Sometimes, God makes coincidences happen that smack you in the face and change you. Happy to report it happened to me today.

As a vowed Franciscan, one of my responsibilities is to read the designated Gospel1 for the day and meditate on it. Another one is to be intimately familiar with the biography and timeline of Francis, so that I can use it as a template for daily living.

The closing line of today’s gospel was Jesus’s reminder that

Normally this admonition gives me a chill, for the following reasons:

1. I often confuse “humbling myself” with self-abasement - always being the one to clean the toilets without complaint, never taking credit for successes, letting the housemates always decide which movie to watch, generally being a doormat. This is pathological.

2. The word “exalted” makes me think of someone on a pedestal in formal clothing winning some kind of award and that grosses me out. I don’t want that.

3. After 1.5 years of hard recovery from healthcare burnout, I am terrified that “humbling myself” (bending and stretching to always serve others until I’m scraped out like a pumpkin) will make the burnout happen again. I do not have enough money for this quantity of therapy.

I heard the words differently today, because I remembered a vignette from the life of Francis that illustrated it.

Francis, after his conversion experience, stole and sold his merchant father’s stuff so he could have the money. His father sued him for reimbursement - but of course he had given it all away. As they litigated publicly in the town square, the townspeople, magistrates, clergy, bishops, and old friends in Assisi watched the medieval Jerry Springer fracas with interest.

Francis, because he is like this, tore his clothes off and stood there in front of everyone naked2. He handed over the clothes and the few cents he had to his father, and proceeded to publicly disown him and state that his only father from now on was God.

That wasn’t self-abasement: that was humility. What’s more humbling than standing butt-naked in front of everyone you know, not figuratively but literally? This situation is not an “exalting” one, no matter how gorgeous you are.

When Francis stripped off his clothes, he also stripped off any possibility of people seeing him as some rich guy’s pious son becoming a Hero of the Church. Francis stripped off any chance that people could ever take him seriously as some sort of spiritual potentate, going town-to-town lecturing people about The Kingdom of Heaven. Any chance he may have had for becoming a priest or joining a “respectable” religious order like the Benedictines completely evaporated. He referred to himself from then on as a “fool for Christ”: never again would he take himself seriously. Everyone had seen his giblets and the gossip would spread like wildfire.

This was kenosis, an emptying. Francis poured his self-image out to make room for the illuminations of God. This was exaltation - a skinny, naked guy in his early 20’s pouring out everything, starting a chaotic and beautiful revolution that would turn the Church upside-down forever.

Francis’s kenosis didn’t translate into self-abasement, showy martyrdom, or burnout - on the contrary! Unlike working in healthcare, this self-emptying didn’t scrape him out into a husk. It poured out temporal and spiritual poisons and refilled him immediately with illumination, purpose, and wild passion for the things that truly matter in the end.

Many people think of him today as a “hero of the church,” “visionary,” or “founder,” but I am 100% certain that would be a revolting surprise for him. The Francis I love and follow is a weird, crusty, spiral-eyed wild man with PTSD who wandered out to the farthest edges of Catholicism and came back giggling, singing, and shooting lightening bolts of bright transcendence into the world around him.

Now to my mind, this is “exaltation.” So, for me, humbling myself means something quite different now. But for the moment, my clothing will remain in place thank you very much.

One autumn about a thousand years ago, I walked across a college campus with a Franciscan nun1. It was gorgeous, crispy, and perfectly mid-Atlantic with the bright trees and all that shit. I was learning how to do Catholicism, and she was one of my teachers. She had a raspy guffaw that you could use to track her around campus; she was earthy, loved animals, and loved food - and I loved her.

The past few months of Catholic Bootcamp2 had given me the willies on several levels: questions generated more questions and I had more than 2000 years of data to sift through for my answers. Many of my cohort were infinitely more clean-cut and apple-cheeked than myself (polo shirts, promise rings, and what-have-you), and I felt like a moldy old shoe whenever we got together.

During the walk I felt the need to fess up, to tell her the truth: “Sister Clare, I don’t think I can ever be a good Catholic’”.

I was in Socially Awkward Hell. She guffawed and didn’t even notice my discomfort, which was nice. She told me: “Kristine, all of us are bad Catholics. Anyone who thinks differently is fooling themselves. That’s the whole point.” That was it; she had clearly shared this little nugget dozens of times before with other neurotic candidates. The conversation tumbled on rapidly to “are we close to the food court yet?”

It hit my sternum like an arrow. I can be a bad Catholic. I can do that really, really well. I can be a downright shitty Catholic. Yes! BEHOLD!

Rather than planting seeds of the famous “Catholic guilt”, this opened a door for me. Sister Clare with her cheeky 5-to-10 second retort spilled the beans: the ostentatiously pious, tidy old ladies were Bad Catholics. The country-club polo shirt guys, the clergy in their fancy hats, the Pope, the sniffy bitch giving me side-eye for my low-cut shirt, Sr. Clare, me: Bad Catholics.

We have a whole sky full of saints who understand: former disembowelers, Satanists, hookers, pedophiles, pipe-bomb throwers, rapists, thugs, heretics, gangsters, Methodists3. Catholics, all. No matter how hard the poster-Papists try, this place will never be a spotless museum. Like Pope Francis explained: It’s a stinking, filthy field hospital for the gravely wounded.

Even with God’s firehose of grace pointed right at us, even with the whitest of white-knuckle discipline, we will all fall short. We have Confession so that we can admit it as often as we need to, out loud to another person, and hear that it’s going to be okay. We’re full of shit, and every year we have Lent so we won’t forget it.

The perception of someone as a “Good Catholic” only lasts as long as it takes for you to really get to know them. Promise. I like to lead with “shitty” because it helps to manage expectations.

“Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst.

-1 Timothy 1:15 (italics mine).

This was written by a brilliant and passionate guy, former bounty hunter of Christians. He survived several shipwrecks, endured a few tortures, and pulled some hard prison time and somehow never lost his faith or hope. Along the way he wrote several of the letters included in today’s Bible and successfully evangelized half the planet.

If he, Paul, is really “the worst”? Saddle up, my shitty friends.

Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly mentally healthy, I like to remind myself that behind the damp gray clouds in the stratosphere there is a radiant sun. I had to do a figurative version of that one Sunday because Mass, to be frank, was a bag of flaming dog-shit. It was a first communion Mass for about 5 little kids, so there were lots of visitors. Cool for the kids, cool for the community at large, a fucked-up disaster for the communion lines. People were going backward instead of forward, leaving one pew and returning to another, taking the host, crossing themselves, and walking straight into the person in line behind them. A real shit-show.

The singer (may God bless her to the very bones, I certainly don’t have the courage to stand in front of hundreds and sing) was a painfully shrill, uh, “soprano?” that actually physically hurt my ears, and caused actual facial grimacing among many. And the best part was when the priest forgot it was a first communion Mass and remembered almost at the end and had to do a frantic last-minute improv thing to accommodate the anxious small persons. My husband and I, side-eyeing each other, could barely contain our guffaws.

And YET. No matter how severely we fuck up the liturgy, God is there. He1 is constant, and remains constant despite this complete bungling, this utter garbage Mass. Despite the number of times I flip him the bird in a given week, or say “shit!” really loud in the echoing sanctuary when the kneeler lands on my foot as it’s time to pray. This is one of my favorite things about God! No matter whether we stumble and spray the bread all over the floor on the way to the altar, no matter whether we drool in the baptismal font or botch our wedding vows, he’s still completely perfect and beautiful, radiant and powerful.

I have cause to think about this aspect of the Most High a lot, because I have a real wretched case of clinical depression2 and have spent lots of quality time hovering over the Void these past decades. I often must remind myself3 that God’s goodness and love is present whether or not I can feel it, see it, understand it, and so on. He/she/it is present whether I can sense it or not. In fact, there’s an ancient aphorism4 about it: VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS, DEUS ADERIT. It means, loosely, “whether or not you ask, God is present.”

God is. When Moses asks him his name, it’s “I AM”; “To Be”. He looks after both black sheep and white, takes care of you whether you believe it or not, whether you deserve it or not (you don’t). I would jump in front of a train for this truth5. And in a pettier sense, whether you royally fuck up the liturgy (or prayer, or meditative practice, or rules, or whatever), he’s there behind the damp gray clouds. Shining, perfectly and with a totally insane warmth, as always.

Amen? Amen.

I’ve been to a lot of funerals, too many. The ratio of years lived to number of funerals is ridiculously lopsided, and I have a whole basket of neuroses to show for evidence. Newborns to nonagenarians and everything in between, loved ones, friends, and strangers. I went to one yesterday that was different in a really remarkable way.

You can learn a lot by watching people at a funeral. At most of them, if you look closely enough, you can see the new hole in the world. The shape and contour of the deceased becomes visible through the actions and words of their survivors. And there are so many different kinds of funerals:

• The elder ones who have been sick after many, many decades of life, there’s almost a resolution. The chapters are over, the suffering is done, the book is closed. We knew their contours for so many years, they began to calcify and become history even before the departed left.

• The traumatic ones - soldiers killed in action, folks lost by addiction, by violence. Everyone is stunned silent and leans on the structure of the funeral because they can’t stand up otherwise. Every person there knows that it is going to take years for their death to sink in before they can even begin to feel the magnitude of the pain (if at all). With the soldiers, your ears get fuzzy, and all you can hear is the trumpet playing “Taps”.

• New babies - we didn’t even get to know their contours. At the funeral, the mom carries a palpable, sucking vacuum around her that terrifies and disorients everyone. The attendees of the funeral are at a complete loss and rattled to their existential cores. The baby’s loss magnifies the mom’s loss, and many attendees run from it, stuttering half-condolences, spilling drinks, leaving early.

No matter what kind of funeral it is, it can be difficult sometimes to gather the contours of the lost person because the attendees mostly talk about themselves - this is what they meant to me, this is why I personally will miss them, this is how my life will be different without them.

This one was so, so different in a really elemental way. I haven’t seen one like it before.

People from all over, ALL over had come on planes, trains, and by car to say goodbye to the guy. Every single one I listened to (there were hundreds of attendees) had a private, personal story between them and the departed alone - just the two of them, as though every one of them regarded the guy as one of their best friends. Through the day, quiet stories emerged about the stunning, selfless things he had done for the people in his community - things he would never list on a resume or even talk about. In addition to being tireless, he was humble.

The contours of this guy were immediately apparent, and only became larger and more luminous through the day. Remarkably, through the tears and ripping pain of fresh grief, people only ever talked about him. You could feel everyone’s affection and awe warm on your skin. Their celebration of him, their palpable love of him, made the new hole in the world grow and illuminate and become astoundingly detailed.

Listening to the others, I learned how passionately he loved the strange little details of life and how readily he shared these loves with the world around him. He surprised the people he knew with personal gifts all the time. “Larger than life” is a stupid and hackneyed phrase, but I think this might be a case where it applies. The guy I didn’t even know became someone I’d miss.

The enormous, glowing, man-shaped exit hole in the world showed me who had left, but far more, it told me what he meant. In his absence, you could feel gentle currents of air blowing his friends and loved ones into the future. His tailwind, with sparks in it, somehow fueled dozens and dozens of people to outwardly resolve to live more like him in the days and years ahead.

Even I want to live more like this guy, and again - I didn’t even know him.

May we all ride on Dan McQuade’s beautiful tailwinds into a life more like his. May his memory be a blessing to all of us.

+

My oldest son turns 17 today and I thank God I get to be with him for it. Right after he was born, I had a postpartum hemorrhage. This happens in about 1% of births, and is when the normal bleeding after childbirth goes crazy and you bleed a lot, really fast, and it can kill you. It’s the #1 cause of maternal deaths worldwide. The ambulance and the hospital fixed me up, the hospital chaplain gave me Communion, and I got to live all these years with my son(s).

After being patched up, I read the day’s Gospel1, and part of it was Mark 5:25-34 - The Woman With the Hemorrhage. These coincidences between the Gospel and your daily life happen sometimes, more often than you’d think. There are many hypotheses out there as to why. Mine? Grace.

In the passage, a hemorrhaging woman sees Jesus walk by and just knows that if she can just touch him with her hands - even just his clothing - she will stop bleeding. She fights through the crowd around him, puts up with a great deal of bitching from his followers, sidles up like the crimson badass she is, and catches the very end of his tattered robe. He feels the energy drain out of his own body. He turns around, and he says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.” And she is.

I am not going to blow a bunch of Faith Healing smoke in your face right now, or ramble about miracles. We’ll talk about those later. What I want you to know is that right after I almost hemorrhaged to death myself and almost had to say goodbye to my beautiful son forever, I met this lady - this fellow bleeding spirit - in the scriptures. Through our hypovolemic dizziness and fatigue, we rebelliously fought through the horde of territorial Jesus-followers together. We physically touched him together (his robe on her pale fingers, the Eucharist on my anemic tongue, and the warm hands of the nurses on my body), and we were both physically, permanently healed.

It’s not a coincidence. Happy birthday, my beautiful boy!

When a Catholic church is built, it contains a Special Closet1. In the Special Closet, there is a Special Drain2 - which, to me, ends up being one of the most beautiful parts of any Catholic church. Let’s go back in time a little bit so I can explain.

The year I was in Catholic Basic Training3, a priest taught us about the sacristy and let us walk around in one. He explained the names and significance of most of the items in there. The room was fragrant with old wood and smoky frankincense; green, pink, white, and red vestments, hand-embroidered with gold thread, waited on racks for their liturgical turn. Shelves held thick leather-bound tomes, four-foot-long candles, golden chalices, and several other things that have beautiful Latin names I can’t remember. It was completely dazzling. And then, aaah, there it was: the Special Drain. A cross for a handle, a wide brass cover so that nothing in the world can accidentally fall in there. Wait a minute.

I probably made some kind of inappropriate cartoon face when I saw it, but the joke is completely on me. This strange little basin taught me one of the most visceral lessons I learned during that year of boot camp: what it means to truly believe that ordinary bread and wine can literally become the flesh of God.

See, if it’s true, you have to become extremely intense about this bit of wheat. You store it in a small golden tabernacle of its very own with a red lamp in front of it to announce He Is In Here. Every seat in the place is pointed straight at it. During Mass, you lay a special cloth under it to catch any crumbs4. You get on your knees5 before taking it into your body. Some churches will hold a little golden plate6 under your chin in case any crumbs should fall out of your maw. When you’re done sharing this Body of Christ with your community, you wipe out the special bowl7 that held it with a special cloth8 (again…crumbs). You cleanse these cloths with water in the Special Sink, and this water SHALL NOT GO INTO THE SEWER. Can you imagine?!?

Even a single molecule of the Body of Christ that could be in that water goes straight into the earth. And not just normal soil! The dirt beneath every Catholic church is blessed in an ancient ceremony with prayers for exorcism, protection, and for the dead. Bishops and priests process around the land and sprinkle holy water across it.

The Special Drain pours into this sacred ground - a suitable resting place not only for our dead community members, but also for every single atomic remnant of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. They lay there together, and we worship above them. His molecules become our molecules, which (eventually) become the molecules of the soil that He has already sanctified.

This level of reverence was something I had not encountered before. When the meaning of the Special Drain (and the closet, the cloths, the red lamp, the kneeling, and the soil) clicked in my mind, I began to perceive what I was getting into and felt awed - and completely freaked out. “If this whole thing is true,” I thought, “how could my punk ass possibly eat this without bursting into flames? I’m a schmuck.”

Turns out, that was the whole point.

I’m pretty sure I could get excommunicated for sharing this. That’s okay, I could probably get excommunicated for a lot of things.

Once upon a time, for quite a while, I worshipped with Roman Catholic Women Priests.1 We were a completely broke family, surviving on unemployment checks and charitable donations. We had asked for help at our previous parish, and been rebuffed (we were literally hungry and they literally did not feed us.) I was being chewed up inside by the fact that women weren’t allowed to offer Mass. Like a responsible Papist, I had a long talk with our priest about this and several other matters of conscience, and he gave me the same talking points that I had already read about at length:

1. Jesus only chose men as apostles so we must, also.

2. It is Sacred Tradition (we have always done it that way.)

3. Jesus was a man, and priests must be in persona Christi (in the person of Christ, in the place of Christ himself) to make the Sacraments work.

To which I replied:

1. The first Apostle - the “Apostle to the Apostles”, as even the most traditional types say, was Mary of Magdala.

2. Are we sure this is capital “T” tradition and not a lower “t” tradition, aka a human one? Pretty sure Jesus was mum on the issue.

3. Jesus is but one part of the trinity. The trinity has no gender. We believe in “theosis”, where believers can become unified with God regardless of gender.

My points were clumsily made because I am not a theologian and I was very hurt and angry. He was duty-bound to explain the teaching according to his vows, over scheduled, henpecked, and struggling with burnout. I get it. I get it! But as I relayed: my family was in trouble. My question was not answered to my satisfaction. My family was hungry, I was hungry on several levels. I’m an asshole, I struggle with pride every single day. So we left.

In any case, we started going to Mass with the Women Priests. We have never received a more loving, gentle, accepting welcome in any religious community before or since. It wasn’t obnoxious - there was no “ohhh, honey, we’re so glad you’re here”, there were no uninvited hugs, no “please introduce yourselves to the community.” The Mass occurred in the rhythm and rubric we knew by heart, there was communion, It felt very much like home. Every conceivable subgroup of the LGBTQ+ community, excused and alienated from the Church proper, was participating with great tenderness and palpable joy.

After Masses, they had little coffee hours - and for the first time, my husband and sons actually wanted to attend. My sons wanted to participate in the Mass - they served at the altar. The priests, deacons, and community members were affable and had wry senses of humor and incredible backstories that we ate up. Lots of laughing and spraying coffeecake crumbs onto the table. Importantly, to me, they were all whip-smart and had already thought deeply, intelligently, and collectively about everything related to the faith.

These women loved the Catholic faith and took the conscience thing dead seriously - that’s why they left the mainstream church. They all accepted their excommunications graciously and kept on living the faith. They all went through many years of seminary training and could answer every theological question I asked - patiently, meticulously, generously. “What about apostolic succession? How do you know your ordinations are valid?” Like I said: I’m an asshole. They were patient.

Christmas of that year, we went to the coffee hour like usual. After our usual goofing around, snacking, and cleaning up, an extremely awkward moment blossomed. The cigarette-smelling church hall got quiet, and people started looking at each other. The bravest and feistiest community member of all, Mary (of course), stood up and said “we got a little something for you, nothing fancy.”

As it turns out, they had been gathering context clues and meeting secretly amongst themselves since shortly after we joined the community. Mary handed my husband a crusty envelope with 800 dollars in it. I cried immediately - we hadn’t been able to buy our guys presents that year. They started pulling wrapped gifts out of various crannies - lots of them. My boys both got the frenzied, spiral-eyed, acquisitive faces that kids everywhere get on Christmas morning. My husband grabbed my sweaty, shaky hand there in front of everybody and spoke for us (because I was simpering like a bitch). “We don’t know what to say. Thank you all, so, so much. I don’t know what to say.”

“Just…don’t. Cut it out. This is weird”, said Mary. Her eyes weren’t glassy because she was tough as nails - an ex-nun teacher with a buzz cut and no time for foolishness - but several of the others were. My boys had already torn into a couple of the gifts and were trying to figure out how the laser tag guns worked. I could barely put words together as they ushered us out to our fucked up minivan and helped us load gifts into the trunk. “Get out of here. Merry Christmas.” Mary gave me a hug. It was like hugging a flagpole.

They paid our overdue bills, they put sharp new clothes on my kids’ backs. They even embroidered little bathroom towels for us with the community’s name on them. These folks were Christ to my family that Christmas. They loved us extravagantly, wastefully, recklessly - like Jesus.

I loved them, I love them, I will always love them. Every single one of their beautiful souls. I will always defend them vehemently and stand up for them and their right to call themselves Catholic.

I still struggle with the Catholic doctrine that there is something completely unacceptable about 50% of the human race being called to preach and administer sacraments to God’s people. I am no theologian and the argument about these things is waaaay beyond my pay grade. But I have signed up, by virtue of my profession, to struggle honestly and conscientiously with Catholic teaching for the rest of my life.

Pace e bene,

K

I knew from the beginning it would be a rough fit.

Years before, while deep in study at a Reform Jewish temple, I made a joke to my husband: “wouldn’t it be a bitch if after this whole journey, I ended up Catholic?” To me at that time, it would mean a copout. A defeat, a bullshit judgment call, a cheap move. An easy, flaky sellout.

At the time, I was full of revulsion to the Catholic faith. I was preoccupied with the evil acts its people committed through their millennia of history. When I thought of the Catholic Church, I automatically thought (as many still do) “Imperialism. Corruption. Oppression. Homophobia. Antisemitism. Racism. Inquisition, Crusades, Sexual Abuse, Sexism. The weaponization of guilt as a means of control.” The long list of great sins, nailed to that old Wittenburg door by Martin Luther, that has since spawned ten thousand splinter factions within Christianity.

That was the joke: if after all this passionate study and earnest seeking, I finally jettisoned every last one of my moral principles and kowtowed to one of the most corrupt faiths on earth. He chuffled through a half-smile at the comment because even at that time, he had a quiet appreciation for the good things associated with the Catholic Church: transcendent art, the obligatory social justice work, some of the rowdier official Saints. Even then, deep within his beautiful revolutionary heart and long before he would outwardly admit it, he loved the mercy and tireless compassion of Jesus. Then, and still today, he tolerates my invective and ranting when my judgmental eyes discover something I deem to be an abuse of religious authority.

Fast-forward a couple years to the long and ridiculous Goldielocking1. Agnosticism never got comfortable for me - I could not stop poking and prodding and hungrily reading about the spiritual lives of humans; I was unable to not care. Atheism lured me directly into a black hole of existential despair. Thelema was too disorganized and I couldn’t learn enough Japanese to understand what was going on at the local Shin Buddhist temple2. Complicating matters, my suspicion was beginning to accumulate that there was indeed a Great Something “out there”, whatever the hell that meant.

My suspicions continued to mutate until they began to look like One Great Something. I needed to gather more data, from people that shared a similar suspicion. The Unitarian community, while wonderfully welcoming, left me hungry for a more substantial doctrine. The Quakers, so peaceful and so loving, were far too quiet and respectable for me to ever feel at home at the meetings. I couldn’t stay in Romania long enough to join the Orthodox church, and so, there I was, still spiritually starving, back on the Group W Bench3 from which I started the whole Quixotic quest.

The Great Something turned into God at that point, between the Unitarian and Quaker chapters: walking out of a hospital after visiting my dying father, while my brother was deployed to combat in the Middle East, recently sober4. With a Newport dangling out of my mouth, I held my lighter and extended my middle finger skyward. I flicked Him off. It wasn’t until later – embarrassingly much later – that I realized that I couldn’t be this furious with God while not believing He existed.

The Jesus thing happened between the Judaic and Eastern Orthodox chapters when a Calvinist friend innocently (I think?) asked me “what if God loved us hard enough that he put on a body to come down here and show us how to be human?” I realized: if God was made of the stuff I was beginning to suspect, coming down here to be with us, like us, is a thing He might [hypothetically] do. And most importantly, that the world’s religions in all their complex nuance and history were not a buffet that I had a right to pick and choose from. In the interest of scientific objectivity, I went back to where my ancestors came from: the Catholic Church.

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Here, I will explain this whole predicament a bit. More than that, I hope to help you see the whole Catholic thing through some different (i.e., unorthodox, probably inappropriate) eyes - and if possible, share a little of the hope, peace, and healing I’ve found here with you.