[Preliminary caveat: This is my phantom post from yesterday, which I have hesitated about publishing because my family reads my blog and I don't want to give offense. Also, after discussing the subject of this post with my parents last night, I concluded that perhaps I'm being hypersensitive and need to knock it off; certainly no one wishes me ill, and the pastor of the Baptist church reacted well and kindly months and months ago when my parents told him of my decision to become Catholic. At the same time the weekend put a strain on me, and I'm sure there will be times in the future when the sensibilities of the following post resurface; and this is, however much a result of oversensitivity, a legitimate part of my experience. And the Science Girl's comment injected enough courage that I thought perhaps it's best to publish it after all (thanks, J.).]
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
~Christina Rossetti, "Uphill"
I'm sitting in the church seats wrapping my coat around my knees and wishing I had dress pants. I glance at the clock: 10:20, almost two and a half hours into my Sunday morning church-a-thon; I've just finished singing at the front of the church with the worship team, and the sermon is about to begin.
Last night I couldn't sleep; the wind beat against the trailer like a circling ring of charging bulls, bearing the news of coming snow, and my bedroom was so cold four layers of blankets and thermal underwear couldn't warm me, so I lay awake for hours too torpid to sleep or to cry. I had to be at the Baptist church at 8:30 a.m. to practice the songs before the service, and Simon woke me at 8:05; I had set my alarm for 7:30 p.m. So here I sit, tired and headachey and wishing I could skip out on the sermon and go take a nap. After this I have the noon Mass to attend, and then a full afternoon.
I pick at a sticky spot on my little red journal. Today the thing God has impressed upon me to do seems impossible. When I joined the Catholic Church in March, after five years of conscious consideration and eight years of refusing to affiliate with any church at all, I almost couldn't swallow. The beauty of the Easter Vigil Mass held me arrested in my seat, tension kept me electrified, thinking, This is it, this is it even as I searched obsessively through the ritual songbook for the Order of the Mass to show to Meg and Phillip, braced in their seats to my left, filling the spots of my family, with Josie napping in her carseat between them.
The moment just before my official reception into the Church remains the sharpest in my memory: I knelt before the altar in the golden brightness of the stage lights with my fellow candidates and catechumens and said the Nicene Creed, and at the words He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end my voice gave out and I finished in a whisper, too full to speak.
I asked for the Confirmation name of Jude. Typically Catholics are Confirmed in the names of saints who match their own sexes, but I have always held a fondness for St. Jude, patron saint of police officers and lost causes. The symbolism carried a dual purpose: a tribute to my father, and an affirmation of my idealistic aspirations.
When I glowed with the balsam scent of the chrism oil marking the Sign of the Cross on my forehead, hearing the echoes of Father Joe's voice receiving me into the Catholic Church under the name of Jude, I had no idea what God had in mind for me, or how true the significance of Jude's patronage would turn out to be.
I can't tell what this brown spot on my journal even was. Coffee? Gum? It won't even flake under my fingernails. I can't pay attention. Coming home has been interesting in a number of ways. I had resolved, upon what people term, to my dissatisfaction, my conversion, that whenever I visited my parents I would attend the Baptist church with them as well as Mass by myself, in the interest of keeping peace, honoring my parents, and revisiting the community of good people who watched me grow up and have prayed for me fervently ever since. I had figured to keep my Catholicism quiet, so as not to offend anyone, and do the juggling act as best I could without stirring up resentments or bitternesses or angers; the sorrow of my parents and the church members I couldn't help, but I could keep the friction to a minimum.
Moving back presented a new series of challenges. After praying about what I should do, I decided to stick to a variation of the original plan -- be involved in two churches at once. It's an idea I've toyed with for a long time now, actually; it doesn't seem to me that differences in theology should translate to divisions, particularly in families. The longer I thought about it, the more I felt the impression, an internal command, to try to breach the gap between Catholic and Protestant, and between other denominations in general, to the best of my ability.
It has been, so far, at best confusing, and at worst extremely painful. Baptists and Catholics share an antipathy unmatched by almost any other Christian denomination, and I don't feel that I can talk freely to very many people in the Baptist church about my newfound and unprecedented joy in the faith which I have received from Catholicism. Because of it, I have been able to "bury my ballast and make my peace" with much of what I hated from my adolescence and early adulthood. All of the bitterness, the despair, that I carried with me from the church of my growing up years has begun to loosen like a crusty weathereaten knot of old rope, and come clean; I have finally begun to believe in the love of God for me; all the rituals and the prayers and the candles and Communion wrap me in a two thousand-year embrace and turn my shoulders to face the wind and give me the freedom to live in what The Shack calls our purpose in being: As a bird is made to fly, we are made to be loved.
Much of this I don't feel I can quite share with most of the Baptist congregation, and a lot of my involvement is a huge amount of work in diplomacy, keeping the lines clear between honesty and offensiveness, maintaining what is appropriate. Which usually means keeping my mouth shut, and which has grown more punishing over the last couple of weeks. However much I might emphasize to the handful of people in the congregation who know my new church membership that I have no interest in proselytizing them, I'm a little worn out by the close-mouthed tension that seems to paralyze people's ability to converse with me normally. Maybe I'm just getting paranoid. What I need (and for what I'm waiting on a phone call regarding) is more involvement with the local Catholic parish -- at the moment I'm involved with Sunday School, a small group and the music team at the Baptist church, and I only attend the Catholic church -- the imbalance that has begun to exact a toll. A person can only feel on the defensive for so long before that person starts to sink into discouragement.
The Baptist church is promising in that there are other young people like myself who are itching to unite all the Christians of the town to common purposes, to begin to break down the walls that keep Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Episcopals, Lutherans, Catholics from associating with one another. At the same time, the Baptist church is the place where, so far, I do the hardest and most difficult work -- which only makes sense. The Catholic church is where I can kneel and lay my forehead on the back of the pew in front of me, breathe in the smell of candle wax and let the tension seep from my sinews as the Holy Spirit moves through them like the slide of hot cider down a cold throat. Last week, after I mentioned my Catholicism to my Sunday School class in the interest of a.) honesty and b.) illustration of my hopes for a united church community, and fended off a few arguments (Sunday School being an inappropriate forum for that kind of discussion; I made it clear that I welcomed questions after class if anyone had them) -- the overall reaction was in fact kind, but I sat through the class in a forcible self-containment that left my shoulders aching -- just the smell of the hot wax in the loveliness of the little cathedral afterward helped a tremendous deal.
Whatever is stuck to my journal isn't coming up, so I open the cloth cover and listen to the pastor begin the sermon. For whatever reason the bulletin I was given goes to last week's sermon, so I start taking the occasional note in the journal to focus my attention. I like Pastor Bob; he's dynamic and passionate about change; and I always find it interesting how certain undercurrents of his own former Catholicism flavor bits of his teaching.
Today, though, as he talks about the necessity of devotion as demonstrated by the early church in the book of Acts, he castigates ritual: "The way I grew up, you took Communion to get on God's good side. You said this prayer or that prayer to get points with God. That's not what it's about..."
He glances at me a time or two as he says this. His eye contact with the congregation at large is direct and engaging, so I'm sure he isn't consciously being pointed; but in my current state of mind it feels like a blow. I'm so tired. I look at the little pencil in the pencil holder on the back of the seat in front of me, reach out to fiddle with it, thinking desperately that there's no way he could know that I agree with his sentiment, that there's no way I can tell him right now that it's not about that, that rejecting Catholicism is part of his story and he has his good reasons, this is a Baptist church, of course this path God put me on isn't easy and isn't going to be easy, at least he didn't mention Catholics by name, nobody enjoys standing in the gap but it's what I've been told to do, I can be strong enough, I'm not strong enough, God make me strong enough...
The little sliver of pain that has been living in my stomach since last Christmas, the Christmas of my decision to become Catholic and the family discord it created which has never healed but filled itself with silence -- the little sliver that has been working its way deeper into my stomach since I embarked on this choppy voyage, sends up a hot red flower behind my eyes and I stare down at my lap. Pastor Bob has moved on to say something really interesting and valuable about how our worries indicate our real passions, and I write it down, trying hard not to yield to fury at my indefensibility, at the questions that no one but one person has asked that might lead to understanding, at the painful hesitant silence of people who think I'm wrong and possibly hellbound and who are either indifferent to my position or afraid to talk about it. It's not their fault. It's not their fault.
I focus on the words I've written in my journal but they don't really mean anything. While the beige guidelines on the pages waver in my vision all I can think about are the pastor's words, and I feel more alone than I've felt since leaving Michigan because I hear, or think I hear, all the things he's saying underneath the things he's saying, and I imagine to my left the silent, motionless stiffening of bone and muscle that means my parents' awareness of those same things, and I think how no one will believe me that it isn't about empty ritual for its own sake, because Pastor Bob grew up in that culture and knows more than a mere convert could; I think how every week I will have to hear, somehow, my chosen branch of the faith on trial, my freedom and my joy condemned; I think how everyone will think me misguided, misled, apostate and never say so; I think how some of the people I love best won't believe me or won't listen, I want so badly to get up and run to Mass but that would be rude and cowardly and Mass hasn't even started yet; I think how I will keep being obedient to this particular calling; and the journal disappears and the tears are streaming down my cheeks and I can't stop them.
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