Four Months A Catholic. . .

I've recounted here, in various ways and times and instances, the utter blood loss - how I basically came to understand that Protestant faith was quickly killing me. After years of playing the occasional, detached lawyer for the Catholic Church against the occasional and unfair Catholic-bashings of my college peers, finally, one day in the counsel chambres, the historic Church finally began getting through to me: 'Thanks for your help and everything, but I'll be okay. In case you didn't know, I've been around the block a few times. However - and I've been trying to tell you this for some time now - you're missing some vital organs, and you're bleeding all over your nice suit and leather briefcase.' And I was. Long before finally deciding to participate in Confirmation, I knew something had to give. If Someone didn't heal me soon, it would be curtains.

Life before being Catholic, life now as a Catholic- there is no way to even begin describing the two different lives, the surprisingly utter transformation. It is indescribably different and utterly natural to be a Catholic Christian. I'm finally home, finally at peace, feasting with our Lord and brothers and sisters at the Table where (in one sense) I'd always grown up but never actually lived. This always seems to cause confusion in conversation with my Protestant friends - this idea of 'coming home,' like it's some sort of a death/end to the 'Christian journey.' No: it's not that the journey ends, but now it's that you suddenly know (in all your journeying) where Father and Mom literally are. All the truths I had clung to as a Protestant were suddenly made complete and allowed to find harmony in such a way that my 'personal experience' is now actually fulfilling and not timidly skeptical, now wrapped up in something much more expansive than my own little definitions. It's like having lived your entire life in a car on an endless vacation and then, late one night when you're despairing and drifting somewhere near another restless dream, pulling up to a strangely familiar house, crashing on a bed that is as you might have remembered it. There will be tomorrow morning to explore the yard, but for now, as it is, it is sensory overload to discover the mystery of a pillow that holds strangely familiar smells.

The incense pours forth at the Vigil; the chant reminds you of a Christianity you never knew but always knew; terms like 'offertory' finally begin presenting themselves to you as the embodied, meaningful realities that they are. The Catholic doesn't need to bring a Bible to the Mass because the Mass is the embodiment of the Holy Word and His Scriptures, a living-out of the Holy Scriptures. After all, Catholicism embodies the reality of the Incarnation, and heaven and earth come together again. When the Psalmist writes 'I will enter His gates with thanksgiving in my heart,' as a Catholic, I am now literally caught up in this reality on at least a weekly basis (daily when possible); the doors of the church open, the Mass begins, the Gate of Heaven offers Himself to us, and we literally kneel before Him praying, 'Lord, I am not worthy to receive Thee, but only say the word and I shall be healed.'

-r