(Originally written on 9/23/17)
It was five years ago today that I bowed the knee to the whore of Babylon and accepted the Antichrist into my heart (that’s fundamentalist-speak for “becoming Catholic,” in case you didn’t know).
What a strange trip it’s been, as the fella said. . . .
At the time I had assumed that I would just be a kind of Catholic version of my old Protestant self: I’d be some sort of apologist for Rome, I’d write and publish and speak about how I’d seen the light and swum the Tiber to the fullness of the Truth.
Instead, I have had a very different experience. In fact, my “doctrinal shift” ended up giving way to an even more cataclysmic existential and personal shift according to which my public “apostasy” has made me rather gun-shy about thinking I’m right and acting like it. (As many of you know, my book Misfit Faith was the result of my distaste for the initial draft — which was way too trigger-happy and polemical — in favor of something a bit more, well, humble and postmodern.)
These days, while I find myself still in agreement with my former insistence on the messiness and overall ambiguity of life in this world, I now have come to simply embrace these things and welcome them for what they are (rather than assure myself and others that they will give way to some celestial age when all the i’s will be dotted and all the t’s crossed to our mutual satisfaction).
I find joy in the ache and solace in the burden of a cosmos that often appears absurd. I revel in the grit and grime of this world. And I have come to accept that, unlike all my evangelical friends (at least I still think of them as such), I cannot just tap directly into the divine frequency and enjoy that unmediated communion with God that seems to come so easy to them.
And I’m okay with that.
For this Drunk Ex-Pastor, I am content with “finding God” amid the rubble and the rabble, and connecting with divinity by means of the icons and sacraments of flesh (be they things like art, films, and music, or bread, water, and wine).
And call me naïve or a novice, but all this feels quite Catholic to me. I seem to remember reading something somewhere about the “new and living way” to the Father being mediated by the fleshly body of the human Christ.
But hey, what do I know? I’m a mere five years into this journey, and all I’m really comfortable saying on the record is “Love your neighbor, for this is all the law, and all the prophets.”
Maybe that’s enough.
