The Call

The last time I was in a Catholic church was for my Dad’s funeral mass last October. The last time before that was for my Mom’s funeral mass the November prior to Dad’s. The last time before that was a friend’s wedding six months before Mom’s passing. The last time I attended Sunday mass was when I visited my folks. They did not insist, did not even ask. They had accepted that I was fallen away, had been since I was twenty-one, but I went because I knew it would please them. Lately, though, I have felt a call to reintroduce myself to a faith I left more than forty years ago.

“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.

Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.

It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.

Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.

Golf, The Amish, and The Catholic Sensibility

On a sunny Sunday morning several years back, before I gave up playing golf—before, that is, I fully realized that “golf” spelled backwards precisely names the applied masochism the game entails—three horse-drawn buggies containing three Amish families on their way to Sunday service passed by on the road near the green I was approaching. As they passed, each occupant in each buggy turned to look at me. I wondered, do they think I am profaning the Lord’s Day by being on a golf course instead of in a church? Then, almost immediately, unable to pass by myself, I wondered, am I?

And there it was. The Catholic sensibility. The earth has spun around the sun forty times since I was a practicing Catholic; forty times since I actively embraced the faith into which I was born, upon which I had been raised, and in which I had been educated; forty times since I had been to Sunday Mass; forty times since I had conscripted myself in the capacious army of the fallen away. And still, still, that persistent, low-frequency hum of Catholic sensibility from which a periodic, stiletto-sharp, consciousness-piercing pulse of guilt erupted.

Catholic sensibility is the Mariana Trench of concepts, deep enough for every human being on the planet, and, possibly, elsewhere, to validate the assertion of that sage semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For me, Catholic sensibility is a set of principles that ligature experience—of the world and of oneself—and keep the soul right side up. It is not the prose of doctrinal conformity, so much as a mindfulness of the poetry of spiritual immanence and a determination to shape one’s life by the stern claims of its entailments. It is the stance of Anselm who, in the preface to his Proslogium, declared he wrote as “one who seeks to understand what he believes,” “understand” here meaning thorough knowledge in the service of accomplished performance. It is the stance of Aquinas, whose prescription for salvation is to know what we “ought to believe,” what we “ought to desire,” and what we “ought to do.”

I have found, and continue to find, myself bruised in the encounter with the last of Acquinas’s oughts: “ought to do”. Catholicism makes performative demands, and for me they are a “reflexive” confessional, Emerson’s term for the standards by which I “absolve me to myself.” By that standard, I remain unshriven. Belief, I believe, is not doctrinal assent; that is merely passive fundamentalism. Rather, belief is basic theological principles practiced. The good of any activity, its virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre says, is internal to the practice of it. I know what I ought to believe and believe it; I know what I ought to desire and desire it. I believe in a natural law that reveals universal moral precepts and desire to conform myself to them. I believe in the reality of conscience, free will, and individual responsibility and desire to be alert to their dictates. I believe, with Aquinas, that human reason is “rather like God in the world” and desire to be an analyst as well as a witness. I believe in Jesus’s second great commandment and desire to seek the well-being of my neighbor with the same alacrity with which I seek my own. I believe that the Mass is a ceremony commemorating atoning sacrifice and conferring benediction, and that, at its heart, in a time when the word is so casually applied, lies a miracle.

But, despite knowing what I ought to do, I falter. I am too often decentered by glibness and cynicism and self-absorption and inattentiveness and lack of trust and stubbornly imperviousness to the needs of others. I am too often weak, just plain weak, and without the moral arrowroot that would thicken my fortitude. Catholicism demands that what I believe and desire be fully integrated into all aspects of my life, that it be the lived texture of all my relations with the world. Knowing that, and knowing as well my capacity for indolence and indecisive lassitude, suborns me; it leads me to accept the flat-souled givenness of my doing instead of its oughtness. That is, in me, the Catholic sensibility that gave me pause before the gaze of those three passing Amish families.

Perhaps their being Amish keyed open the door of my Catholic sensibility, for their lives bear witness in every way to Paul’s description in Romans of the practice of belief: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.” “Test and approve,” action incorporated, embodied: thus the simplicity of dress to act humility; thus the refusal of connection to electrical grids to act a disconnection from a world that demands conformity to its structures of thinking and feeling; thus the lack of car ownership to act a communal equality of status, wealth, and power; thus the Ordnung to act a way of life governed not by statute but by a tradition absorbed so undilutedly into the community’s capillary system it need not be spoken. And thus, while I played golf, three families committed to service and holy living, to transformation and renewal, on their way to their church district’s Sunday service.

By the end of that round of golf I had resolved to never again play on Sunday. One year later, I quit playing golf entirely. And to this day I am still thinking, still wondering, still almost but not quite prepared to listen to the still small voice that tells me I ought to return to Sunday mass.

Fallen Away

Fallen Away

We are tribal creatures. Some of us belong to the Democratic tribe, and some to the Republican tribe; some to the Green Bay Packers rooting tribe, and some to the cat’s eye marble collecting tribe; some to the vegetarian tribe, and some to the Jimmy Dean pancakes and sausage on a stick tribe. I was born, raised, and educated in the Catholic tribe. Now I am a member of what some claim is the even larger tribe of fallen-away Catholics.

I find it difficult to explain, even to myself, why I joined this tribe. It was not political, even though I disagreed with the Church’s stand on contraception, abortion and sexual orientation, which put me in the very large tribe of Americans who ignore uncongenial edicts from Rome. It was not sociological, even though I thought women should be ordained and priests allowed to marry. It was not academic, even though I could not accept a historically contingent document like the Bible, its component books assembled first at the Council of Hippo in 393, debated at subsequent councils, and finalized as infallible at the Council of Trent in the 16th century, as the divinely-inspired, inerrant word of God. It was not especially doctrinal, even though I found the Augustinian conception of original sin, an iniquity bequeathed to posterity by his conviction that all humanity was present in Adam, a stunningly unfair insult to human dignity and a punishment out of all proportion to the offense of intemperate fruit eating. Besides, what was up with God’s ironic comment on Adam’s fate: “the man has become like one of us.” Us? Doesn’t the Apostles’ Creed recited at every Mass begin, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?” And the notion of the Holy Trinity! Why, it did not simply rattle the latch of logic; it burst open the door. How could one Supreme Being be, at the same time, a composite of three persons. If God was, as Aquinas said, esse, being itself, utterly transcendent and, as Anselm said, “than which beyond thinking cannot go,” was a triune God contradictory in that it made God a being in triplicate?

No, none of these account for my membership in the tribe of the fallen-away. In fact, I considered most of the Church’s teachings morally resonant: the sanctity of free will and conscience that summoned us to exceed what, by nature, we were; the buttressing of revelation with intellect and reason; the emphasis on individual accountability, the recognition that the body, like everything else in the created order, is inherently good; the notion that evil is an internal lack or absence resulting from a failure to act in accordance with the good present in things, the idea that charity should infuse every aspect of our lives. Moreover, the rituals, mysteries, and symbols of the Mass and other services—the resurrection and ascension, the miracle of transubstantiation, the infusions of grace, the stations of the cross, the priestly vestments, the blessing of throats, the anointing with ashes, the burning of incense, the votive candles, the statues, the indulgences and prayers for the poor souls in purgatory, the stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings and soaring organ music—enchanted a world I saw as desperately disenchanted. Just being in a church during Mass seemed a small, sublime experience of transcendence. The space seemed filled with immanence, dense and numinous and wholly other. I even liked the Tridentine Mass, for, as I followed the priest’s words in my missal, Latin on one side, English on the other, I acquired a fair proficiency in a language that connected me to a deep slipstream of religious, political, and scholarly history.

What, then, caused my falling away? Perhaps it was that I was a young man who, like most young men, was self-absorbed and resistant to externally imposed obligations like Sunday and holy day church attendance, confession, Communion at Easter, inactivity on Good Friday afternoon, and self-abnegation during Lent. Perhaps it was that I was a young man who came of age in the 1960s, when the zone of what counted as religious behavior and spiritual practice widened considerably. Perhaps it was an unacknowledged form of rebellion against my parents. Perhaps I simply grew tired of the inconvenience of getting dressed for Mass, finding a parking spot, sitting in an wooden pew for an hour, listening to wooden sermons delivered by men who appeared to lack the most basic knowledge of public speaking, and enduring the mad scramble out of the parking lot at the end of Mass. Perhaps it was the artificiality of the enforced community spirit at Mass, the handholding and the exchange of the sign of peace. Who knows? One Sunday, I decided, for some reason, not to attend Mass. No shaft of lightning knifed its way from heaven to strike me down. On subsequent Sundays I made the same decision for the same unknown reason. It cascaded, and eventually I fell away from the Church altogether.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “fallen away.” On the one hand, it is haunted by negative associations: the headlong fall of Lucifer from heaven; the Fall of Man; the fall of pagan Jericho before Joshua’s 600,000 man army; the fall of Saul, the envious, witch-consulting first king of Israel; Solomon’s fall into idolatry; the fall of the Roman Empire; the fall of Saigon; the 2008 fall of the stock market. The sense here is that some purposeful unrighteous act, or failure to act, sets a perpendicularly downward trend in motion, a precipitous and irredeemable decline from potentiality, from the fruition of good. On the other hand, the phrase can also suggest passivity, an absence of fault, a being acted upon rather than acting. We fall in (and out of) love; we fall into a swoon; we fall into bad company or misfortune or madness. The mustard seed fallen by the wayside did not choose the inhospitable ground. It is a perplexing phrase, “fallen away,” linguistically uniting two opposing conceptions of human agency without so much as a glimpse of synthesis in sight--much as the Catholic Church positions its adherents between the two worlds of matter and spirit. The difference, and it’s a big one, is that the Church asks them to find a point of unity, a dialectic synthesis known by the more familiar name of “faith.” No non-overlapping magisterial here, no compartmentalization, but, rather, a deep grammar of being in which two separate languages find expression in the same tongue.

It is not typical for a religion to refer to its erstwhile adherents as “fallen away.” Non-practicing, nonobservant, one-time, former—but not fallen away. Evidently, the fallen away tribe is special as well as large. I do not know why it is special, any more than I know why it is large or how I became a member of it. What I do know is this: we are all wayfarers, and later rather than sooner we discover that our wayfaring is really a pilgrimage. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, we tell stories to make the going easier. But eventually the destination comes in sight and the serious business begins. Having pilgrimaged for many years, I find that being poised between the two worlds of matter and spirit is serious business for me now. I’d like to find that common grammar. It would seem you can leave the Catholic tribe, but it never quite leaves you.