Pilgrim’s Progress: My Journey Home to the Catholic Church (by ContraSuggest)

Looking back at my life, I don’t think there was ever a time when I learned anything important through conventional means.  As a kid, my grades in school were pretty decent overall, but by the time I crammed my brains out, passed the tests and graduated, I was an exhausted nervous wreck, and my ability to retain knowledge ranked up there with that of a lab rat.  Not until much later did I discover that I was best able to learn only slowly, on my own, through independent study.  As a kid, my inability to retain academic knowledge stood side by side with ignorance of my religious faith.  Furthermore, I thought that anyone who practiced so-called “organized religion” was basically a douche-bag.  Oh how I detested those pushy, self-righteous, over zealous religious lunatics, who were going to convince me that I faced eternal damnation in the pits and bowels of Hell, lest I immediately repent and turn myself over to Christ!  These boobs were able to gain access to my attention through several different means.  The main avenue of access was the television airwaves.  Having spent the better part of my childhood in front of the tube, I received quite a large dose of “televangelism” in between reruns of Star Trek and the Odd Couple.  These televangelist guys, mostly dressed in dark three-piece suits, always seemed to be yelling at the tops of their lungs and foaming at the mouths.  Every now and then they’d work themselves up into such a lather that tears would stream down their faces.  Suffice to say that these various televangelists all seemed like babbling lunatics to me and so, I thought, the most unlikely messengers of Christ that I could conceive.  Another method used by the minions of religious conversion was to set out on Sunday mornings pounding the pavement, going from house to house to spread the word of the Lord.  So while your bacon and eggs were getting cold, these dapperly dressed automatons would take to buzzing around your front porch, quoting scripture, refusing to leave until you agreed to take some of their omnipresent literature for later reading.  I tried everything to keep these religious Amway salesmen away from the house, including keeping all the doors and windows closed, turning on the lawn sprinklers (making sure that they were aimed squarely at the front porch).  I tried letting the dog out with no leash, and some even more radical measures, like telling them (with a straight face) that our family were worshipers of mighty Satan and so could not possibly have any use for Christianity.  Although each method was effective to varying degrees, the situation was always uncomfortable, and those people always managed to piss me off.

I certainly had a lot of frustration and anger towards the world of religion back then, even my own church was not immune from the harshest of my criticisms.  I was raised in a not so devout Roman Catholic family; since I attended public schools, I had to receive religious instruction on Sundays and in the evenings, received my first communion, was confirmed, but attended Mass sporadically.  During my formative years, though I always remained respectful of Jesus Christ, there weren’t many positive things I had to say about the Church.  Mass was too long, boring, and annoying (sit-stand-kneel-repeat), the liturgy incomprehensible (the Catholic missal might as well have been written in Klingon), most churchgoers looked like a bunch of mindless zombies, some parishioners observed various customs while others did not, etc.  As I got older these resentments grew stronger, and learning about the politics and scandals within the Catholic Church (always from secular, anti-Catholic sources, mind you) including infidelities on behalf of some priests, helped to reinforce all my negative feelings.  Taking some crash courses in world history (again, from anti-Catholic sources) I discovered that the Church had been the progenitor of many a bloodbath: the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the improprieties that made the Reformation necessary, just to name a few.  The “proofs” of science seemed to disprove the literalness of many biblical events.  I proceeded to enter a period of great doubt, never questioning the existence of a God, but believing God to be something other than what Christendom claimed Him to be, and thinking Christianity to be nothing more than a quaint and convenient mythology.

As the years wore on I pictured myself to be on a course moving farther and farther away from my Catholic faith.  Who needed organized religion and all the scandal and guilt that went along with it?  The dastardly cartoon image of the Church, viewed through the lens of our destructive secular culture, was a perfect fit with my cynical immaturity.  I had a habit of siding with anyone who had even the slightest beef with the Vatican, imagining the Church to be a cross between the Mafia and the evil M.A.D. organization from the Inspector Gadget cartoons.  I drifted in a nebulous void for years; reading, contemplating, and searching.  I read books and pamphlets on just about every other belief system known to man: Christian Gnosticism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, I Ching, Shinto, Mithraism, Kaballah (aka Jewish Gnosticism), Ceremonial Magic, Wicca, Astrology, and the list of drivel went on and on.  There were few I hadn’t heard of or read something about, but none of them could fill the void that I felt in my heart and in my soul.  I viewed religion as something that you kept tucked away in your pocket, to be taken out as a crutch at funerals, merely to be tucked away afterwards out of embarrassment.  I just couldn’t understand the concept of faith: believing in something with all your heart when most of the salient facts told you otherwise. Taking things “on faith” seemed to me like a fool’s pursuit; I wanted truth, and to me truth meant possessing the cold, hard facts, not some fuzzy, illogical belief in something that I couldn’t perceive with my five senses. 

But things are not always as they seem, as I came to realize that the course leading me away from the Catholic Faith was more akin to that of a boomerang than a bullet.  For so long I assumed the grass to be greener on the other side of the religious fence.  However, when looking at the unmolested historical record, it becomes clear that Catholic Doctrine, although based upon faith, is invariably consistent with reason, history and scientific inquiry (for a thorough exposition on this topic, see my post of 12/26/2011 titled, Merry Christmas and a Defense of the Catholic Faith linked here: http://contrasuggest.blogspot.com/2011/12/merry-christmas-and-defense-of-catholic.html).  Throughout my long period of disillusionment there were two people, both practicing Catholics, who helped to guide me back home.  One was my mother; the other my oldest friend; they were always there as gentle defenders of the faith, sounding boards, and shoulders to cry on in my spiritual frustrations.  They continually showed me a side of Catholicism that was inconsistent with the presumptuousness that I attributed to it.  Never did they dismiss me out of hand, never did they back away from me, and rarely, if ever, did they exhibit the smug sanctimoniousness that I at times engaged in.  They nearly always showed patience and tolerance for my dissenting views of the Church, no matter how harsh and disrespectful those views were.  And in attempting to answer some of my often very tough questions, they taught me, through example, one of the key exponents of faith: never be afraid to say, “I don’t know the answer,” while still maintaining your belief.  Somehow they just knew that I would eventually return, and they made that prognostication without consulting the Psychic Friends Network, a deck of Tarot Cards, or even the much-revered Magic Eight Ball.  Without their prayers and patient support, my journey would certainly have been a longer and harder one.  And, lucky for me, I married a fantastic woman who happened to be on a similar journey, which allowed the two of us to return to the Church together.  I know that I speak for her as well when I say that it feels great to be home.  And so I encourage all cradle Catholics who have drifted from the faith to fairly reexamine the Church; you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you discover.