The Cry of the Catholic Church

My road to (and from) catholicism is a complicated one - I remember as a child seeing the kids at St. Joseph's Catholic school in Demarest NJ, across the street from my own public elementary school dressed in their uniforms. And on special days, the girls in their white communion dresses, looking like little brides. We were Methodist/Baptist, sort of... and while occasionally my mother would take my sisters and I to church, it was never a regular thing. But I loved the catholic church - built sometime in the 50's, with Terrazzo floors and banks of little flickering candles. I would go over there and sit for hours at a time after school, or on weekends when nothing else was going on.

Perhaps odd behavior for an eight year old. And then I would play Mass, getting the little dressing stool in my great-grandmother's bedroom set up as an alter, and going through the whole rubric of the Mass with the little missal I appropriated from the church. I had never even been to a Mass.

My first time at a real Mass was when I was nine, and my friend John Maxwell killed himself because his dad wanted him to get his hair cut. Things like that happened in the 60's. By the time I was thirteen, I was already playing fairly serious organ music (and blessed to be able to study with the great concert organist Dr. Clair Coci, who lived in my town in New Jersey...) - I started playing the organ in church, first a black Baptist church my dad set me up with, and later St. John's Catholic church in Bergenfield, NJ. I could walk there in 20 minutes from our house.

Back then I didn't really understand the theology, nor did I know anything about the politics or the history of the church. I only knew that I loved the smells, the bells and the sense of quiet peace that pervaded all the churches I visited. I sensed even then that it was a place where we encountered thin spaces (thanks to Dr. Marcus Borg for the term) or those spaces where the veil between our world and the next world was at its thinnest, so we might be able to glimpse a glimmer of the other side.

(This is a bit off topic, but I have come to realize that the next world doesn't have to mean where we go when we're finished with this one, as much as it might be compared to the next station on the FM dial - all happening simultaneously, but we're generally tuned in only to one...)

I converted when I was 21, my sponsor was Fr. Daniel Berrigan, the well known Jesuit peace activist (a long story). After reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, I knew then that I wanted to be a monk. Telescope a little more than ten years and that's exactly what I found myself doing. A benedictine postulant at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon.

It didn't take too long to discover that it wasn't the life for me. The abbey knew it much sooner than I did. I left and after a little time at the Seminary studying as a diocesan seminarian - I resumed a rather non-monastic life in Portland. I realized during that time of monastic seclusion (I'm being sarcastic - monks are some of the busiest people I know) that my faith wasn't based on the mythology other people had - did Jesus really die and rise again (not a chance), or was he taken into heaven by crane? (Ummm...don't think so on that one either either), is he the one and only 'Son of God' (no more than I am) - so those stories didn't do anything for me. But I began to get the idea (again thanks to Dr. Borg, who taught at the seminary one year while I was there- and from Fr. Andrew Greeley's great adult Catechism, The Great Mysteries) that there was much more.

OK - I'll get to the point. Someone asked how people could still believe after scandal upon scandal rocked the church. Now it reaches to the pope and associates. First, it's not a question of belief. It's just a comfortable space where little is demanded of you, and there is a familiarity, an "at homeness" that a lot of people have. Second, there is a sense among a lot of catholics that there is something more to the church than the Vatican and its bumbling, or the absurd pronouncements they make from time to time on gays, contraception and all manner of things they simply don't have the moral authority to talk about. Not a lot of regular people read that stuff, or give a whit about it.

Using an integral model - I think it's a fluctuation between Magenta and Amber - hoping that something out of it is true, while sensing all the time that it isn't - at least true in any literal sense. Being a basically Orange to Teal person - I don't really care about the church in the same way. I am sorry for their troubles, just as I would be for anyone, but troubles come and you're not defined by what they are, as much as you are defined by what you do about them.

So, this is an opportunity for the church...will they take it and make something positive, or sweep it? It remains to be seen.