March 10, 2012

• Why Catholic?

  @tgwiy asked some interesting questions in a recent post that I thought I would answer for the interest of all who are…well, interested. I am preparing to give a talk about how my grandparents influenced my call to the priesthood so I’ve been thinking a lot on the topic of why I’m Catholic anyways, so here goes. She proposed a sort of three-tiered approach to the whole thing, so I will follow the same.

   

  “The first level is the atheist/theist level. You either believe in a higher power, or you don’t (or you don’t know obviously). It makes sense to me why people would believe in a higher power, no matter what religion it is.”

  I remember when I was in middle school we listened to Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” in music class; I think I was in fifth grade. I didn’t really care for nor pay attention to music whatsoever at that point in my life. I wasn’t religious either; church was just a thing we did as a family on Sundays because that’s what Catholics do on Sundays. But when that part of “Appalachian Spring” started to play, the melody of the famous Shaker hymn called “Simple Gifts,” I felt something stir deep inside me. I didn’t understand why it made me feel the way it did, but something moved me in a way I’d never been moved before. Not long after that we began listening to Beethoven and when I heard the choral section of his ninth symphony for the first time I was completely undone. Something changed profoundly inside of me, and in the years since then as I tried to understand it, I began to realize that it was in music I first encountered beauty.

  Never at any point in my life did I ever question the existence of God; theism was always taken for granted and for the most part unconscious. But as I became more and more acquainted with beauty I began to ask myself, “Where does beauty come from? Why is anything beautiful to begin with?” As this whole reality began to unfold for me all manner of things began to change. I stopped caring about popularity and focused on being true to myself and who I was. Band and making music was something I began taking seriously, and I enjoyed my art and choir classes a great deal more, as well as my English classes; my writing really began to take off. Soon I’d even start dabbling in poetry, a gift I still enjoy from time to time, as you all know from my yearly St. Valentine’s Day poem.

  I began to notice beauty in two unexpected places: in nature and in women (or girls, as they were at that age!) though the latter came a few years later. I began exploring the wilderness around my house, especially around the beautiful creek to the east and the timber that grew along its banks. Walking in the early evening as the golden sun cast everything in its perfect color was my favorite thing to do.

  

  When I was in seventh grade a girl named Mandy moved to town. Before I saw her I thought girls were icky and nothing but trouble, yet one look at her dark eyes and auburn hair and I was convinced otherwise. Nothing ever came of that crush but a lot of interior drama and a song I wrote for her on the piano, however it was with her that I began to realize what this pursuit of and appreciation for beauty was teaching me: that first (when I only saw beauty in things) I had a yearning for something and later (when I saw beauty in a person) that I yearn for someone. Interestingly enough, though, it was before I met Mandy that, giving up on my dreams of being an astronaut, I realized my “dream job” was being a stay-at-home dad. Strange for a sixth-grader, no?

  This pursuit of beauty led me on a journey that would only lead me deeper and deeper into the reality of myself, one that brought me to encounters with the source of beauty Himself. But you all know that story fairly well!

  What I understand now, looking back at those early days, is that I was encountering a phenomenon far beyond what I could understand, something that did not have an earthly explanation. I remember thinking that beauty, especially beauty as experienced in non-human things, has no real applicability or relevance when it comes to human survival; in other words, it makes no sense to suggest that beauty is merely a natural instinct on a purely biochemical or physiological level (granted I was not using these terms or concepts in middle school for crying out loud!). It is easier to see how finding beauty in the opposite sex can have material explanations, but I remember (as I would fall in love later on of course) wondering, too, why this particular girl or that particular one was so beautiful to me even though there were so many very attractive girls in my high school, small as it was (graduating class of around 75). If finding the opposite sex attractive is all about mating and the like, why this phenomenon of finding one particular woman beautiful above all others? 

  As I became older and, hopefully, wiser I began to realize more and more that beauty was a gift, an intentional one at that, and not merely a fluke of nature. Beauty is a rational response; we understand that something is beautiful, even though our opinions on what exactly is beautiful differ according to our tastes and intellectual ability (what children find beautiful and what adults find beautiful can be vastly different, such as when girls were “icky” and then, magically, they were not!). Were beauty merely a random thing with no rationality behind it whatsoever, then I wouldn’t be able to comprehend it or understand it to be beautiful. Nor would it be possible, it seems to me, for there to be a vast consensus regarding things that are beautiful: newborn babies, certain men or certain women, certain pieces of music, sunsets or other natural phenomenon, etc., especially considering the diversity of factors influencing the perspectives and tastes of those in such consensus! Yet songs and poems about sunsets have been written in many cultures for centuries. 

  I began to see over the years that beauty wasn’t so much a something as it was the action of a someone, such a one that was trying to speak something to me through beauty. Eventually I would come to realize that someone was God, the one who makes anything that is beautiful beautiful in the first place.

  So, a long story about why I am a theist! Or at least how I came to affirm my theism to begin with.

   

  “The second level is what religion you “choose” once you identify as a theist. There’s so many you could be. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Taoist, Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Pagan, Mayan, Roman, Greek, Hindu, Sikh, Janist, and so on and so forth. It fascinates me when people say “I am _____ because of X reasons.”"

  The easy answer is that I am Christian because when I was thirty-one days old I was baptized such and my parents raised me in such a way to foster the Christian faith.

  

  (Baby Me on Day One and Baby Me on Day One of my new life in Christ)

  That and I grew up in a town where there were no mosques and synagogues! Not because we didn’t like Jews and Muslims but because, frankly, in a small farming town of just over 3,000 people you just aren’t going to get a lot of religious diversity.

  I suppose, though, that I’ve chosen to remain Christian chiefly by a special grace that helped me to choose it. Also, and I mean no disrespect, but Muhammed did not offer his life for me, nor did Buddha, nor did any other non-Christian religious figure. As for polytheism (Roman, Greek, etc.) it seems to me that if gods are like us save for they are immortal, powerful and perfect, well, its nonsense to me. If a god is perfect, meaning that it lacks nothing and is utterly complete in itself, then why need there be more than one? Even were I not Christian I think I would tend naturally toward monotheism; at least in that I could form a meaningful relationship with a god to whom I can be grateful for everything, as opposed to picking a favorite god or gods among whom I must divide my heart.

   

  “And the third level is what “flavor” you are. For example, you’re Christian, but you’re Southern Baptist, or Pentecostal, or Catholic, or Mormon, Eastern Orthodox, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, and so on.”
  

  

  Meet my great-great-great-grandparents Johannes and Elisabetha from Brilon, Westphalia, Germany (or, in those days, Prussia). They were the first of my paternal ancestors to immigrate to the United States and settled in Norway, Iowa in 1865. They were wed in Sts. Peter and Andrew Church in Brilon, which was the church Johannes was baptized in, which was the church his parents were married in and his father was baptized in, and so on back into the 1600s at least (I haven’t had a chance to look further). However what I do see is that my family has been Catholic for a very, very long time, since before the Reformation and since there wasn’t anything in Germany before that then they’ve probably been Catholic since St. Boniface and others first began to preach the Gospel to the Germanic tribes centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. As I’ve become to realize this my Catholic heritage has become dear to me; to think that my simple family of farm-folk from Germany has remained true to the faith that was first preached to them over a thousand years ago–even in spite of the Protestant Reformation that swept through their homeland–well, why would I ever want to leave?

  

  My grandparents Don and Leila, who passed the faith to my father, who influenced my mother’s conversion from being Southern Baptist; she saw the joy that my grandparents always carried with them and when she realized how inseparable it was from their Catholic faith, she realized that she wanted it for herself as well. And now, even in the midst of crippling debt, two jobs and being divorced, she is yet joyful and the Eucharist is her greatest treasure. Praise God! And God bless my grandma; she just turned 93 on March 5th and prays the rosary twice a day for the whole family.

  

  (A photo of my grandmother that my grandfather carried in his wallet during World War II.)

   

  In addition to inheriting such a treasure as the Christian faith as it was taught and handed down by my ancestors, I’ve come to cherish the Catholic faith for other reasons, too. I love it’s history; granted, there are some painful and ugly parts of it. But there is also so much beauty and goodness that a person could not even glimpse it all in a life time. I love the saints and their writings, the stories of their lives. I love the martyrs; to think that through the ages there have been hundreds of thousands of Christians who believed the same as I and were killed for it! I love the Mass and the way we incarnate our faith in the world. I love the sacraments and above all the Eucharist; this is my dearest treasure of all. What’s more is that the Eucharist is Christ, unchanged through the centuries: when I receive the Eucharist at Mass every day I am receiving the same Christ in the same way the FIRST of my ancestors did when they were received into the Body of Christ all those centuries ago; Christ is truly my alpha and omega. I love the Pope and the Papacy, that there is a living voice of authority to whom we can look for guidance when questions of faith and morals arise that are not so clearly spelled out in Scripture or are clear in tradition. I love the universality of the Church and its world-encompassing scope. I love the different rites–twenty-three ways of being Catholic!–that have arisen from the traditions laid down by the Apostles as they preached the Gospel to different peoples in different lands. 

  But most of all I love Jesus Christ. When I stop to consider that there was only one Church around after He founded it on St. Peter and that I, by the grace of God, was born into that same Church that traces its roots historically, traditionally, archaeologically, spiritually, scripturally and ritually all the way back to that founding moment I find myself, whenever asked by anyone if I ever thought of leaving the Catholic Church, saying the same words as that strong-headed, sometimes idiotic, but earnest St. Peter, “To whom shall I go? You have the words of everlasting life.” Jesus Christ founded the Church, He founded it once and as one, He desired it to remain one, He entrusted it to the Apostles, and today it is known as the Catholic Church. It wasn’t founded by some guy named “Cathol” (thanks, Eddie Izzard) because it isn’t named after who founded it, but rather named for what it is: a universal (katholikos) body of people called out of (ekklesia) the world to be His. It’s called the Catholic Church simply because that’s what it is; I don’t know that I would be comfortable belonging to the Church of Luther, Calvin, or anyone else but Christ.

   

  “What did your spiritual journey look like?”

  Beyond what I’ve shared here (I tried really hard to pull up some previously unpublished material!) I’ve given the full-length version beginning here at the post called “In the Beginning.” That begins a whole series regarding my faith journey as well as my vocation story. Many have enjoyed reading it, so I hope you all do as well.

   

  I hope this post was interesting for you; feel free to ask more questions in the comments if you wish!

  • 5:27 pm
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