Moments that mean something
October 20, 2011
8:10 pm
You know those moments that startle you? Where you’re going about your business, doing your thing, and suddenly you’re struck by significance in something insignificant. It feels like something critical is being imparted to you, and you have to seal it in your memory.
I.
I was in eleventh grade when I met Jason and became interested in Catholicism via Jason’s conversion. We sat together in physics class, and I spent far more time contemplating the Catholic Church than I did studying physics. But I experienced a fair amount of inner turmoil in coming to the decision to convert, myself. I had rather recently become confirmed in my denomination of origin, the Episcopal Church, and while I had chosen to do that spontaneously, of my own free will, and willingly undertook my studies toward that end, I had somehow not approached that decision in the same way I would later approach Catholicism. Learning about Rome made my Episcopal faith feel incomplete. Hence the conversion.
But before I got that point, there was the turmoil. There were some other kids in our class who occasionally participated in these Catholic/Episcopalian/whatever discussions. There were actually several belonging to each sect. During the turmoil, I wrote in my diary the following documentation of a moment that seemed very much like it must have meant something important:
11/12/96
I AM A SLACKER. [I think this refers to the fact that I’m journaling during physics class instead of paying attention or doing my work.]
Anyways. OK, I have to tell you about this, it’s weird. I’m sitting here in physics and I notice that, at the next table, all the Episcopalians are wearing red, and all the Catholics are wearing blue. And, across from me, Jason, a Catholic is wearing blue. What am I wearing? Plaid. Plaid with red and blue in it. That is so weird.
I almost wore a red shirt today. I don’t even own any blue shirts.
This moment seemed important at the time, important enough to write down. And while I have not thought about this in years, for some reason, it came back to me recently. I went and found my old diary so I could read the entry exactly as I wrote it.
It’s kind of dorky, but it seems like that moment was more prophetic than I even tried to make it be. Fifteen years later, I know that I eventually did become a Catholic, that I have gone back and forth between the Catholics and the Episcopalians to varying degrees more times than I can remember, and that the which-one-do-I-choose puzzle has become the laughably persistent and over-arching theme in my spiritual life. If Catholics are blue (the color associated with Mary) and Episcopalians are red, then I am undeniably red-and-blue plaid. These churches tangle around me in impossible knots. They have never blended; I’m not purple. I’m plaid. The colors are distinct but woven together. To unwind them would be to destroy the shirt. I almost chose red, but instead I chose plaid. I could not have chosen blue; I didn’t own any. From that day on, it has always been so. It may always be so.
II.
We were living in New Orleans, and Lee and I were disagreeing about something. I don’t even remember what; maybe it had something to do with religion? Maybe not. I feel like it was something rather minor, but the irritation of the disagreement prompted me to go to church to pray about it. I went to a Catholic church in Gentilly where I knew they were having adoration of the blessed sacrament. I entered and knelt on the kneeler at the front, directly in front of the monstrance. My attitude going in was kind of bemused: “Well, God, I’m coming to pray about this. It’s a bit silly, but I could kind of use your help.”
This was an unusual setting for a Moment as it’s not too often I go to church specifically to pray for issues having to do with my marriage. Perhaps that was why the moment seemed so striking.
Kneeling there, I rested my elbows on the surface in front of me, clasped my hands together, bowed my head so that my mouth touched my knuckles, and closed my eyes. During my prayer, I opened my eyes while still in that pose, and I saw my engagement ring. But more than that, I saw the sacrament in the monstrance reflected in the surface of the diamond in my engagement ring. It made my stomach drop. It seemed like the message was that the answer to problems in my marriage was the eucharist.
The practical application of that was not so easily revealed. Lee is not a Catholic, and he’s not going to become one. Nor is he an Episcopalian, and though I would say there’s a much greater likelihood he would become one of those, it still is not very likely. Sharing the eucharist with my husband is not going to be an option for me. But perhaps bringing my troubles to Jesus in the eucharist-or just at all-is a sorely unused.
III.
Some time in the middle of my foray with the Episcopalians in New Orleans, Lee and I went to Oklahoma to visit his family. I joined Paula, Lee’s friend Andy’s mother, at her Episcopal church for Sunday services, and I found myself reflecting on my crisis of faith. I was pondering whether to join, again, the Episcopalians. I was thinking about how much time I had put into these conversions, how many years I spent as a Catholic vs. how many years I was going to spend before coming to a decision about whether to become an Episcopalian again.
I don’t know if it was something in the sermon that made me think it or if it came to me spontaneously, but I was suddenly reminded that long before this crisis of faith, long before I began muddying the path of my own spiritual journey, I was baptized. I was just a few weeks from my third birthday when I was baptized, just a little kid, just barely old enough to remember. That’s when I became a Christian. That was the true beginning. That’s the event that meant the most. Today, I may have been a Catholic for 14 some-odd years, but I have been a Christian for 28 years. The very vast majority of my remembered life. Before it meant much to me to be a Christian, I was one. I have been a member of the Body of Christ for all this time.
IV.
Some time around Katrina, I realized that I had been waiting to find something or someone who would light the path for me, when all along I had been holding the flashlight.
What it means to be holding the flashlight… that part I have not quite mastered.
V.
I just finished reading Finding Home: Stories of Roman Catholics Entering the Episcopal Church. I really enjoyed it; I had something in common with nearly every story in the book. And none of the people had a big chip on their shoulder about the Catholic Church or left it out of anger or because they were mad at somebody.
Finishing the book was what prompted me to remember that red-and-blue plaid thing, to unearth the diary from a box of old memories under my bed, and to read the pages written during that chapter in my life. I finished looking at the diary just before I went to bed, and that night I had a very vivid dream.
In the dream, Jason and I were at Atticus’s baptism, and Fr. R was going to be performing the baptism. (He officiated at my wedding, but he did not actually baptize Atticus, and I have not belonged to Fr. R’s parish in many years.) But when it came time to say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” Fr. R just said a bunch of nonsense about baptizing in the name of the Father and the pee pee.
I was very put out by this but didn’t say anything until later, when I asked Jason if he had heard this. He hadn’t. I asked him if he thought I should baptize the baby myself, since in emergency situations, anyone can baptize anyone else. If I did it and said the right words, at least the baptism would be valid, where it wasn’t based on how Fr. R did it. It didn’t seem like a reasonable choice to go to Fr. R and ask him to do it over; either I was going to baptize my son, or I was going to leave him sort of half-baptized by Fr. R’s weird rendition.
Dream-Jason did not think I should baptize the baby. He told me it would be a greater sin not to have faith that the baptism was valid than to let Atticus proceed in his faith having been invalidly baptized. And I wanted to argue with Dream-Jason, because he himself was baptized when he converted, because his childhood baptism, in a Pentecostal tradition, had not been in an acceptable form for Catholics. But I didn’t argue with him, because by then I was confused or tired or intimidated, or maybe something else was going on.
Later in the dreamscape, Dream-Jason and I were crossing a long bridge when we saw torpedoes launched from the far shore. One of the torpedoes destroyed the bridge, and we managed to fly to safety on some sort of gliders made from foam pool noodles. The flight on the gliders was terrifying, and I was never sure I would survive it, but I knew I had no other choice, and I was surprised that I remained level-headed and calm. We then had to walk back to town and find our friends and families. All around us, civilization seemed to be collapsing as our land was attacked by whatever forces launched the torpedoes. A ship filled with convicted murderers became beached next to an elementary school, and the convicts threatened to take over. But when Drea-Jason and I tried to explain to people what was going on, that we were being attacked and that there was chaos on the streets, no one would believe us.
I told Real Life Jason about this dream, and he offered a very insightful interpretation. He noted that Fr. R’s presence in the dream makes sense; since Fr. R married me and Lee, he represents the link between the Catholic Church and my family with Lee. “His malfeasance at the baptism is representative of the ineptitude you perceive in the clergy given the weight of their calling.”
Jason pointed out that in my dreams, he is often frozen as the way I knew him at 18 or 19. “As such, dream-Jason is an embodiment of that craving for an authentic religious experience; that secret fear that religious truth has equal measures of pain for all its consolations, but the consolations can be ecstatically good-like an abusive relationship with great sex. The dream-Jason always proposes you make the biggest leap of faith or take on a practice that seems physically excruciating, if not painful.”
This part of Jason’s interpretation struck a cord with me. When I first woke up, my impression of the baptism in the dream was that Fr. R had been out of line and ridiculous, if not flat-out wrong, and that dream-Jason had also been wrong to discourage me from questioning the ridiculousness and from taking matters into my own hands. But after reading Jason’s response, my own interpretation evolved.
The thing I’m continually hung up on is validity: is the Episcopal Church a valid church? Are their orders valid? Are their sacraments valid? If I join them, will I be partaking in a valid eucharist? The Catholic Church’s validity is a given, to me; after all, the Episcopalians do not doubt the Catholics’ validity. But the Catholics sure do doubt the Piskies’; that’s why it feels terrifying to consider switching. That’s why it feels like no switch could ever be permanent, because some day I will want to go back again, if for no other reason than out of fear.
Dream-Jason proposed I take a huge leap of faith: to entrust not my own soul but that of my beloved child to God with this obviously invalid baptism. To have faith that God could make the baptism valid in spite of the foibles of the priest. It would be a greater sin not to have faith that God could, would, did already grant salvation, thereby overcoming the shortcomings of men, than to labor to correct those shortcomings.
Real-life Jason also offered that the second half of the dream, with the torpedoes and collapse of society, even though disconnected from the baptism part, was still a continuation of the dream that delivered the earlier scene. “The apocalypse-like continuation is tied to some basic, primal fear of a grand dissolution. This fear of destruction and flight is a basic one to our collective humanity. All the myths and folktales in which the heroes must flee from their burning homeland must have universal resonance-we see that story so often.” My own conscious mind wants to divide the dream into two distinct parts, but certainly I can acknowledge fears about “a grand dissolution.” Or even dissolutions: of faith, of stability, of salvation. Even contemplating doing something that I know on some level would make me happy-becoming an Episcopalian-is terrifying because of the specter of regret. Temporal and eternal.
I very rarely say that God is speaking to me. But I feel like these contemplations right now are important, are significant. I feel “convicted.” This is a continuation of the thought pattern I wrote about March 28 and 29; it’s coming from the same place.
8:10 pm
You know those moments that startle you? Where you’re going about your business, doing your thing, and suddenly you’re struck by significance in something insignificant. It feels like something critical is being imparted to you, and you have to seal it in your memory.
I.
I was in eleventh grade when I met Jason and became interested in Catholicism via Jason’s conversion. We sat together in physics class, and I spent far more time contemplating the Catholic Church than I did studying physics. But I experienced a fair amount of inner turmoil in coming to the decision to convert, myself. I had rather recently become confirmed in my denomination of origin, the Episcopal Church, and while I had chosen to do that spontaneously, of my own free will, and willingly undertook my studies toward that end, I had somehow not approached that decision in the same way I would later approach Catholicism. Learning about Rome made my Episcopal faith feel incomplete. Hence the conversion.
But before I got that point, there was the turmoil. There were some other kids in our class who occasionally participated in these Catholic/Episcopalian/whatever discussions. There were actually several belonging to each sect. During the turmoil, I wrote in my diary the following documentation of a moment that seemed very much like it must have meant something important:
11/12/96
I AM A SLACKER. [I think this refers to the fact that I’m journaling during physics class instead of paying attention or doing my work.]
Anyways. OK, I have to tell you about this, it’s weird. I’m sitting here in physics and I notice that, at the next table, all the Episcopalians are wearing red, and all the Catholics are wearing blue. And, across from me, Jason, a Catholic is wearing blue. What am I wearing? Plaid. Plaid with red and blue in it. That is so weird.
I almost wore a red shirt today. I don’t even own any blue shirts.
This moment seemed important at the time, important enough to write down. And while I have not thought about this in years, for some reason, it came back to me recently. I went and found my old diary so I could read the entry exactly as I wrote it.
It’s kind of dorky, but it seems like that moment was more prophetic than I even tried to make it be. Fifteen years later, I know that I eventually did become a Catholic, that I have gone back and forth between the Catholics and the Episcopalians to varying degrees more times than I can remember, and that the which-one-do-I-choose puzzle has become the laughably persistent and over-arching theme in my spiritual life. If Catholics are blue (the color associated with Mary) and Episcopalians are red, then I am undeniably red-and-blue plaid. These churches tangle around me in impossible knots. They have never blended; I’m not purple. I’m plaid. The colors are distinct but woven together. To unwind them would be to destroy the shirt. I almost chose red, but instead I chose plaid. I could not have chosen blue; I didn’t own any. From that day on, it has always been so. It may always be so.
II.
We were living in New Orleans, and Lee and I were disagreeing about something. I don’t even remember what; maybe it had something to do with religion? Maybe not. I feel like it was something rather minor, but the irritation of the disagreement prompted me to go to church to pray about it. I went to a Catholic church in Gentilly where I knew they were having adoration of the blessed sacrament. I entered and knelt on the kneeler at the front, directly in front of the monstrance. My attitude going in was kind of bemused: “Well, God, I’m coming to pray about this. It’s a bit silly, but I could kind of use your help.”
This was an unusual setting for a Moment as it’s not too often I go to church specifically to pray for issues having to do with my marriage. Perhaps that was why the moment seemed so striking.
Kneeling there, I rested my elbows on the surface in front of me, clasped my hands together, bowed my head so that my mouth touched my knuckles, and closed my eyes. During my prayer, I opened my eyes while still in that pose, and I saw my engagement ring. But more than that, I saw the sacrament in the monstrance reflected in the surface of the diamond in my engagement ring. It made my stomach drop. It seemed like the message was that the answer to problems in my marriage was the eucharist.
The practical application of that was not so easily revealed. Lee is not a Catholic, and he’s not going to become one. Nor is he an Episcopalian, and though I would say there’s a much greater likelihood he would become one of those, it still is not very likely. Sharing the eucharist with my husband is not going to be an option for me. But perhaps bringing my troubles to Jesus in the eucharist-or just at all-is a sorely unused.
III.
Some time in the middle of my foray with the Episcopalians in New Orleans, Lee and I went to Oklahoma to visit his family. I joined Paula, Lee’s friend Andy’s mother, at her Episcopal church for Sunday services, and I found myself reflecting on my crisis of faith. I was pondering whether to join, again, the Episcopalians. I was thinking about how much time I had put into these conversions, how many years I spent as a Catholic vs. how many years I was going to spend before coming to a decision about whether to become an Episcopalian again.
I don’t know if it was something in the sermon that made me think it or if it came to me spontaneously, but I was suddenly reminded that long before this crisis of faith, long before I began muddying the path of my own spiritual journey, I was baptized. I was just a few weeks from my third birthday when I was baptized, just a little kid, just barely old enough to remember. That’s when I became a Christian. That was the true beginning. That’s the event that meant the most. Today, I may have been a Catholic for 14 some-odd years, but I have been a Christian for 28 years. The very vast majority of my remembered life. Before it meant much to me to be a Christian, I was one. I have been a member of the Body of Christ for all this time.
IV.
Some time around Katrina, I realized that I had been waiting to find something or someone who would light the path for me, when all along I had been holding the flashlight.
What it means to be holding the flashlight… that part I have not quite mastered.
V.
I just finished reading Finding Home: Stories of Roman Catholics Entering the Episcopal Church. I really enjoyed it; I had something in common with nearly every story in the book. And none of the people had a big chip on their shoulder about the Catholic Church or left it out of anger or because they were mad at somebody.
Finishing the book was what prompted me to remember that red-and-blue plaid thing, to unearth the diary from a box of old memories under my bed, and to read the pages written during that chapter in my life. I finished looking at the diary just before I went to bed, and that night I had a very vivid dream.
In the dream, Jason and I were at Atticus’s baptism, and Fr. R was going to be performing the baptism. (He officiated at my wedding, but he did not actually baptize Atticus, and I have not belonged to Fr. R’s parish in many years.) But when it came time to say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” Fr. R just said a bunch of nonsense about baptizing in the name of the Father and the pee pee.
I was very put out by this but didn’t say anything until later, when I asked Jason if he had heard this. He hadn’t. I asked him if he thought I should baptize the baby myself, since in emergency situations, anyone can baptize anyone else. If I did it and said the right words, at least the baptism would be valid, where it wasn’t based on how Fr. R did it. It didn’t seem like a reasonable choice to go to Fr. R and ask him to do it over; either I was going to baptize my son, or I was going to leave him sort of half-baptized by Fr. R’s weird rendition.
Dream-Jason did not think I should baptize the baby. He told me it would be a greater sin not to have faith that the baptism was valid than to let Atticus proceed in his faith having been invalidly baptized. And I wanted to argue with Dream-Jason, because he himself was baptized when he converted, because his childhood baptism, in a Pentecostal tradition, had not been in an acceptable form for Catholics. But I didn’t argue with him, because by then I was confused or tired or intimidated, or maybe something else was going on.
Later in the dreamscape, Dream-Jason and I were crossing a long bridge when we saw torpedoes launched from the far shore. One of the torpedoes destroyed the bridge, and we managed to fly to safety on some sort of gliders made from foam pool noodles. The flight on the gliders was terrifying, and I was never sure I would survive it, but I knew I had no other choice, and I was surprised that I remained level-headed and calm. We then had to walk back to town and find our friends and families. All around us, civilization seemed to be collapsing as our land was attacked by whatever forces launched the torpedoes. A ship filled with convicted murderers became beached next to an elementary school, and the convicts threatened to take over. But when Drea-Jason and I tried to explain to people what was going on, that we were being attacked and that there was chaos on the streets, no one would believe us.
I told Real Life Jason about this dream, and he offered a very insightful interpretation. He noted that Fr. R’s presence in the dream makes sense; since Fr. R married me and Lee, he represents the link between the Catholic Church and my family with Lee. “His malfeasance at the baptism is representative of the ineptitude you perceive in the clergy given the weight of their calling.”
Jason pointed out that in my dreams, he is often frozen as the way I knew him at 18 or 19. “As such, dream-Jason is an embodiment of that craving for an authentic religious experience; that secret fear that religious truth has equal measures of pain for all its consolations, but the consolations can be ecstatically good-like an abusive relationship with great sex. The dream-Jason always proposes you make the biggest leap of faith or take on a practice that seems physically excruciating, if not painful.”
This part of Jason’s interpretation struck a cord with me. When I first woke up, my impression of the baptism in the dream was that Fr. R had been out of line and ridiculous, if not flat-out wrong, and that dream-Jason had also been wrong to discourage me from questioning the ridiculousness and from taking matters into my own hands. But after reading Jason’s response, my own interpretation evolved.
The thing I’m continually hung up on is validity: is the Episcopal Church a valid church? Are their orders valid? Are their sacraments valid? If I join them, will I be partaking in a valid eucharist? The Catholic Church’s validity is a given, to me; after all, the Episcopalians do not doubt the Catholics’ validity. But the Catholics sure do doubt the Piskies’; that’s why it feels terrifying to consider switching. That’s why it feels like no switch could ever be permanent, because some day I will want to go back again, if for no other reason than out of fear.
Dream-Jason proposed I take a huge leap of faith: to entrust not my own soul but that of my beloved child to God with this obviously invalid baptism. To have faith that God could make the baptism valid in spite of the foibles of the priest. It would be a greater sin not to have faith that God could, would, did already grant salvation, thereby overcoming the shortcomings of men, than to labor to correct those shortcomings.
Real-life Jason also offered that the second half of the dream, with the torpedoes and collapse of society, even though disconnected from the baptism part, was still a continuation of the dream that delivered the earlier scene. “The apocalypse-like continuation is tied to some basic, primal fear of a grand dissolution. This fear of destruction and flight is a basic one to our collective humanity. All the myths and folktales in which the heroes must flee from their burning homeland must have universal resonance-we see that story so often.” My own conscious mind wants to divide the dream into two distinct parts, but certainly I can acknowledge fears about “a grand dissolution.” Or even dissolutions: of faith, of stability, of salvation. Even contemplating doing something that I know on some level would make me happy-becoming an Episcopalian-is terrifying because of the specter of regret. Temporal and eternal.
I very rarely say that God is speaking to me. But I feel like these contemplations right now are important, are significant. I feel “convicted.” This is a continuation of the thought pattern I wrote about March 28 and 29; it’s coming from the same place.