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brought us together at the
conference—one of us a lifelong Catholic
schooled by Benedictines, the other a recent
convert who had spent some formative time at a
Camaldolese hermitage just up the road at Big Sur—and
within a few months, the idea for this volume of
essays on the sacraments by contemporary Catholic
writers had been born and its earliest
contributors had enthusiastically agreed to
participate.
This enthusiasm, in
retrospect, is not hard to understand. Sacraments,
according to the old three-part catechism formulation, are
"outward signs instituted by Christ to give
grace," and while the history of the instituting and
the precise work of the grace are perhaps the provinces of
a church historian or a theologian, who better than a
novelist or a poet to help us understand the experience of
these "signs," each of which is associated with
such earthy realities as water, oil, bread, and wine? So
it was that Katherine Vaz, a swimmer, chose to write about
the water of Baptism; Mary Gordon warmed to the sensuous
nature of the chrism used in the Anointing of the Sick;
and Ron Hansen recalled the feel of the Communion wafer on
the roof of his mouth. The purely aesthetic
experience of the sacraments—arguably the most
distinctive feature of Catholic life—is at least one
source of their appeal to our imaginations.
Beyond the visible signs, though, are the invisible
realities to which they point. Each is. . . ."a
vehicle for the journey between the seen and the
unseen." . . . Each marks one of the spiritual
milestones of the great human journey . . . .
From "Matrimony" by Paula Huston:
Many people don’t realize that it is difficult to
become a Catholic. I certainly never anticipated that my
bid to enter the Church would become a vastly tangled
affair that eventually required the annulment of my first
marriage and a second wedding ceremony with Mike, who had
already put in a good number of years as my legal spouse.
In some vague, hazy way I assumed that Vatican II had
ended "all that"—that the Church no longer
much concerned itself with people’s "private
lives," those areas of our existence, specifically
the bedroom, that we late twentieth-century individualists
firmly believe to be "off limits," nobody’s
moral business but our own.
My ignorance in this line was rather typical, I
believe. People outside the context of lifetime
Catholicism take note of the big events: the Pope visiting
Mexico, the disgruntlement that sometimes flares within
the ranks over the not-yet- and maybe never-lifted
requirement of priestly celibacy. Outsiders are willing to
concede that Catholicism is a mysterious religion, full of
odd, incomprehensible ritual, but they tend to interpret
this mystery as simple confusion, sorted out and pared
down later by the Protestant reformers. Others are less
restrained in their criticisms. These folk may find
religion itself rather harmless, more of a yawn than
anything else, yet something about Catholic worship raises
their ire; something about it morally offends and disgusts
them. For such people, the rituals may call up the
complex, at times downright nasty history of the
Church-in-the-world, or its refusal to accommodate certain
basic facts about how things are these days. They
may symbolize an antiquated patriarchy (priests, bishops,
cardinals, Pope—all those men). However, such
folk—and I used to be one of them—rarely conjecture
about whether or not they could join if they wanted to.
The Church is so enormous, after all; how can you explain
a billion members without an open-door policy?
And so it was a great surprise to me to discover that
the Church does indeed bar the gates at times, that
joining the Catholic church is not necessarily a matter of
personal choice. "Surprise," actually, doesn’t
quite describe that discovery. The day I was told that I
would have to drop out of the Rite of Christian Initiation
for Adults (RCIA) program and seek an annulment before the
church could consider allowing me to participate in the
sacraments as a full-fledged Catholic, I felt shock, pure
and simple, in the sense of "the shock of the icy
water took her breath away." Like many Americans of
my generation, I’d never before run up against the kind
of authority that places the integrity of institution over
individual "rights." Along with shock, of
course, came the simple human anger of being rejected . .
. .
As someone who had been AWOL from church for many years—not
only AWOL but utterly faithless—a serious reassessment
on my side was now in order. The important thing, I
thought, was God. I’d finally found him again; I didn’t
want to cloud that trembling, delicate new clarity on
things. Did I really need corporate religion? Could I
stick with this admittedly rocky new spiritual path
without the inspiration of liturgical worship, sacrament,
the warmth of a congregation shuffling in their pews
around me? I knew that other had done it, at least for a
while—religious geniuses like Paul, Francis, Teresa of
Avila, George Fox. Yet their times of solitude all seemed
to lead back to the same place: roles of leadership in the
new, more vibrant version of the Church that grew up
around them. Many of us, it seems, need the visceral unity
of group worship, the shared symbols of "organized
religion," the spiritual grit of religious
discipline, the (at times) daunting authority of
institution. I was afraid that if I tried to go it alone,
I’d be tempted to take the path of least resistance, to
create for myself a relationship with God that, more than
anything, pleased and reassured me. Worse, that allowed me
to remain aloof and critical.
My decision to proceed was not so much brave as it was
desperate. I’d found something that spoke directly to
the crying need within me and did so in ways that I could
not command, surprising ways that kept me off balance,
less apt to think I was running the show on my own. True,
I could have gone to another church, an "easier
church," as they put it in RCIA, "around the
corner." But an easier church might not do the job,
might not be able to tame this thing in me that needed
taming.
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