What if?

I was recently asked about how my conversion started, and what arguments I found the most persuasive. As much as I've written about my conversion, I realized I'd never really talked in much detail about the very beginning.

It's hard to pinpoint because it really was a combination of many things kind of converging in my head at once. I think I really started to be challenged when I seriously entertained the possibility that this physical, visible Church could be God-lead, and not just man-made as I had always assumed. It dawned on me that there was nothing stopping God from working through human beings...after all, I already believed he had done this in creation of the Bible.

Prior to this the dichotomy always existed in my head, always assumed and never really challenged, that one either follows God or follows man, and the Catholic Church was obviously man-made because it had a hierarchy made up of men. The Catholic Church was led by the pope, a man (which they admitted), and seemed, from my POV, focused on paying respect to men as bishops and priests. I was so stuck on the notion that it was all for power or money (which is utterly laughable these days, lol) that I never even considered the possibility that these priests and bishops could actually be humble servants trying their best to do God's will, quite like the apostles we see in the scriptures.

So, I suppose it really all began with the simple question...what if?

Suddenly I felt compelled to really examine the possibility...What if Christ set up a visible Church on earth, and gave us a visible steward (the pope) not as a replacement of Him, but as a visible authority, led by the Holy Spirit to guide us on earth while He was away? What would that look like? What would I expect this to look like?

I couldn't deny it made sense, all I had to do was look around me at the 1001 interpretations of the Bible various denominations held, all quite sincerely and in good faith. And yet, I still believed God would surely have foreseen this kind of confusion among men and given us something to guard against it...the Catholics proposed a solution, the living authority of the Church.

Basically, it came down to authority for me. I already believed the Bible was God's word...but looking at the history of how the canon of the Bible was decided upon in the first place, I couldn't deny it was the Catholic Church who finally settled the canon. (This was a shock, along with the fact that the "extra books" Catholics had supposedly "added" at some point were, in fact, taken out by Martin Luther at the time of the protestant reformation.) This really kind of shook up my whole world, as I'm sure you can understand the Bible was the center and core of my faith...and now I see it was first canonized by the Catholics, and second tampered with by the Protestants! It really made me realize just how vulnerable a mere book is, and how much it depends upon living people...for canonization, for interpretation, for translation, all kinds of things. And while I believed God could of course work through humans to protect His Written Word, my question was..how did I know which humans to trust? The Bible didn't really tell me that!

So, as I asked myself what would it look like if Christ gave us a living authority in the Church, meant as a companion to the written Word which I already acknowledged as authoritative, I couldn't help but feel that the Catholic Church would be a likely candidate for what that shining city upon a hill might look like.

This, coupled with my reading of the Early Church Fathers, seeing that so much of what the core of Catholicism is about was undeniably present in the Early Church....the Eucharist as the center of their faith, the mass, the sacraments, confession (which seemed so obviousl in Jn 20:23, although I couldn't recall ever reading it before!), their view of Mary as held in great regard...I saw all this and more in the writings of Christians who lived not 100 years after Christ was on the earth.

And the amazing thing was, the Catholic Church, even if it was wrong (which I still at that point assumed) had kept these practices, these teachings just the same for 2,000 years. This was something that really impressed me, as I saw just how fickle mere human beings were, especially in the CoC with a new argument breaking out every couple years over the smallest little detail concerning doctrine or worship.

So...all of this kind of converged at once in my head, and the "what if?" really started to weigh on my heart. I couldn't believe I was even considering the possibility...but each time I did, although I really was looking for proof that the idea was absolutely ridiculous, it seemed from whatever angle I approached, it made so much sense, it fit like a glove. I'd try to snap myself out of it and remind myself of some of the Catholics' most horrid offenses, like their treatment of Mary, and their pompous exaltation of men...but the problem was, I felt a dutiful sense of fairness that compelled me to consider their own explanations of such things. And each time I'd read an explanation of why in their understanding, they're not exalting Mary above Christ or any man on earth above Christ, to my surprise and sometimes terror, their explanation, again, made sense within the context of their worldview.

The more I looked, the more I saw a depth of wisdom that I had never even had a glimpse of in the CoC...and it started with things we agreed on, and led me to consider their points on things I disagreed on. And the more I read and studied and examined, the more pieces of the puzzle that is life started to fall into place in my head. I found answers to questions I'd never even thought to ask brilliantly expounded upon, and little by little, quite despite myself, I started to trust this grand authority on matters of faith and morals. I didn't understand everything, to be sure, and there were some things I still felt quite queasy about...but I had yet to ask a question and not receive a well thought-out and exceedingly wise answer, so I set that queasiness aside and that's when I really started studying to learn, with the intent to become Catholic.

So, I think probably the biggest thing was the question of authority...whether the Bible alone was meant as our only authority, or whether Christ meant for us to have a living, breathing authority guided by the Holy spirit, meant to teach us, to help us interpret scripture rightly, etc. And when I asked "What if...?" and examined the possible answers, it was the Catholic Church that seemed the most logical choice as that living authority, for me, despite the fact that I sincerely hoped to find evidence to the contrary.

I still remained skeptically hesitant, mind you, even when I started seriously considering Catholicism, but each newly answered question and shining bit of supernatural wisdom slowly wore down my skepticism over time, and by my confirmation I couldn't wait to receive what I now believed to be Christ actually present in the Eucharist...and this, Christ in the Eucharist, replaced the Bible as the center and core of my faith as a Catholic, and remains so to this day, thanks be to God!

Our Christmas Entertainment

My husband was kind enough to give my family a little bagpipe concert on Christmas day, so I thought I'd share a taste of his piping here on my blog as well.
:-)

Christ is Born!!

Merry Christmas everyone!!

O Holy Night...

**Reposted for your listening pleasure! And check out this interview with the man behind it.**

Christmas is just around the corner, and so I thought I'd drag out my favorite mp3 of the worst rendition of O Holy Night ever sung. This was passed onto me from my former coworker, and we used to listen to it around Christmas and just have giggling fits over it. Those were some good times!

So, here you are, and enjoy!! (Be sure to listen to the WHOLE thing, it gets progressively "better!")

Traditions and Rituals

As Christmas approaches, I got to thinking about what it is I, and people in general I think, like so much about holidays. I think a lot of it is a sense of familiarity. We bring out those same decorations year after year, make those same cookies, practice our same family traditions, sing those familiar songs etc, and they bring us together and make us feel united. Humans crave familiarity, tradition, and even ritual.

I grew up in a church where tradition and ritual were seen as bad things, and yet we practiced them all the same without calling them what they were. The family prayer was always the same, complete with hesitations in the same spots that made it perhaps sound more like spontaneous prayer on the surface, but the truth is any of us could have repeated it word for word, hesitations and all. Church services were the same each week and would have fit any definition of ritual, for instance this one from a dictionary online: "Any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner." Well yeah, that's what we did!

I think an interesting side note is the fact that, as an introvert, I appreciate rituals and rote prayer even more because it allows me to really focus on my intentions and prayers, rather than frantically scrambling to find "the right words." I'm not a good thinker off the cuff, and I was always terrified of having to pray out loud in front of people (and thankful I was a girl so I didn't have to often!) But with rote prayer, the words are given to me so that I can focus on the meaning rather than finding the words.

But rote prayer and rituals were seen as vain and empty in the church of my upbringing, and yet we practiced them all the same. We practiced them without calling them what they were. And we practiced them in family settings too, especially around the holidays. It doesn't matter how much we said they were bad or wrong, in the end we were drawn to them and we practiced them anyway. Why did we do this? Because it is natural, it is good. God created us with this longing for tradition and ritual, it is not a bad thing or a dirty word.

People have their bedtime routines, their nightly prayers, their weekly Saturday morning breakfast or weekday game night. The seasons and the activities that come and go with them are also a form of tradition, we can see that our liturgical seasons mirror the natural seasons. These things comfort us, they give structure to our time and familiarity and closeness. So why wouldn't we embrace these things in our worship? Why pretend like we don't practice them when we do?

Of course the answer one would probably receive is because these rituals and traditions are "man-made." Well, so are church service programs, who gets to decide how many songs you sing before the sermon? A man does! But the thing is, man-made does not automatically mean wrong. Yes, some of these rituals and traditions are "man made" in the sense that men were there to organize them. But the desire, I believe, is God-given. It's why, even when we try to avoid rituals we end up fitting them in somewhere in our lives...in our weekly schedules, or in our holiday traditions, even in our daily family interactions. Seeing as God created us, and became one of us, certainly he's aware of this natural human desire for ritual and tradition. How, then, could we say it's a bad thing?

I love the structure that the liturgical year brings to my life, and I thank God for fulfilling the desires He places in our hearts for such things through the Church!