Monday, March 12, 2012

Stepping Where Grace Tells Us to Step: On This Day in 1967, I Become Catholic



On this day in 1967, I "became" Catholic--as in, "I was re-baptized and accepted into the [Roman] Catholic church."  I had, of course, been baptized as a boy in my family's Southern Baptist church, but as the assistant pastor of the Catholic parish in our small south Arkansas city who accepted me into the Catholic church (and who was to commit suicide several years later) told me, "You never know with those Baptist churches, what they do or how they do it.  Let's just re-baptize you to be on the safe side, in case they used the wrong formula."


I've probably written about this momentous decision at other places on this blog, and I feel sure that if I write much about it today, I'll be repeating things I've already said.  I had actually made the choice to become Catholic two years earlier, when a surprising sense of peace, joy, rightness suddenly settled on me as I was reading about religious this and religious that one day, and it hit me: the Catholic church is where you belong.

A decision made when one is 15 years old: I'm not sure how to access the thought process (or soul process--such as either can have been, when one is 15) which led to that decision now, all these years later, when so much water has flowed past that particular bridge.  I do have a childish journal I kept at the time, which reminds me of some of the books I was reading, the callow questions I was asking, which may have preceded this decision.

I had read Theodore Dreiser's novel about Quakers, for instance, The Bulwark, and I somehow finished that novel with the surprising quandary: Catholic or Quaker?  You need a new church: which of those two will it be?  I remember clearly, too, the year before my decision to become Catholic, discovering in our school library a mind-bending book about world religions which suggested to me that many of the Old Testament stories I'd been carefully taught in Sunday School might very well have analogues in other religious traditions of the ancient Near East, and Judaism didn't spring de novo out of the soil of divine revelation, as Sunday School had suggested to me, but had ties to (and borrowed from) those other traditions.

There was all this and the Civil Rights movement, which was, bar none, the most unsettling, the most liberating, social movement of that particular period, for a young, impressionable teen living in the American South.  A movement that was turning everything upside down and forcing anyone who thought about much of anything at all to think about everything--since how can we take anything for granted when everything we've taken for granted up to now is clearly wrong?

As I feel sure I have said on this blog, that movement and the questions it began to raise for me led me to request a meeting with my church's pastor, in which I asked him how groups outside the church could be leading the way to racial reconciliation and the erasing of unjust lines of discrimination, when the churches were not only dragging their feet but defending the injustice.  When our church was a bulwark of discrimination . . . .

The pastor's response--churches change slowly and have to change slowly, because they're bastions meant to preserve values when radical cultural groups eat away at them like acid--didn't satisfy me.  It seemed to be a cop out.  It seemed flatly to deny everything I had been taught in Sunday School about the role of the church in the world, and about my vocation as a follower of Jesus, a concept that means everything to Southern Baptists, since there is no moment anytime or anywhere that we aren't representing Jesus to the world.

And so I was looking around for a new church because my own church had so spectacularly disappointed me in its response to the Civil Rights movement, especially after it engaged in an enervating internal battle in 1965 that split the church into two groups, about whether we should accept black members.  The Catholic church in our little city was the only "white" church about which I had any knowledge that had long been integrated, where black and white Christians worshiped side by side without fanfare.  

And that definitely attracted me.  

I say I made a "decision" to become Catholic, but truth be told, the way I remember it, there was no real decision at all about the surprising moment of certainty or enlightenment when it suddenly became clear to me: here is the path.  Walk in it.  This recognition simply hit me: this is it.  This is right.  This way, peace and joy lie.  

And from that moment, I did not turn back, because I couldn't do so, since who turns his back on peace and joy?  My parents did not see the moment of decision as I did, though, and two years of intense struggle--particularly with my father--were the result of my announcement that I had decided to become Catholic.  I was forbidden this or that--the use of the family car when I turned 16, except with his express permission; the right to go anyplace at all without his express permission; the right to talk about any of this at all at any time at all; the right to join another church until he expressly permitted me to do so.  

There were threats to "break your plate" and put me out of the house if I did not stop defying him.  There were threats to send me to a 1) psychiatrist or 2) military school to work the nonsense out of me.

Two wearisome years that finally resulted in his announcing that he felt defeated, that I might as well do what I had determined to do, because he could see I didn't intend to change my mind and people in the town had begun to talk about his unfairness to me: and then the re-baptism on this day in 1967.  A fateful decision . . . .

One I'm not at all certain I'd make right now.  One I'm rather inclined to think that, knowing what I do today, I'd certainly not choose to make today--if for no other reason, then because the Catholic church's commitment to values of justice and human dignity that was so central to my "decision" to become Catholic is far, far less patent to me today than it was in my small south Arkansas city in 1965-1967.

To the contrary.  Very decidedly so.

Do I regret the decision?  Yes and no.  I regret what the church has done to Steve and to me.  I regret what it has done and continues to do to others who are simply seeking to piece together the shards of human dignity in their gay lives, their lives as women, their lives as survivors of clerical sexual abuse.

I regret the way in which my life of communal spiritual practice has been radically interrupted, because--though the eucharist was far and away the most compelling part of what pulled me into the Catholic church, once my "decision" had been made--I will not return to the eucharistic table now.  Not when the very same gentlemen of the cloth telling me that they confect the body of the Lord there are the ones who have taken from my mouth and Steve's our daily bread, our livelihood, our health insurance, our savings for retirement, the vocations to which we felt strongly called and for which we sacrificed much when we went to graduate school to study theology.

The men of the cloth have chosen to take all of this from Steve and me without apology.  Ever.

When they live in total economic and social security--the economic and social security they have taken from us, seriously problematizing our lives.  And our faith.

Do I completely regret my "decision" to become Catholic?  I can't say that I do, since I wouldn't have met Steve if I hadn't taken the step to become Catholic, since what were the chances that a young man from a Deep South evangelical background who played with dolls until he was 7 and had an infatuation with books and Joan Baez and crazy aunts and uncles would have met a Midwestern farm boy with centuries of Catholicism bred into his bones, who played football in high school and was slated by his parish priest to go to a minor seminary, and when he balked at that idea, then to West Point or, if not a military career, at the very least one in the sciences?

How could two such opposites have met without that insane "decision" to step where I thought grace told me to step in 1965-1967?  And what would have been left to me to write about--and complain about, and cry about, and yes, celebrate about--here on this blog, if I hadn't let that little silver seashell of water fall over my head on this day in 1967?

(Though I may well lose steam to continue the writing at some point.)

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