An opening

Interesting developments at my house around religion in the last couple of days.

My oldest daughter (7, soon to be 8, but precocious in many ways) professes to be "not sure" what she believes about God and religion, "like Mommy." She has recently become friends with a Jewish boy in her class. He has been given the opportunity to share some of the traditions of Judaism (e.g. festival days, food regulations, fasts) with their second-grade class now and then, and my daughter has always eaten it up.

Last night when my wife was driving her home from the restaurant where they grabbed dinner, my daughter told her that she "wanted to be Jewish." Of course we thought it was mostly because she wanted participate in the "different" holidays and fasts and what have you. But later, when her mother was putting her to bed, she expressed an interest in learning how to pray. (This is not really something we do at my house as a family.) So my wife called me upstairs and we all shared a short prayer. Yeah, it was pretty shallow. And yeah, it was awkwardly syncretic as my wife was simultaneously trying to explain her own informal system of meditation or internal "prayer". But it was an opening. And this morning she tried to help her little sister (four years old) say a prayer, too; and she reiterated her interest in Judaism, which I take as a step in the right direction.

Now here's the thing: I'm a cradle-Protestant Christianoid who's frankly unsure how far to trust the Church, or any church (though I try to confess Christ as God before my children when the subject of religion comes up.) But I do pray privately, and of late I have asked Jesus, Mary, and Saints Monica and Thomas More to work on my family, to draw us all to Christ and the Sacraments. It could be coincidence. It feels like an experience of answered prayer, or the beginning of an answer, and I thank God and all who have prayed for us.

I have an opening. Or, please God, He has an opening. This morning I pointed my daughter to the Old Testament as an obvious place to start learning about Judaism, but the only editions of the Bible I have to hand her are decidedly geared toward adults. So if anybody's reading this, please help me out with your suggestions! Ideally I need a Bible translation/edition (or maybe a collection of Bible stories?) that an academically-gifted 8-year-old will find grown-up enough to feel authentic-- she thinks she's too old for picture books, and anyway I want it to have some gravitas for her-- but it needs to be accessible enough that it doesn't require excessive fortitude to read through. Maps would be nice. Any ideas?

And if anybody who reads this blog has been praying for my family, please please PLEASE keep it up. I need all the help I can get.

A lonely expatriate

Here I was, once again thrown back into the world, alone in the turmoil and futility of it, and robbed of my close and immediate and visible association with any group of those who had banded themselves together to form a small, secret colony of the Kingdom of Heaven in this earth of exile.

No, it was all too evident: I needed this support, this nearness of those who really loved Christ so much that they seemed to see Him. I needed to be with people whose every action told me something of the country that was my home: just as expatriates in every alien land keep together, if only to remind themselves, by their very faces and clothes and gait and accents and expressions, of the land they come from.

 - Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 383

Oh yes. I hear you, Thomas.

You don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't debate abortion with Brandon Vogt

Please-- don't get your blood on my nice white gei.

I recently got my butt rhetorically kicked by Brandon Vogt. (This is a little like having your butt physically kicked by Chuck Norris: you really didn't expect it to come out any different, and you're kind of honored that he took the time.) I commented on his post that asked non-Catholic readers to fill in the blank: "I'm not Catholic because ______." I cited the Catholic stances on abortion and homosexuality as major issues for me, and Brandon proceeded to pull my "arguments" to pieces on logical grounds, pretty much leaving me sputtering, "But... but... it just feels so mean." Which, as pretty much anyone could point out, does not constitute an argument.

Well, I'm not ready with a rebuttal or anything. I still can't argue with the rationality and lucidity of Catholic social teaching. But I can examine my reasons for not embracing it at a "gut" level.

Indeed, I think I did touch on this in Brandon's combox, but then I subsequently buried the lead:

Culture war aside, I'm generally concerned that the would-be "humility" of subjecting my own thinking to the teaching of the Church is actually an abdication of responsibility. What if the Church is wrong?...

Finally-- and this is not so much an objection as a circumstance-- my wife remains an agnostic. And as I learned during the time I tried to conform my thinking to Reformed/"biblical" theology, when I adopt a worldview that would call hers "wrong", all hell breaks loose. She feels hurt, even while I can't really carry it off because I don't really feel any conviction that she *is* wrong, or at any rate that her wrongness is culpable. She's a nice, very smart lady, trying to figure it all out while not hurting anybody and raising her daughters to be nice, smart ladies like herself (and I pray God she does just that!). She doesn't wish to be married to a theologically-conservative Christian-- certainly not one who wants to be "open to life"!-- so I find that my (probably uninformed, probably broken) conscience tells me I must try to avoid being such a person.

Let me be clear what (I hope) I am not saying: I am not saying "It's my wife's fault I'm not Catholic." Indeed, you might say it's her virtues that hold me back. The world is replete with stories of conversion where Spouse A accepts Christ (in one form or another), while Spouse B goes on living a dissolute, God-dishonoring life of booze and selfishness until Spouse A wins Spouse B over with their Awesome, Loving Christian Witness.

This will not be my story. My wife is in no way dissolute. She is not given to trinkets and baubles and material doo-dads. She tries to be as charitable as decent standards of prudence allow. Injustice affects her like poison ivy: she can't sit still for it. I feel confident that she would go to the wall for her family.

She's also wicked smart. (Why the hell is she married to YOU, then? Touche. She must have a blind spot.) I don't want to give too many details since I'm trying to keep this blog anonymous, but suffice it to say she has scaled any number of academic mountains, if not with ease, then with tireless perseverance. She reads the news; she knows the score; she is quite capable of independent, critical thought.

And she flatly rejects Christianity. Forget Catholic social teaching (the specifics of which make her cringe): this archaic notion of God becoming human, and giving His life for a sinful human race, she simply will not give the time of day to. Oh, she'll allow that in its milder manifestations a belief like this might be psychologically helpful. It's not so bad to believe in God and imagine that He loves you. But the minute some organization begins to speak for God, she loses all patience.

Is she a wretched, lost sinner? I suppose. I can't help feeling that I should be so wretched and lost myself. I love the woman, but I also admire her. I end up wondering-- not what's wrong with her that she should be so hostile to a theologically-conservative worldview-- but rather what's wrong with me that I should be flirting with these ideas in the face of her obvious virtue and goodness, and in opposition to (what should I call it?) the founding principles of our marriage.

I pray the rosary on my evening commute most nights. Last night I stopped by a church that's on my route and sat and prayed the last decade sitting in my car outside the perpetual adoration chapel. This is how it is for me: I drive by churches like some kind of creepy love-lorn teenager driving past the house of a girl who's rejected him. I feel like I'm doing something vaguely dirty, vaguely adulterous in my devotions, in my desire to approach God through Catholic belief and practice.

And I'm not sure how to clean that up.

The point of it all

I've been playing with Gimp, trying to make myself some seasonal "wallpaper" for my computer...

I'm not entirely happy with it, mostly because I find it visually distracting... But I thought I'd throw it out here anyway.

This might be my favorite passage of scripture; it puts literally everything in perspective. Simply put, Christ was the turning point. In a sense we are now in the denouement of human, and perhaps cosmological, history. The war is won. I am unsure of my place in the great mopping-up operation, but I know the change is happening before my eyes, and I rejoice. (My apologies if this sentiment is better oriented toward Christmas than Advent; I find it impossible not to look toward the thing anticipated, I guess. My kids can't wait for Christmas either!)

Another effect of recognizing the Christ-centric nature of, well, the whole universe: questions about the literal or figurative nature of the Genesis creation account begin to seem rather niggling. You look at the Hubble Deep Field photo and can almost hear God saying, "Did I say six days? Oh. Actually I meant FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS. Because as you might have heard I HAVE THAT KIND OF TIME."

Who knows how long the aforementioned mopping-up operation will take? Perhaps long enough to make friends of all our former enemies? Long enough for all the stars to burn out and something unforeseen and unimaginable to blaze up in their place?