Leavetaking and Homecoming

It has been hard to write about this but as more time passes, I know the window is closing. But this is what I want to say: I am practicing Catholicism and it is good.

I just came from Seasonal Choir practice. I go back and forth about this in my head-- the voice of my Protestant friends, clicking their tongue and shaking their head in disappointment but then this other voice, this voice of okay-ness. Like where we are is okay because that's where we are. I don't want to say that coming away from our Liberti experience has affected me with this limp, this spiritual handicap. But I feel like something got broken there and it still hurts.

And that where I am, at St. Vincent's in this particular community, feels like I am able to be who I am. I don't know if it's a disrespectful metaphor but this may be what it feels like for some people to come out of the closet. Like maybe I was putting on a charade of being this person, of doing these things and all along, I wasn't being honest. I am less interested in exploring the great theological divide between Reformed Presbyterianism and Social-Justice Catholicism but more interested in exploring why I left what I was raised with. Why I turned so easily from it, and why it took me so long to look back.

Not long ago, I was at a party with folks from our old church. I took on the posture of an older-sister when asking this newly-graduated friend about her leave-taking of her Catholic upbringing. I could see myself in her, the fresh-faced sincerity of wanting a faith with feet, of enacting God's Word in zealous and radical mission trips, dramatic evangelical conversations in her stunning social life. She explained how the liturgy felt suffocating to her. She felt hostile about praying to saints and Mary. I could hear her but I asked her to just be cautious in her turning away, to be careful about how she walks away.

I can't make sense of it all here but I want to document these things now, so when my girls for example are in college, they can read this and maybe identify with this--the divergence of what your parents have taught you and how God is being revealed to you. I want them to know that I have been here. That this heavy and difficult spot is no fun but somehow, God is at work in it.

Above is a photo that Clara took just after Daily Mass at St. V's. The priest is from Jakarta but has been to the PI lots of times, he says.