Cultural Catholic
Someone recently said to me, “Everyone has their personal prodigal son story.” God works through people, and the timing of that message was perfect. I instantly felt less secluded, less naked, and less alone. Maybe God could indeed forgive me, exactly as our church teaches. I saw my failures as great and my fall as steep. Over the past few years, I have inventoried my behavior with, “What have I done?” I, too, have my prodigal son story that is uniquely my own.
I was born into Catholicism 56 years ago. That history likely goes back many generations, as my grandparents (and great-grandparents) are from Northwest Spain, a region rich in Catholic history. As a child and as far back as I can remember, I have always loved and prayed to Jesus. That has always been part of me, and thank God for that grace. As an adult, when it is necessary to do more, specifically pray and walk, I was just a Cultural Catholic going through the motions. The reality was that I was not an active participant. Further, I had no intellectual understanding of some very basic Catholic realities, the eucharist being at the peak of that ignorance. Would I go to mass as an adult? Certainly. But showing up to mass once a week for an hour does not make one a Catholic any more than showing up to an NBA game makes you a professional basketball player. There is so much more to our faith. Sunday is meant to strengthen you for the other 6 days and 23 hours of your week when you don’t have the sanctuary of the Church to keep you from the secular world. We are in this world, not of it, and so we are called to follow Jesus all the time, even while we sleep.
Breaking Point
I don’t know why some of us (me specifically) need to be brought to our knees to turn back to Jesus. The way I see it now, it’s a gift. During this difficult time, I prayed for knowledge: “Lord, let me understand my faith.” I found a simple bridge: a podcast I could listen to on my 30-minute drive into work (Relevant Radio’s Fr. Richard Simon). I do not recall how I found it, but it was the beginning of my adult bible and religious studies. Fr. Simon’s conversational and academically grounded manner of presenting daily Bible verses, coupled with historical and linguistic context and our traditions, was exceedingly interesting to me. I was immediately hooked. That was eight years ago, and I’m still a listener today. It is one of my sources of Catholic information, and a daily respite from the secular world.
The Plane Ride
A few years later, I was flying back from New York to Orlando, and a young man of about twenty-nine sat next to me. Almost immediately, he asked me if I minded a conversation. I hadn’t yet buckled my seatbelt. Now to know me is to know I like to sit predominantly in silence during plane rides. I use all the white noise of the flight to decompress from the stress of travel. I was impelled to say yes graciously, and we spent the better part of three hours going back and forth about his life and his upbringing in one of Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish communities. He had broken away from that isolation (as he described it) but was still connected to friends and family. He was on his own path, running his own business outside the confines of his community. His attire was that of a 90’s grunge artist, so you wouldn’t know his background unless he told you. He described to me a lot of trauma (emotional and physical), a lot of pain, and what sounded to me like a lot of self-medicating. After a long conversation about his religion and culture, he eventually asked me about my religion and asked me to explain it to him. He specifically asked me to give him the important points. After four years of listening to podcasts and learning, I froze. My brain just stopped working. All that information was stored, but I couldn’t condense or highlight it, much less verbalize it. I can recall the moment now, and the feeling of blankness. He looked at me, a little disappointed. He wanted either inspiration, information, or debate. Not sure which. I was able to muster some words, but no real semblance of harmonious beauty that might have moved him. I still think about that missed opportunity today. Maybe our paths will cross again.
That night, I set out to never let that happen to me again. As irony would have it, and at that precise moment in my life, I needed reading material and a good subject matter to dive into. I had just finished my first year of law school, but had to set it aside due to professional and personal responsibilities. Namely, my job and family needed my attention. What I realized at that point was that I did not want to take a break from studying and reading. So, I focused on Catholic philosophy and theology. I remember some time ago, during a homily, a visiting priest said, “Theology is faith trying to understand itself.” Indeed, it is.
Love & The Mind
Foundationally, Catholic reading begins and ends with a Catholic Bible, and its helpful interpretive footnotes. To accompany that, I suggest the Catholic Catechism. If you are feeling particularly frisky, add the Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma by Ludwig Ott, which will give you 2,000 years of scripture, interpretation, and tradition. The Catholic Dogma book (as the other two are) is pure beauty and harmony. The irony is, the secular world has given the word “dogma” notoriety and a negative connotation. Our enemy, the great deceiver, never sleeps.
Jesus said, “You shall love the lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” For me, loving God with my mind means reading and learning. We have been given the gift of consciousness, intelligence, and reasoning. Use these gifts to love God. I am embarrassed to say I only began to love God with my mind and through my readings since 2023. Because of this, and like St. Ignatius of Loyola once said, the Lord has seen fit to “open my eyes just a little,” I’ve read approximately 25 books since. The gospels and the New Testament twice, and quite intentionally. This year, I began reading the Old Testament as well as Gallagher’s The Discernment of Spirits, an Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living. I have another 14 books in the queue. Stand outs for me so far are Trent Horn’s “Case for Catholicism, Scott Hann’s Reasons to Believe, and Msgr Rossetti’s “Diary of an American Exorcist. Trent’s book should be a manual for all Catholics. We should be able to defend even the simplest of attacks on our theology and institution. Hann’s book is an easy to read, relatable book on the realities of the unseen world, and prepares you to speak to those who have lost their way. Msgr Rossetti’s book is important because you need to know how the evil one operates. How else could you overcome and progress if you don’t understand the enemy’s rules and tactics? One word of caution: approach exorcist’s books in a state of grace if possible, and if not, with lots of prayer and fasting. I bought the book and had to put it aside after the first day. It took me a year of daily rosary prayers and scripture to pick it up again and complete it. Even then, every time I would read it, I would get a knot in my stomach. The enemy does not like to be revealed, and these things are not to be played with.
During my legal studies, my biggest surprise was just how grey the law is. Much like relativism, the law in the secular world is flexible, bending, and has many shades of grey. There are underpinnings of morality in most of our secular laws, but spiritual warfare is present, and morality does live in all of them. God’s law, on the other hand, is quite binary. Good and evil are binary. True that some sins are more grievous than others, but they are all either sins or not. We may convince ourselves that, at times, a small lie or sin may be harmless or at times practical, but it is what it is, and the consequences are what they are. Sin reverberates in our timeline like waves in a pond; once started, there is no taking them back. This is not incongruent with the sacrament of reconciliation. We are forgiven for our sins through confession, and they are indeed forgotten, but the sins’ secular and worldly waves still live. This is why we must strive to eliminate sin and all its waves, small and large, as much as possible. Self-awareness of our religious philosophies and spiritual discernment help with these matters. Do I live up to a sinless ideal? I do not, regrettably, but it is important for me to understand what I am striving for, what the goal is, and what the consequences of missing the mark are. When I do fail, I reflect on how I can avoid putting myself in that situation again. Our religion is a difficult one. What other religion has an image of a crucified man at its altar? This is our target, but as He said, His yoke is light. For me, the secular yoke is way too heavy.
Grace & Free Will
Prodigal children, through their own free will, wander away from God and Jesus. For this reason, the graces of the Holy Spirit will not be fully with us. Free will is His love for us manifested, and it would be incongruent for God to override that free will. The good news is that the more you exercise the gift of your free will and turn to Him, the more grace will be given to you. Grace is the difference between your capacity and God’s will for you. Imagine you are reaching for something on a top shelf or in a pantry; there are no ladders, no step stools, only your capacity to stretch. Imagine yourself stretching not for seconds, but for weeks, months, even years. Imagine continuing to strain yourself to the point of failure, pain, and dejection. Do not give up. If you hold steadfast and if you trust, He will deliver. God knows what is in you, and trials are His way of revealing your resolve not to Him, but to yourself. At some point, God will give you the graces to make up the difference between your reach and His grasp. When this happens (and it will), His presence and His imprint on you will be undeniable. His light will shine in your eyes, in your life, and in your words.
Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-wooden-chairs-inside-church-UrFja47NUHU
