Repetitious
A New Life and a Deeper Faith
Today we have journeyed through the painful betrayal of Holy Thursday, and through the heartbreaking sacrifice of Good Friday. But I want to talk with you now about the joy of new life. About the joy of finding that Christ is really alive. You can hear Him call to you as you weep before His tomb: “Woman, why are you crying?” You can meet Him face to face, touch the holes in His hands and the wound on His side. And at every mass, you can actually hold Him in your hand, put Him in your mouth, and consume Him. It doesn’t get more real than that.
But for most of my life I didn’t believe all that. In fact, just three years ago I would have said, quite passionately, that communion was just a symbol, and that Catholics were superstitious, brainwashed, and just plain wrong… like they were about confession, about baptism, about the Pope, about Mary... the list goes on and on. I was raised in the Southern Baptist church down in North Carolina, and I was taught that the traditions of Catholicism were illogical. How was confession necessary, when you can just confess directly to God in prayer? Why baptize babies, when they don’t even understand what’s happening? And most importantly, why would Jesus actually embody the bread and wine? Christianity isn’t about magic tricks after all. So, four times a year I would take my tiny chicklet-sized bite of cracker and itty bitty cup of grape juice and pass the plate down the pew - a mere symbol, a small and forgettable part of my faith.
Years passed, I went off to college, and I had a few of those typical “searching” years. I quit going to church altogether for a while, and then I went to whatever church my boyfriend at the time wanted to go to. But by the time I reached my junior year, I began to seek my own faith, a church that was right for me. Some place with a doctrine that fit my understanding of Christianity. Some place where I felt I belonged. I started trying out lots of different churches with friends of different denominations. Eventually, I got invited to a mass. I can’t say I went with the purest of motives. The outside of the local Catholic church looked like a castle, and I wanted to see what the inside looked like. I also wanted to know what those weirdos were really doing in there. Now I can’t really tell you what happened during that first mass - I was amazed by the beauty and solemnity and mystery, and I guess God was just there waiting for me, and I felt that somehow. I wanted to understand what it all meant. So I kept going back with my Catholic friend every week, constantly whispering questions in his ear. “How does everyone know to stand up all at the same time?” “Where are those bells coming from?” “Why is everyone waving their thumbs all around their faces like that?” It wasn’t too long before my friend ran out of answers for me. I was hungry to know more, but also very suspicious and more than a little stubborn. The following summer, I found a book that explained all the different denominations of Christianity, and I opened it, determined to find a better outlet for me to explore the faith than Catholicism. Ironically, Catholicism was the topic of the very first chapter of that book! But I skipped it and read every other chapter. At this time I didn’t even know that Catholicism was an option for me - I thought you had to be born one. But I wouldn’t have wanted to consider it anyway. What about all those “wrong” things they believe? What about my family and friends and my church community back home? What would they think if they knew I had been going to mass, and liking it? There’s got to be an easier choice. But through that whole book, none of the other choices seemed right. Finally I gave in and read the chapter on Catholicism. I got more excited, more drawn in, with every detail. Especially the detail about the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, which would be starting right in the parish I’d been going to in only a few short months. Now all I had to do was get up the guts to tell my mom.
She surprised me with her openness and supportiveness. “As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons… I mean, it’s still Christianity, right?” But something else that my mother said that day made me sure of my decision to join the RCIA program. She said, “I do think you should wait though, April. You’re going into your senior year of college, and you’re going to be really busy with your hardest classes, and your job, and getting ready for graduation. I just think you should wait another year or so, until you have a little more free time.” And it was like something just flipped in my head. “There will always be a reason to wait, Mom,” I told her. “If it’s not school, then it’ll be my first job, or moving to a new town, or getting married… there will always be some reason to put it off.” I heard myself tell her that this was something I had to do now, and that I would be calling the Director of Religious Ed at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church tomorrow to sign up for the RCIA class. And that’s just what I did.
Now, RCIA was definitely one of the most amazing experiences of my life, but I can’t say it was always fun or easy. It was basically a year of un-learning a lot of things that had been ground into my head my entire life. It was a year of struggling to come to terms with things I’d always disagreed with. I can’t tell you an exact moment where I broke down and came over to the Catholic view of things. But I do remember my RCIA teacher saying, after lecturing on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, that we’d just have to pray to believe it. “It is a true gift to have faith strong enough to believe something this big,” he said. “So just ask God to open your heart and give you that gift.” So I did.
Time passed, and as Easter Vigil drew near I found myself incredibly humbled by my newfound understanding of faith. I was a small, ignorant, and finite person trying to experience an infinite God. So of course I needed Him to come to me through the five senses He’d given me to experience things with. I needed to smell him with my nose, and the Catholic church gave me burning incense, a sweet aroma that reminded me of God’s holy presence. I needed to hear Him with my ears, and the Catholic church gave me priests, representatives for Christ, that would speak the tender words of forgiveness after I’d confessed my sins. And I needed to see Him with my eyes, touch Him with my hands, taste Him with my mouth. So, on April 15th 2006 I received the unfathomable gift of the Eucharist. My infinite, all-powerful God humbled Himself so much that He became a tiny wafer of bread for me to look down at as I held it in my palm, for me to put in my mouth, and chew, and swallow. I was indeed not worthy to receive Him, but He allowed me to - not because I’d gone through all the right steps in RCIA, not because of the great things I would do as a new Catholic, but simply because He loved me.
I will never forget the feeling of walking up to the front of the church to take Holy Communion for the first time. I will never forget the face of Fr. James smiling at me as he held up that host and said, “April, the body of Christ.” I knew at that moment that the Eucharist truly was a mystery, one that I would never fully understand. But I also knew that I would never tire of trying.
So that is my story. That is my experience of the new life found through the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ. I share it with you in the hopes that you will be inspired to appreciate your own experience. Jesus loves us so much that He comes to each of us in our own special way. We are the ones who betrayed Him, we are the ones who crucified Him, but on Easter morning He finds each of us where we are, He gets to us however He can, so that we might believe. He is real, and we have proof: come, taste and see.
That was a speech I did at CYFM today. And then I went out in my bare feet in the grass and threw around the football for a while. I felt pretty happy.
Tonight I went out for a bike ride. It had gotten a lot chillier, and really windy. I rode all around town. It was one of those nights when in my mind's eye, I kept seeing myself as if I was another person watching me. Does that make sense? Especially the end of my ride, when I went out to the river point park. One of my favorite places here. I parked my bike and walked way out on the little strip of rocks to the very edge of the water. And it was dark, and the city lights were shining all around, and just an inkling of the sunset was left glowing on the water. After I came back to my bike and started to ride away, I looked over my shoulder at where I'd been and it was like I could still see myself there, a dark silhouette in the twilight, staring emptily out into the Hudson. A lonely girl who is wondering why, no matter where she goes, her life is so painfully repetitious. She is wishing she could step off the edge of these rocks onto a boat that would take her sailing away, and she could stay out on the water where things make sense.
But she isn't really there. She's on this bike, pedaling home in the dark back to real life, back where nothing's certain, nothing's as it seems, and all of it is strangely similar to the life she tried to leave before.