Catholicism – How to Read: with Mike Bevel

Who were the homestead wives?
Who were the gold rush brides?
Does anybody know?
Do their works survive their yellow fever lives in the pages they wrote?
The land was free, yet it cost their lives.

— “Gold Rush Brides,” 10,000 Maniacs

A lovely woman whom I don’t remember meeting emails me periodically to check in on my faith. She’s Catholic, and named Margaret, so I probably met her at the one (1) catechism class I attended before I realized with the deep sweetness of unerring certainty that I was Not a Catholic.

We started emailing because I asked her not to email me any more. She organizes Dorothy Day Dinners (I imagine I’ll write about Day at some point in the future. I find her fetishization of the poor to be…worth writing about) and had sent an email to a group asking for people to contribute ingredients. It’s stone-soupy, if you will, if stone soup is a reference you’re familiar with.

I wrote to Margaret in early August, saying, “Please take me off your email list. I am so glad of the work you’re doing, and admire everyone. But after a lot of searching, I feel that my spiritual home is with the Quakers.”

So, as it turns out, my spiritual home is not with the Quakers, but that’s not the point of this story.

Margaret wrote back, “I have a sense of loss in reading that you are leaving our Communion and wonder if you would honor me with some details about what we are missing that you find attractive with the Quakers.”

So I did.

Margaret:

When I came to the Church, it was at a time where I finally was able to stay out of my own way about faith and God. Before, I worried that I was being intellectually disingenuous; I had always identified as an atheist, and thought that made me smarter than everyone who was a believer.

Of course, then God comes along and quietly reminds me that I’m not smarter than anyone at all. I’m just loud. 🙂

I knew I needed a spiritual home. I really thought it was going to be Catholicism. But I think there is so much culture there — being Catholic is more than just going to Mass. And I didn’t feel Catholicism in my heart at all.

Growing up in a faith tradition is easier than converting; and I feel maybe one should convert only if one cannot find what she needs in her own “home.” And I was starting out too late in the evening, as it was, to be an effective Catholic; I would have felt very behind all the time, and my disbelief would be heavy.

I found the Quakers because my husband said, “What about that?” He’s a Won Buddhist, a Korean-form of belief. (He’s not Korean, by the way.) His conversion was also circuitous. He had gone to a Quaker school in North Carolina (Guilford), which, by virtue of being a contemplative religion, made stretching into Eastern traditions less jarring, I’d guess. I went to my first meeting, and was sort of overwhelmed with peace and love. I could start there, from the beginning; whereas, while everyone was lovely and welcoming to me when I came to my one (and only) catechism class, I didn’t feel like I was starting from a place of love. I felt like I was starting only from a place of struggle.

I now identify as a Quaker with a sense of Flannery O’Connor about myself, and an appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I’m not completely hidden from Catholicism.

Again, I can’t stress enough how much I now do not identify as a Quaker, though I admire them greatly. Our breakup was not the never-speak-to-me-or-my-good-strong-sons-again type. I just need more religion in my religion than unprogrammed Quakerism provides. I need the Bible. I need God and Jesus. I need pews and awkward hymns and a sermon because, as it turns out, I really need structure. I didn’t grow up feeling necessarily safe and secure; when I feel like things are too come-what-come-may my anxiety spikes and I’m left chewing the skin around my fingers and counting my steps to soothe myself.

My friend Steve, through a teacher he had, explained to me once that one is probably best served within the religious tradition in which they were raised. Those cultural groundings are important. It’s not a necessity — clearly, as Zach is incredibly content and thriving in Buddhism. But, as I learn more about myself and my relationship to faith, it is a necessity to me.

I later sent Margaret an email with a link to an essay I wrote. I titled it “of possible interest” and she very graciously said, “I probably will not be able to check in on your web site but things change and I may find time to do so in the future.” I love Margaret very much, and her honesty. I probably wouldn’t have time to read my own writing, too, but would lie to me and say, “I can’t wait to read this tonight.” But I’m trying not to be like that. Margaret went on to write, “My ex-husband’s health is declining and very soon I am going to need to give more of my time to him.” She also said, “Today, I am going to try and get through the heat, cook and can spaghetti sauce and make an offering of my day to God.” And she closed by asking for prayers for her and her family.

(The thesis of this post, by the way — suffering — we’re getting to it. I promise.)

A few weeks ago I completed hospice training. As part of my religious focus, on myself and the world, this felt like something I could give that also needed giving. Right now, it makes me feel useful. My hope is that it will make me humble. There’s something self-serving in announcing, “I PROVIDE HOSPICE CARE.” And it’s there because we’re humans, with human feelings and emotions. Even Christ let slip he was the Son of God every now and again, and he was both wholly human and wholly divine.

“You sound dead-set on turning your stove on today, so I won’t counsel against it. I baked cookies on Sunday and thanked God for air conditioning,” I wrote her back, among a bunch of other things, including how now, at 40, I’m better able to hear the Still Small Voice of God. When I was younger — in my 20s — I expected, or, rather, demanded, that God speak to me in a Giant Booming Voice. And when He didn’t, I told myself, ‘Well, that proves it. He doesn’t exist.’ But none of us are smart in our 20s. Now, in my 40s, I hear God in the still small voice from 1 Kings. I think about the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and how a very small faith, if well-tended, can provide safety and shelter. It is incredibly humbling. And such a great rejoinder to Twenty-Year-Old Mike, who didn’t know how to listen.

Margaret explained the stove thing to me:

The stove thing is because my garden had produced a nice crop of tomatoes and I must “do” something with them and not let them spoil. I often think, at this moment each year, about the pioneer women, or even early 20th c. women who slaved over a wood heat stove to can. They died young but at least I have made it to 70 and have fans. If I make the heat today a prayer, it is called the prayer of the body. What I mean is this: I pray aloud or silently and this is pleasing to God. If I offer my whole day to God, my prayers, works, joys and suffering, and I unite myself to His passion and death, then suffering the heat of the day IS a prayer.

And we’re where I need us to be, now. Thee and me, we are all caught up. Because I want to think about religious suffering for a few more words.

I want to make this clear at the start: my religious beliefs and practices are very much mine. They’re influenced by what I’ve read, what I’ve heard, whom I’ve met, and what feels right to me, which is ever changing as I’m influenced by the aforementioned three other things. (“I’m new in town…” — John Mulaney) I’m sure this is true for a lot of my brothers and sisters in Christ. The idea of God requiring suffering from me is so foreign, so unutterably alien, that I am actively compelled away from the idea of lovingkindness when considering it. Faith that values suffering is a faith that I don’t wish to have. It is a faith that is alien to me. It’s a faith, nonetheless; it’s just not mine own, mine own, mine own.

Within my faith practice, suffering is something I commit against myself. When I push against the mystery of God, when I give in to harmful/uncaring thoughts against my self (cf Cheri Huber, e.g.), I cause suffering. I can also cause others to suffer, too, which is reflected back on to me like rubber and glue. There is no good in suffering, as far as I can see. And Christ, of all people, certainly does not need my suffering to weigh the love I have for Him.

But it’s Margaret’s, and not mine to take from her, or disavow to her.

“Ok, I begin,” she ends.

After years of no real belief at all, one late fall I felt called to be a Catholic.

Belief is a slippery thing to write about — it can feel instructional, when you’re really just trying to work things out; or self-congratulatory, when you are actually trying to interrogate what it is you believe. Putting your belief(s) in writing can also feel final: It’s in words because now it’s true.

I am not a Catholic. That belief wasn’t true. But I am now a Christian, which, weirdly, feels less certain than when I thought I was Catholic. Everything is a swirl of confusion, and a wrong step or a sharp exhale might collapse, well, all of it.

The call to Catholicism went like this: I had felt, for some time, that I was missing something — some kind of comfort and peace. I was also working on some essays about saints and martyrs, pieces that weren’t really an exploration of my faith, but more just an exercise in memoir couched in stigmata and holy foreskins. I found myself both baffled and moved by these people — these saints and martyrs — so filled with belief and certainty that death came as a welcomed reward.

My husband was raised Catholic, his childhood church just up the road from us. (He’s now a Won Buddhist.) I didn’t know how to talk to him about these new thoughts I was entertaining — that I needed the comfort of Catholicism, the ritual of incense smoke and wine, liturgy and bread. I didn’t know how to talk about that because I wasn’t actually sure it was what I really needed. I would feel a warm fullness in my heart when I thought about mass (in the abstract; I, to this day, have no real experience with mass), and I began vetting different saints to hire as my Personal Spiritual Guide (probably Francis De Sales, Bishop of Geneva in the late 16th century and patron saint of writers), but I never fully felt that click — the click Brick describes in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — “The click I get in my head when I’ve had enough of this stuff to make me peaceful.”

catonahottinroof2 — **Brick**: It’s like a switch, clickin’ off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there’s peace. (Paul Newman in *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,* 1958.)

So I was left with this empty feeling, a need for some connection, both spiritual as well as to a community of similar-minded believers. (I went to one catechism class at the Catholic church where F. Scott Fitzgerald is buried and felt immediately alienated from God. There was no room for doubt. Every question had an answer, rather than an opportunity for further reflection. One woman said, “It’s important to remember that we do not worship the Virgin Mary. A lot of people think we do, but we don’t.” She made this clear to us in a room with no less than eight statues of the blessed mother. To leave the church, you have to walk by a giant statue of Mary. Another statue of Mary gleams whitely outside of the church.) I was at a place in my life where I was ready to believe — where my belief unraveled my disbelief — I just didn’t know where to go.

Belief itself is very personal, much like the house rules for Monopoly are different from family to family. What I most needed was a home where not just my belief, but my doubts and questions were equally welcome. I also needed it to not be Unitarian Universalist because I’m not interested in praying to no one in particular. I didn’t want something divorced from spirituality. Zach and I went to a Unitarian Christmas service one year and it was irritating from start to finish. “Are they ever going to talk about why Christmas is important?” I whispered to Zach. He looked at my with pity and then told me to shush.

So where am I now? I turned to the Quakers — the Religious Society of Friends. (Another time I’ll write about how I put a lot of energy into exploring Santeria. Just know, for now, that I am a Very White Person who speaks zero Spanish beyond phrases that clearly mark me out as illiterate.) It’s church for introverts in a sense. I belong to an unprogrammed sect, which means we have no minister, no assigned readings from the Bible, no choir. We sit in silence for an hour, waiting for the still small voice of God to whisper words of revelation to us. I augment this with my own trek through the Bible, and with my questions, and few answers.

This site is a space for me to work on/through/with questions I have, answers I’m considering, and revelations that come to me. Nothing I write is an explanation, or even an instruction, on how to be a Person of Faith. I am mostly, and narrowly, only describing myself, and my thoughts, which you may read and agree with, or you may read and remain unconvinced. You will know, and be comforted, or you will not, and maybe still be comforted.

“As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,
take somewhere else and let some return to me.
This story ends with me still rowing.”

— Anne Sexton, “Rowing”

Title Source: “Admonitions to a Special Person” by Anne Sexton