Who the hell am I?

It was never my intention to write about religion on this blog. I did my bit as a religion blogger years ago and found it ultimately unhelpful in my spiritual growth. So, I've contented myself in these later years with reading religion blogs, all the while remarking to myself how glad I was to get off that treadmill. Self congratulatory thoughts about how I'd risen above pointless Internet theological contretemps and argumentation without end were my bread and butter. I was better than that, I thought.

But as it is our common destiny to become that which we most loath, I now find myself blogging about religion. Which means that I owe you, my sad and lonely reader, some explanations.

I am Catholic, having swum the Monongahela in 2002 to enter into blessed union with the See of Pittsburgh. I spent nearly two years as a novice in a small monastery in the Mojave desert, along with a certain other blogger. After watching my vocation incinerate at 450 degrees in an industrial baking oven, I returned to the world with most of the wounds I brought to the monastery completely healed by the grace of God and the love of the monks, whom I will treasure as brothers for the rest of my life. The inevitable nicks and abrasions suffered in religious life are now distant memories and I ache for my lost vocation only occasionally, as if it were a phantom limb.