Friday, April 25, 2008

Self Consciousness

One morning after Matins at Holy Resurrection Monastery, where I was once a novice, one of the monks looked at me said "Dear Br. Spyridon (for that was my monastic name), the one thing you need but can never have is a Catholic childhood!"

He said this because he had seen in me (a very recent convert to the True Church (TM)), from the moment I showed up, an awkwardness in my religion. Over the next two years he would do his best to give me the Catholic childhood I had missed. Using his unique spiritual gifts (discouragement and sarcasm), a vigorous reading program (the Sword of Honor trilogy, The Land of Spices, Speak Memory, to name but a few) and, well hidden beneath his crusty exterior, a generous amount of love and prayers, he attempted to transmute a convert still damp with the oil of chrism into a cradle Catholic.

Sadly, he was never entirely successful. I still feel self conscious when making the sign of the cross. I still don't know what to buy someone on the occasion of their first communion. Unlike the residents of Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, "... to whom the supernatural order in all its ramifications was ever present and ever more lively than the humdrum world about them...", for the me the supernatural order and clouds of witnesses are something I read about but rarely feel comfortable enough to treat as a reality.

My fervent prayer is that someday before I die I will be able to walk into a church and not wonder what the hell I am doing there.

4 comments:

FrGregACCA said...

Feeling awkward making the Sign of the Cross? Interesting. I was making the Sign of the Cross and, in what would have been much to my parents' horror had they known, praying the "Hail Mary", long before I had become any sort of Orthodox and/or Catholic.

At our Convocation one year, we had a (relatively) large number of Baptists present (long story). My colleague, Chorepiscopus Andreas was, at the beginning, giving them an overview of the Divine Liturgy and instructing them in the making of the Sign of the Cross. "Go ahead," said he, "you know you've always wanted to." And so they did.

He, like me, comes from an Evangelical Protestant background. Many years ago, when we first met, shortly after I had been ordained to the diaconate, he asked me, "What did you want to do when you were 14?"

"Be a priest," I said. "Me too," he said.

Pretty weird, no?

Arturo Vasquez said...

Hey, what about me?!

Okay, we were probably too busy listening to 50 Cent on our way back and forth from Big Bear. Anyway, I think the only thing a real Catholic childhood gives you is a sense that, even if you stopped doing something, you can always go back to it eventually. You can always go home.

That being said, I have to say that while all Catholic childhoods are precious, some are more precious than others. Unless one grew up in the good ol' days with nuns ready to rap a ruler around your knuckels for getting a Latin declension incorrect (like our beloved Dr. Q), or you grew up in an ethnic enclave (like me), a Catholic childhood might not have meant a whole heck of a lot in the years in which you grew up. I have just spoken again to a young man who is younger than me and a cradle Catholic, and he seems to be just as secularized in his core as anyone else. He might as well have been raised nothing, and he ended up apostatizing.

So who knows? You may not be worse off than anyone else at this point. And I know that you are a way better person than this cradle Catholic apostate. I know you'll be fine.

Sean Roberts said...

Sorry, Arturo... didn't mean to sell your contributions short!

123 said...

When I started attending an Orthodox church, I started making the sign of the cross for the first time (I was raised Lutheran). I wasn't very good at it for a long time. I used to sorta smack myself in the head. I once asked a cradle Orthodox (of convert parents) how you stop from doing that. She said something like, 'just don't'.