Cost of Ministry…

My parish is having a course for the high school kids this week called ‘Catholic Summer University: A Crash Course in Catholicism’ taught by our priest and our seminarian.  Since I am attending as an Ethics and Integrity adult, all four of my kids are participating (15, 12, 11, 10).  As of the end of this, our second day, we have almost 50 handouts and that isn’t counting the blank paper we have taken notes on.  It has been awesome. 

In one of the handouts on The Christian Spiritual Life I found something under the topic of Prayer and Devotion that struck me as I read our ‘homework’ for the evening.  It wasn’t what was said but rather how it was said. 

“Woe to me if I preach not the Gospel” does not entitle us to forget: “What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

I read that, thought ‘yep’ and turned the page.

Then I thought ‘WHOA’ and turned it back.

Rereading it, the meaning broke over me, sort of like the day I realized that ‘bearing much fruit’ as a believer had NOTHING to do with the number of saved souls on your belt (the only interpretation of that verse I ever was taught as a Baptist – though of course, in more genial terms) and oddly enough these two teachings – in their true meaning – dovetail.  Immediately, some in my own experience came to mind.  I would not say for one moment that these had lost their soul.  However, I definitely have wondered if their dedication to ‘preaching the Gospel’ in order to ‘gain the whole world’ had not cost their souls, and many others, more than was ever intended to be paid…

For me, realizing that ‘bearing much fruit’ did not mean I was responsible for the salvation of souls… on the contrary, while we may be used of God, conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit alone and it is presumptious both to assume otherwise and to claim something for which we can take no credit… To realize that, and to understand that by ‘bearing much fruit’ our Lord meant ‘fruit of the Spirit’, left me in tears and left an enormous weight of responsibility and a burden of failure on the floor at the altar.

Similarly freeing, realizing that while God sends us forth to the lost world, He does not expect or even intend for us to neglect our own soul, or the souls for which we are directly responsible (ie my children), by giving so much of ourselves for the sake of others. How much more might we influence the world for our blessed Lord if we cared for our own soul, and those more immediately entrusted to our care, as we have been taught, in that allowing ourselves to be more completely transformed we would be an even better witness than we ever could be in compromising our own spiritual life by a level of ministry involvement beyond what is wise?

The example which came to mind aside, this was an important moment in my own understanding and has given me both great peace and encouragement.  God does not ask more than we can give and the first thing He asks us to give, and give completely, is ourselves… not to everyone else… but to Himself.

Once again, I learn about the importance of priorities and balance. If we want to be of greater service to God, then FIRST we must give more of ourselves to Him in personal spiritual growth through prayer, meditation, the Sacraments, mortifications, fasting, etc… and as we grow in holiness, then we are of greater use in whatever service our Lord asks of us.

 

The Dinner Table…

We ended our interview odyssey at my husband’s parents for a few days visit.  It’d been a long time, over a year and a half since we’d seen them last during which the girls and I had reconciled to the Catholic Church.  Our visit coincided with Father’s Day and my father-in-law’s birthday always falls close to that, so we had a bit of  party Saturday evening. 

After the barbeque was eaten and all but my fil and I were in the kitchen cleaning up, my father-in-law turned to me and asked how long my husband and I had been married now.  I told him it would be 16 years this december.  I had no idea where he was going with this and then he said ‘and you were a die hard Baptist too’.  He went on to say how he never thought I would convert, he knew what I was like before, and it just wasn’t going to happen… that I was the last person he’d have ever expected to become Catholic.  He said, “It’s a miracle, that’s what it is… A miracle.”  As we got up to leave the table and rejoin the others, he said he owed me an apology, that he’d been pretty hard on me over the years.

It might seem a simple thing… and yet, aren’t simple things sometimes the most profound? I don’t mean the apology, the Lord knows I owed him one as well. Rather, his understanding of where I was and just how awesome was the work of God in my life these past 3(ish) years.  On the homeschool forums it is often insinuated, if not said outright, that I wasn’t REALLY a Baptist (and any number of other things) or I wouldn’t have converted…if I had REALLY been strong in my faith… that I didn’t REALLY believe such and such because a REAL Baptist/whatever would NEVER convert to Catholicism, despite having told them I was JUST LIKE THEM. I have been accused of dishonesty at best, idiocy and idolatry of demons at worst.  Yet despite the testimony of friends who knew me before, such accusers will not believe… and in a way I don’t blame them… after all, to believe that I was what I say I was would shake their foundations… their security.  If I was REALLY like them, then what happened to me could happen to them too… and that is unthinkable.

So for my father-in-law to say what he did touched me deeply.  To have someone (friends who walked my reconciliation with me excluded) who knew me before, knew me well, share that they remembered what I was, knew how solid I was in my faith then, and have them recognize and admit just how far God has moved me when so many have denied it meant more than I can say.  For it to be my father-in-law, who rarely speaks of such things and certainly not in such a personal way meant even more.

 

Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads (Part 1)

This book by Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. was recommended to me by a friend who said “This is a MUST buy! RUN, don’t walk, RUN to Amazon…” and so I did. She is rarely wrong about such things.  I began it shortly before leaving on the two week interview odyssey with my family (husband is changing jobs) and continued to read it between my spousal obligations at each interview location. While far from finished, I must admit to being grateful the highlighter I’m using is a fresh one… certainly it is getting a LOT of use.

The book is divided into ‘chapters’ but they are not numbered, being differentiated instead by their title.   I begin here with the ‘chapter’ titled The Fertile Ground.  While it is all excellent, I’m just sharing some bits that really jumped out at me for one reason or another and read as a whole it flows much better than hacked into such ‘bits’.

The Fertile Ground

Conversion* is a turning of the heart toward God, which means that the heart has to turn away from the quick and the transient satisfactions of this world in favor of its birthright, which is everlasting reunion with God (Gn 25:29-34).

So from earliest times monks and nuns often sang psalms.  Sometimes they sang all hundred and fifty psalms, and sometimes they chose certain ones appropriate to the intentions of their prayers; but either way they all used psalms as a basis for meditative prayer – “I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the understanding also; I will sing with the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also”, as St. Paul advised (1 Cr 14:15-16). And they added standard prayers like the Kyrie after each, no matter what arrangement of psalms they sang. Historians like Eusebius, John Cassian, and, long before them, St. Paul himself (Eph 5:19; Cl 3:16) testify that the laity, too, established the Psalter as the basis of their private devotions very early in the Church’s history.  Day and night, the people flocked to the oratories of the monasteries and convents to participate in those devotions, and they were certainly welcome; the communal prayers of monastic communities are above all the prayers of the whole Church for the whole Church, and for the salvation of the whole world. In fact, the monks didn’t just admit people who happened by; they invited the laity to join in.  By the turn of the fifth century St. Porphyrius of Gasa had already added an invitatorium to the psalmodic prayers of the monks in his diocese; he put Psalm 94 – Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord – at the beginning of the devotions, and there it has stayed ever since across Christendom.  The Mozarabic Rite still calls this sonus, because it’s sung while the bells are being rung to summon people to prayer, and since at least the time of Charlemagne the rubrics in Europe have specified that it should be sung slowly, to give people enough time to get there.

Still, plenty of people could read, in the Middle Ages. In fact, the Book of Psalms was the basic textbook that the Church used to teach people to read.  And the practice is as old as Scripture itself – it’s why Psalms 110, 111, and 118 are arranged as little alphabet-books for Hebrew children.  The real problem was that before the invention of printing nobody could figure out how to make enough copies of the liturgical books so that everybody who could read could use one.  We sometimes forget that mediaeval Europe didn’t even have paper; a single sheet of parchment or vellum costs the life of a farm animal, not to mention weeks of preparation.  Even today good ink is costly, brewed by hand.  Manuscripts took years to copy, and they were unbelievably expensive.  A Psalter was worth a farm and a Bible a whole village.

To understand Mt 6:7 clearly, you have to go back to the Church’s Bible, which was the only Bible in existance when the King James commission started working on their own version.  The original Greek… In it’s classical sense… means “to stammer”, and it’s also used to mean to chatter any empty, meaningless sound.  Eustathius, the twelfth-century bishop of Thessalonika – who certainly knew his Gospel – used it in his commentary on Homer to refer to the twittering of birds.  Either way, the word doesn’t mean saying the same thing over and over; it means hemming and hawing, babbling meaninglessly instead of saying what you want to say, or just not getting to the point…. In the Latin Bible… nolite multum loqui just means “don’t talk a lot; don’t run off at the mouth; don’t rattle on like the pagans do: get to the point” – exactly what the Greek means…. So Mt 6:7 is a warning against confusing quantity witih quality; “first of all,” St. Augustine said, “Our Lord excluded loquaciousness” (Sermon 56:4).  Christ advised against twittering and talking too elaborately, which is a different thing entirely from repeating the same prayers over and over.  In fact – like pious people in the Old Testament (1 Kn 12) – he himself spent whole nights in prayer; he himself repeated what he said time and again (Mt 26:44), and he himself said that repeated prayers work even beyond the claims of justice (Lk 11:5-8, 18:1-8; cf. Jm 5:16-17; 3 Kn 17-18).

The simple answer to the objection, then, is that proper repetitions of vocal prayers aren’t vain, in either sense of the word. The words of vocal prayer are not meaningless – it’s a fault to babble them out without paying any attention to them (Mr 7:6), but words have meaning and, because the human mind operates in terms of language, words have power, the power to change the way you think.  If you repeat the words automatically, you’ve wasted this power, and you’e missed the point of vocal prayer, which is after all communication that asks for an answer.

If you’re saying it right, you can’t say it often enough; and if you’re saying it wrong, it doesn’t matter how often you say it.

But beyond that an objection to the repetition of vocal prayer in devotions like the Rosary misses the point, precisely because these vocal prayers are repeated as a way to achieve a state of clear meditation, a lively regard of God or of some aspect of God: he who only follows words has nothing, but he who possesses his own mind cares for his soul (Pr 19:7-8). Repetitions aimed at that goal can appear vain only to those who have not been taught the skill of meditative prayer.

If we’re working with our hands on earthly things, Richard Rolle asked in the fourteenth century, “what is to keep us from working with our hearts on heavenly things?”

… the laity across Europe had the habit of praying as they worked, too…. They counted their prayers by means of little stones, or they knitted those prayers together with a length of string, a circlet of cord knotted or strung with beads.

In fact, our English word “bead” really means “prayer”.

It’s also why the venerable St. Bede, the eighth-century English writer, was named that; his name means prayer.

For the word to enter our language as it did, the Angles must have used beads almost exclusively for counting prayers, and the Saxons must have worn their strings of prayer beads around the waist – the Saxon word for prayer is belt.

….the modern Rosary itself, lay far in the future in the year 800. But by then all the elements were there: the Faithful throughout Christendom, lay and clerical alike, were regularly practicing meditative prayer; they were structuring their meditations on the repetitions of vocal prayers anchored to the Lord’s own prayer, the Our Father; they added the Angelic Salutation after each Pater noster, and they counted these vocal prayers on beads, after the pattern of the psalms, grouping them in fifties for a total of a hundred and fifty.

 Some of these ‘bits’ were things that rang true from past experience… others were things that connected for the first time in a rapid fire chain and left me saying ‘duh, of course!’ such as the meaning of the word bead and how it translated to the name of the Venerable Bede (which I got before the book made the connection for me).  As much as I have appreciated the Rosary these past two years, this book (along with Hail Holy Queen by Scott Hahn) has helped me realize that I have only scratched the surface and that there is so much more to the beads I hold in my hand than I realize… and so much more that God can teach me through this devotional form of prayer.  Again the joy of new discovery breaks over me, the knowledge that no matter how long I live or how much I devote myself to the faith, the feast that God has brought me to in the Catholic Church is large enough to sustain me, fresh as though newly prepared and yet two thousand years old with wisdom that God has protected through the ages, simple enough to minister to my youngest child and yet rich and complex enough to satisfy the most discerning adult.  How thankful I am that God had not created within me a hunger for more of Himself that He did not intend to satisfy, and how I rejoice as He shares glimpses of what lies ‘further up and further in’.

*Many people use the word ‘convert’ when speaking in terms of a move from the Protestant arena to the Catholic Church.  This use does not accurately reflect what has happened however.  The proper term would be ‘reconciled’… so and so ‘reconciled’ to the Catholic Church.  This would be true regardless of whether or not they had ever been Catholic before.  The word ‘conversion’ in the Catholic faith refers to the ongoing process of the Christian walk, the Christian life. A cycle containing both  God’s saving grace (and other graces) and our loving response to Him through our prayers and Acts of Mercy, whether spiritual or corporeal, which changes or ‘converts’ us – our habits, desires, tendencies, thought processes, etc – into more Christ-like people. 

 

Caution: New Convert

Shellie over at Profound Gratitude has penned a wonderful post called Caution: New Convert. So much of what she has said here is true!  As a convert myself, my initial reaction was just to hole up, ‘abandoning my day job’ as her hubby says, and study.  Humility had come in a liberal dose (though probably more is in order) due to the manner of my conversion and I had lost all interest in ‘being used’ of God.  Which is not to say I stopped serving, on the contrary, I worked the church bazaar and all those sorts of things… but my focus was not ‘God use me,’ it was ‘I want to learn MORE’.  I just wanted to sit at His feet, reading, studying, learning, absorbing all that He had to teach me, all that I had been cut off from before. 

However, the protestant homeschooling forum often discussed matters of theology and I quickly found myself sucked into the melee, sharing with enthusiasm what I was learning… well after all, the forum’s name IS Lifelong Learners… that is its purpose.   In no way do I blame others for not seeing immediately what it took me so long to see but I do get frustrated occasionally.  The pain of being confronted regularly with what was once my own position, sinful and heretical, is a constant penance and source of mourning. 

It was the process of constantly answering questions, the same questions, over and over that brought me to blogging.  I needed an easy place to store answers.  Sometimes I would copy paste them, sometimes just give someone the link.  It grew from there.  Not any desire to ‘tell anyone how they should do it’ but rather to document what I was learning, what God was doing in my own life, in my own continued conversion… primarily for myself, but available to anyone else who might find it useful.  It always surprises me when they do.

 

I Didn’t Die Either…

Shellie of Profound Gratitude recently posted on having lived past the anniversary of her mother’s death.  While my mother yet lives, I had an experience within the last two years that resonated when I read her blog entry.

As I mentioned in another entry, I had often been concerned pre-reconciliation about what seemed to me a ‘lack of usefulness’ to God in my life.  I was jumping through serious protestant hoops, trying to do what I understood biblically to be the right things, and more than anything I wanted to be used by God.  Oh, I don’t mean anything attention getting…  didn’t want accolades or attention or approval, I just wanted to serve… even if it was a quiet hole somewhere… and I felt singularly useless.  Just existing and being loved by Him wasn’t enough (is that horrid?), I wanted to tag along with Him, help Him in His work, talk to Him as we worked side by side… much as I always wanted to do with my own earthly father.

Something God taught me during those years of frustration is that to everything there is a season, seasons of preparation preceed seasons of service or ministry.  Tools that are only half way constructed aren’t going to be much use for the job they are intended. I definitely was getting the ‘not that season’ impression.  Ok Lord, mold away (thinking potter/clay here), I’ll learn to be content here first. 

My conversion came down out of the ether,  many events spread across the years congealed, God spoke, rugs were pulled, and I hit the ground hard and running in 2004. I was 32. By the time I turned 33 in early 2005 I was Catholic in everything but sacraments… and that birthday hit me hard.  The knowledge that Christ died at that age made the whole year significant for me.  I was constantly remembering how much He did in such a short time, and how little I had done. In so many ways, I had not used my time so well or as like Him as I should’ve. Then, just a couple of months before my next birthday, we celebrated our reception into the Church and received the sacraments.  It seemed oddly appropo to be coming home to Rome in that year. 

Shellie said she began to live on the anniversary of her mom’s death… I began to live on the anniversary of Christ’s…

 

It is Jesus…

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

~Pope John Paul II

 

Communal Life… Communal Penance…

In a recent post to the Spitfire Grill, I shared something that had come to me a few months ago when meditating on why God called me into the Catholic Church and not any other member of my family (so far, that I know of). 

There was a time earlier in my conversion when I was thinking ‘why me?’  I mean, why not anyone else in my family.  I’m the youngest, and definitely the least ‘spiritual’ I guess you could say, of them all.  The thought also occurs that it probably isn’t anything special about ME per se.  Not only that but thinking about how much I wished that I could share what I’ve found with my family… and knowing that wasn’t possible. 

I don’t remember how the thought process segued but I ended up thinking about the people of Israel and God’s dealings with them.  In the scriptures, when God talks about Israel being taken into bondage, and then brought back out four hundred years later, He talks about them as though they are the SAME people.  He considers His promise to bring them back as fulfilled, even though the generation who was taken captive died long ago, even though generations have died during the captivity.  He doesn’t see them, or always deal with them, individually.  He deals with them COMMUNALLY.  He says His people have been brought home, and so they have. 

At the time, that was a rather revolutionary concept for me to understand.  It did give me a measure of comfort though, to think that however long ago my family broke away from God’s Church militant  and the Authority He placed over us, in some small way my family had come home, or begun to come home, in me and my children.

Since then, I’ve been learning a lot more about the communal life of the Body of Christ.  As gracious as He is to us individually, it really isn’t about us individually.

As a former protestant, I was intimately familiar with the individual aspect of faith in an imperfect form. As a Catholic, that individual aspect has been re-formed into a more ancient, more perfect form.  A form that helps me to be better at the individual aspect of the faith.  However, God has been teaching me more and more about the communal aspect of the faith… something I very much needed in order to have a more balanced and accurate perspective of the life of faith.  I find that balance very hard to maintain as I tend to be such a selfish, self centered person. I do not find that focusing on the communal causes me to neglect or sacrifice the individual. Rather, focusing on the communal helps me to keep the individual in it’s proper place and aids me in self discipline and sacrifice. 

Tonight we had our Advent communal penance Mass at Church.  It began very like a normal Mass, but the altar candles remained dark as we did not celebrate the Eucharist.  Having progressed through the readings, and prayed a common confiteor, our priest explained the procedure for individual confessions. 

He had two priests assisting, so they were spaced at three of the four corners of the sanctuary. At the front of the Church, there was a small table with a lit Christ candle on it which was surrounded by very small red candles which were unlit. Father turned on music, to assist us in prayer and to help maintain the privacy of the confessional in the open room. After we went to confession, we were to light one of the small candles and return to our pew to pray. After everyone had been to confession and candles were lit, we knelt or sat quietly and prayed.

I was done fairly quickly, as I tend to sit near the front of the Church and the priest I preferred was up in that corner by the baptismal font. Having lit my candle I knelt to pray and wait for my children to finish.  Slowly, one by one the individual candles were lit from the Christ candle. Slowly, as each soul was cleansed, the light spread and grew.

As the last parishioner lit their candle and sat, our priest, the last still hearing confessions, came down to sit by one of the other priests.  He leaned close and I thought he was just speaking to his brother priest while waiting for us to finish.  However, when the priest nodded and completed the absolution and blessing over him, I realized that our priest too had made his confession.  Rising, he lit the last small candle and the beauty of this service broke over me.  This man, our priest, our brother… the completeness of our communal penance made more perfect by his joining us in the sacrament. This small portion of the Body of Christ come together to purify itself during Advent, to prepare the way of the Lord as best we could in obedience to Him.

It struck me deeply, the beauty of this communal act.  The humility and brokenness of each penitent, admitting before each other and God their sins.  The mercy, comfort, and forgiveness evident in the welcoming smile of each priest. The indescribable blessing that comes with the hands upon your head as absolution is given, the burden lifted. A new beginning, ours once again.

 

My intent…

Just a clarification, for anyone who has misunderstood or wondered. It has never been my intent to plead with my protestant sisters (and brothers) to come to the RCC so that they would have the fullness of faith. I have said that is what I have found. I have said I HOPE it for others. I have clarified and defended the RC beliefs when they were misunderstood or maligned to the best of my limited ability. However, I am very much of the opinion that conversions are the Holy Spirit’s job, not mine. I am not here to ‘convert’ anyone. I am not pleading with anyone to convert. In fact, I would not do so.

For one thing, the Holy Spirit leads where He wills, and that is not always the RCC for everyone. My prayer for the ladies of the forum where I participate always has been, and ever will be, that they be in the center of GOD”S WILL for THEM, where ever that may be. It is not my place to judge anothers heart, or anothers walk with the Lord. Should someone be led by the Holy Spirit to convert, and desire to talk to me about my experiences, ask questions, that has always been a source of great joy… but it is as the Holy Spirit leads, and as I may serve Him… not out of any purpose or intent of my own.

In addition, while my conversion has been source of great joy and spiritual growth, it has not been easy. I have come to experience and understand suffering and persecution for my faith on a level I never experienced before. It is something that would’ve been unbearable were it not for the gifts of the Spirit which sustain me and the absolute conviction beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am exactly where God wants me to be. I would not wish anyone to experience the things I have without those gifts and the strength to bear it that comes from being in the center of God’s will.

I am not of the opinion that it is my job to save anyone from anything. That is something which God has made absolutely clear to me. It is God who saves. It is MY job to be obedient, to speak the truth in love, to live my life as best I can doing EXACTLY what He wants of me. That is what I strive to do whether here or in real life and if I have ever given an impression otherwise, then I am heartily sorry.

 

Introducing: The Catholic Spitfire Grill

In the midst of a wonderful three-way discussion with a friend and someone who is seriously considering conversion to the Catholic Church today, the conversation turned to the conflicts all searchers share… the need to talk to someone and the very real opposition that most converts face from family and friends.  So often on the homeschooling forums we frequent, the Holy Spirit begins to draw someone to study Catholicism but they are not comfortable entering into the discussion for whatever reason.  This leads to private messages and emails etc with those who ARE discussing… many times the Catholic ladies on the forum.  However much we enjoy that and want to be involved in their journey, it might be a blessing to these searchers and new converts to be able to talk to each OTHER as well and have companionship on the journey. Thus the birth of the Catholic Spitfire Grill, a spin-off of the email loop of Catholic ladies who participate on the homeschool forums called the Catholic Spitfire Babes, a fun way of acknowleging our passion for our faith and poking fun at ourselves. We already have a good start going with lots of enthusiasm over people we recognize and questions and answers being shared! 

Despite its origins, this is a group for anyone on such a journey so if you have questions, are feeling drawn, have recently converted or maybe have a friend or family member who has, feel free to come on over… we’ll save a seat for you.

 

The More Things Change…

I’ve been busy with the beginning of the school year and the insanity of trying to save money by painting my own kitchen. (See the other blog) However, while I have not been sharing on this blog, I have had much time to ruminate (while painting) and one conversation has been in the fore of my thoughts.  

Source or history of the rumination currently under discussion: I was talking to my Dad on the phone shortly before I began the insanity of the kitchen.  After the usual odds and ends of conversation, we began to discuss faith issues.  I was sharing with him the story of the rosary in the car and he asked something like yeah but imagine how that made Jesus brothers feel?  Trying to wrap my mind around that just stopped me cold.  There was this long silence and finally I said, what do you mean?  He said well ya know Jesus had brothers, how do you think that made them feel… and I replied that I wasn’t so sure that Jesus HAD brothers. (It had just hit me how much my beliefs had changed and I was trying to ease into discussion about what I believe now.)  Which then began a discussion over that.  Which ended in Dad saying that it sounded to him like I was trying to make the scripture say what I wanted it to.  I couldn’t help laughing.  It was so like the conversations in the homeschool forums. (Where I would not have hesitated to not only say it was doubtful that Jesus had brothers but would have launched a serious argument complete with scriptural and cultural proofs to support the belief that he did not.) I asked him if that sounded like me and he said no and it sounded to me like he was having some difficulty trying to reconcile the fact that I am NOT the type to twist scripture to fit my preferences and the fact that what I was arguing about scripture was radically different than what I used to believe… than what he believes.

So as I’ve been working and limited on time I’ve been thinking a great deal about this conversation.  While I realize that a great many of my beliefs have changed since becoming Catholic, I have not changed. My character has not changed.  I have had to face the fact that I was wrong about a great many things and make the necessary adjustments but I had to do that before (just not as much or as fast). I have had to admit the error and lack of scriptural basis for sola scriptura and learn to embrace the authority and Tradition of the Church but my passion for sacred scripture and for it’s inerrancy has not changed. My demand for absolute obedience to God’s will in my life regardless of how difficult it is for me is just as adamant as ever.  My love for truth is intact.  In fact, instead of undermining any of these things, my Catholic faith has intensified them.  If anything I am not less of who I was, or what I was… I am more.  In so many ways I thought I was LOSING by becoming Catholic, and yet God has given me a fullness and surety of faith unlike anything I’ve ever known and I’ve lost nothing, being blessed instead above all I could ask or imagine.

It is frustrating at times that I am not able to share that more clearly. Yet, whether or not the people who I’d LIKE to have see that are ever able to do so, I am forever grateful to God for the great work He has done in me these past few years and it is with great anticipation I look forward to what lies ahead. 

The more things change, the more they are the same. ~Alphonse Karr