John

I started to write about how I found the Church, but that isn't what happened. The Church found me. Reached out and grabbed me as I was muddling through my life half-asleep.

Grabbed me twice, I think. There have been two times in my life when everything changed with astonishing speed. The second was this last year, the first was when I met my wife Charlene. We got married, bought a house, joined a church and had our first child, all in the year 1985! My background was Evangelical, and she was a cradle-Catholic, though long estranged from the Church. So we compromised and became Episcopalians. We happily let the beautiful liturgies wash over us. I felt like this was just right, and she was thrilled by the resemblance to the Mass of her youth.

But I see now that I was expecting something to happen. Some sort of magic, but I wasn't sure what. I won't criticize the Episcopalians; it just wasn't happening there.

Charlene started to return to The Church in 2005. Her deeply religious nature and good Catholic upbringing made this a difficult step—not like a Protestant switching denominations. Luckily a friend recommended St Dominic's Parish in San Francisco (beautifully photographed by Gerald). I tagged along with her, but at first I couldn't SEE what was around me. It just looked like Anglicanism with diversity! Remember what Chesterton wrote, about how the Church is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? I had to move a little ways inside to actually see.

What woke me up to the reality that was all around me was a homily preached by one of our Dominican brothers, Br. Bernhard Blankenhorn. (Now Father Bernhard, in, I think, Seattle.) I must explain that I've always hungered for an indescribable something, something spooky and magical, something "otherworldly." Something that I could never pin down, and which ordinary life never seemed to have enough of.

The homily was about how Mary is the Ark of the Covenant, replacing the Israelite Ark. I learned later that this is a very early Christian idea, and I'd it's guess elementary to any knowledgeable Catholic. You'll probably laugh at my naiveté, but I'd never heard anything like it, and I found it electrifying. Why? Because it wasn't a metaphor. Or an analogy, or a simile, or symbolic. He wasn't using a clever figure of speech. It was a fact. She IS the Ark. And, evidently, it was coming from a world-view where such facts were normal and expected.

To me this was like suddenly finding myself inside a fairy tale, and having trees or animals talk to me. What it was, it turns out, was the sacramental worldview, or imagination. (Catholic Encyclopedia: "...we can say that the whole world is a vast sacramental system, in that material things are unto men the signs of things spiritual and sacred, even of the Divinity.") What I had been missing in my life was the knowledge that the world, and my ordinary life, were charged with meaning. That the world was fizzy with signs, and the signs were real, not just notions. They are, you might say, metaphors that have come alive. What I was missing were sacraments. That was the spooky and mysterious something that I'd been longing for all along.

I could write LOTS more about many exciting ideas and things that have happened to me, but that's the essence of it. I became Catholic at Easter of this year, 2007. We have a superb RCIA at our parish, if anyone's looking.

(BTW, for any Protestants worried about Catholics "worshipping" Mary, it's not so. That Marian homily (sermon to you) was the only one I've heard so far. Most homilies are on the Gospel reading of the day. In fact, I find that the Church is more "Gospel" than those Gospel places.)