​Religion was a predominantly cultural phenomenon for me until I hit college. It was just in the air, a fact of life that one incorporated into one’s identity in one way or another throughout the tumult of youth. Sometimes you embraced it; sometimes you fought against it; most often it was just there like a piece of furniture that you never really expected to go away. You could push it around, put it in different rooms or the closet, put your feet on it when people were over, etc. Other people might have different furniture that might appear to feel more, less, or equally comfortable with respect to your own, and you might comment on that in more or less admiring tones from time to time. But your house was your house, and theirs was theirs, and no one really made a big fuss about the difference, it seemed. The most serious religious arguments I remember at all were among early grade schoolers about whether Christmas, Hanukkah, or Eid was better (i.e., who got more stuff), and then a distinctly unsavory situation in Catholic high school when a group of students started chanting “Jews killed Jesus” at the other team. But these were a function less of spiritual conviction than of tribal opportunism. (The “Jewish” school was in fact predominantly Protestant Christian. But since when have facts mattered to teenaged idiocy?)

College was when religion actually began to pose itself as a serious question. I think this is because college was probably the first time I seriously encountered people who actually hated religion, or at least Christianity in particular, and not merely in the adolescent way of getting mad because mom made you turn your phone off at midnight Mass. Of course, I don’t think they would have called it hatred; genteel, educated hatreds love to rationalize themselves heroically, especially when given a good opportunity. Pointing specifically at the idiots, they say, “See? These haters represent you,” and then pretend that you failed to object both to the idiocy and to the association of yourself with it. Having had that happen several times, especially from people who I had hoped would have known better, certainly made a difference for me. While I had no problem with opposition or disagreement (a couple of my best friends do not subscribe to organized religion), it was wearying to stay among people who acted smugly self-righteous while casually & erroneously smearing what I believed. And so this set up a choice: Stop hanging around those people, or maybe try to have an awkward conversation about it, or…what? After several years, I eventually came to the conclusion that I did not want to spend my working life in a default culture where the things I held dear were regularly abused as dangerous and malicious ignorance.

On that note, I probably could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble by choosing a more explicitly Catholic career path. But at the same time, I certainly gained a lot of insight from experiences such as, say, realizing that someone infected the chaplaincy computer with a pornographic pop-up window virus, or going to mandatory religion classes in medical school where it was assumed that Catholics worship Mary as divine. Some people have the grace to bear such affronts with equanimity fairly quickly, but some of us need more time to get over the initial shock and the defensive reaction before we can really develop a degree of compassion for the people who tirelessly malign us, often without deliberate spite and due to their own previous experiences – e.g., idiots chanting “Jews killed Jesus”.

Along those lines, I should also say that I encountered and occasionally fell into a degree of counterproductively rabid zeal. This was almost all manifestly external, as though the essence of religion were a Procrustean series of propositions that you began by blind assent and continued through querulous argumentation. I remember sitting around thinking I had to study the whole catechism if I really meant to be serious about the faith. And then there was the fear of “dry spells” and various attempts to jump-start a sense of coasting along effortlessly. In retrospect, this was all patently self-centered, like the puerile disputes about gifts — What do I have to do to get the most pleasantness for myself out of this, and how do I avoid the difficulties? It probably would have been more salutary to spend more of that time either doing schoolwork or going out socially. The fact that God’s forgiveness is limitless should have been a clue that getting it right the first time is not a critical priority.

This is of course not to deny that getting it right is important, or that there are standards which require us to change our behaviors and attitudes if we wish to live by them properly. Complaisance is certainly a bad thing, but an undue fear of complaisance or scrupulous fear of error can be an equally paralyzing obverse. In light of this, it’s very easy to fall into the critics’ trap of impossible perfectionism. After all, it’s so embarrassing when people ask you about issues and you don’t have anything significant to say! And God forbid you should ever do anything wrong while being a professed Christian. Even then, you’re not really supposed to believe anything until you have all the facts, right? Show me proof that God exists. What are you, some kind of anti-science fundamentalist? Don’t you know about Galileo and the Inquisition? Aren’t you supporting Jew-hatred and gay-bashing? You’re such a misogynist! Etc. ad nauseam.

But it’s fundamentally bizarre to Christianity (if not to religions in general) to begin this way. I mean, it’s not like Jesus went around asking people to check boxes on a survey in order to rank discipleship. Can you imagine? “On a scale of 1 to 10, what do you think of gay people? Are you in favor of the death penalty: Yes or No? Have you ever had an abortion? How often do you sin? Ok, thank you very much. We’ll evaluate these responses, and if we think Christianity is for you, you’ll receive your membership card in the mail. Have a nice day!” I’m of course being facetious. I really don’t want to denigrate the importance of matters like these. I would just make the argument these days that a strong inclination to place “issues-based” questions front-and-center and to demand strong, definitive answers to such is, religiously speaking, putting the cart before the horse and very likely to lead to frustration and disillusionment. I remember as an undergraduate being subject to that kind of constant bleating assault, and it did lead me to seek refuge in solid propositions and arguments to throw back. Now, there certainly is a role for people who can do that constructively, but not everyone can or should. I think that I and others who felt cornered into that position unfortunately spent a lot of time beating ourselves up while alienating those who were on the fence. The struggle will not always be pleasant, but if it becomes joyless and counterproductive, maybe that’s a signal to step back and switch gears.

One of the things I finally began to realize after college is that some people are never going to be satisfied, and that their objective is not to get to know you and why you think what you think and believe what you believe so that you can both come to some kind of common ground (or at least non-destructive co-existence, i.e., what used to be called “tolerance”), but rather to beat you down until your capitulation temporarily quenches their desire for affirmation. Beware of this, and learn to avoid or ignore it. (You will likely meet some Christians who suffer from the same “verbal beat-down = spiritual victory” mentality. It may even be you.) Anyway, dealing with all of that can be quite exhausting. It was for me, and I needed a break.

But I started to come back around when I realized that the way I ideally wanted to treat people was falling right in line with Christian notions of moral and social cohesion. Duh, the foundation of Christianity is interpersonal. And often paradoxically so, at least in the light of deductive reasoning. But who predicates their own interpersonal relationships on deductive reasoning? Did you draw up a logical argument to determine whom to choose as your friends? Do you set up the pros and cons of falling in love with someone? Note again that I’m not saying that such thinking has no role in interpersonal relationships — it certainly does, especially when one is trying to work out problems that invariably arise. But it cannot be the basis of love.

That sounds very pat, but it’s not. I’ve summed up in a few paragraphs over a decade of false starts, U-turns, and unmitigated disasters. One of the things I continue to struggle with is the gulf between our forgiveness and God’s forgiveness. Sometimes, we hurt others or others hurt us, and there is always, under the right conditions, forgiveness from God. But what about from the people to whom the damage has been done? Can there ever be repair and full restitution? These days I think that in this life, no. There are wounds that time cannot heal, and not for any reason of deliberate hardheartedness, but from the fact that we live in a Vale of Tears and we are not as we ought to be.

At the end of the day, I take the view that there are things to do in life and you do them, but not everyone can or should do the same things. The Church is large; find where you fit and go there. I came back home from dropping out of medical school to find myself wrapped up in several years’ worth of choral work and foreign language instruction at a parish in my city. While there, I investigated a vocation with the Dominicans, but I ultimately decided that I really needed to be around to help my family. About 5 years later I can see that was the right decision. Remember: One of the patron saints of missionaries is St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who pretty much never left her home.
I’m now teaching at a Catholic school for boys, and I’m pretty much where I want to be. The famed Williams network didn’t do this for me; the Catholic network that I managed to fall right into about 6 years ago did. I’m busy with my job and my immediate family. I don’t know for certain whether I’m called to be married; I’ve been exploring the possibility, and I’ve also had the opportunity to get to know some members of the Opus Dei and explore long-term options for the single life. It’s too soon to tell; but in the meantime and through it all, life continues to be worth living.

The Otter