ARTICLES
January 2000 ARTICLES
Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Hope and Soaring Joy
How One Returned to the Church
Editor's Note: The following is Part II of the story "I Could Not Hypnotize Myself," which appeared in the December 1999 Mission. The story is condensed from Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home to the Church, edited by Donna Steichen and published by Ignatius Press. The 375 page book costs $14.95. To order, call (800) 651-1531, or visit Ignatius' website at www.ignatius.com.
BY MAUREEN CASSIDY QUACKENBUSH
After my summer of work, travel and escapes, I came to rest at last at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Evergreen is an "alternative" school where classes are small and the curriculum is called "innovative" because it takes some account of the need for coherence. I was accepted for admission and even won a modest scholarship on the basis of an application essay that answered the question of what I wanted to do with my education. I wanted to become a witch, I said, and live on the moors, dispensing herbal cures and communing with nature. Apparently I fitted their idea of the educated woman.
Deeply relieved to have only studying and moderately interesting classes to think about, I liked Evergreen at first. The curriculum seemed less arbitrary than had been the case at my first college, and the students more motivated and interested in their studies. Yet even more than at my high school, the Evergreen students were bent on being counter-cultural, creative and unique. Uniqueness was hard to achieve, as there was also a strong unspoken pressure to conform to a vegetarian, leather-free, anti-nuke, bisexual, consciousness-raised pro-Sandinista line.
As long as I didn't think about what in the world I was doing, or what I ought to do, I was content enough. My thoughts were disjointed and unclear and my behavior became entirely whim-driven. As I grew more and more indifferent, I slipped gradually into a state where it didn't matter what I thought, even about simple day-to-day matters. I experimented with strange diets, just to see what it would be like, for instance, to eat only apples for a week, and I continued to look for relationships with men that would be adventurous. My roommate was a lesbian, and for a while I considered the possibility of being one, because the lifestyle of a houseful of women I knew looked so happy and wholesome. They baked their own bread and had a big garden and made beautifully crafted pottery.
Trying to create my own happiness, involved in progressively more confusing relationships, unable to shake the growing feeling that college was only a more expensive continuation of high school, wondering at one level why I was there at all, I finally realized I wasn't just having occasional episodes of gloom. Rather, I was deeply and completely unhappy. This was an admission of utter failure to one taught, as I had been, that we are always responsible for our own happiness and should live by slogans like "visualize yourself bathed in a golden pool of light," and "you are what you believe you are."
For the first time, I reached a boundary where I felt I could no longer take care of myself. Sitting by a pond in the woods behind my house, trying to write something deep and significant in my diary, I ended up sobbing instead, and "asking" for help from the universe at large, from something I didn't even know. The whole action was unreasonable, and uncharacteristic, too, as I didn't believe in God. But it was an important moment, because it was an admission of my own limitedness.
I think God answered me immediately. Very shortly after that, I met my husband-to-be. First he tried to arrange an introduction through some mutual friends at the school office where we both worked, but I shied away from that proposal as contrived and unnatural, like dates, which I abhorred. We met, finally, at a party, and within a few minutes he mentioned that he liked President Reagan. Never having met a person with such tastes before, I was first stunned and then intrigued. We went on to discuss the current political situation, about which I soon realized I had many prejudices and no information. He said he was going to switch to a small college in California named Thomas Aquinas College. He described it as offering an education rather like that prevailing in the Middle Ages.
The next time we met, David had a little Gideon Bible in his pocket, and he said he was considering Christianity. I told him I knew from experience that one place you don't want to go for that is the Catholic Church. His response was, "Really? Tell me more about this." So I tried and discovered once again that I knew nothing at all about it, except for the undeniable fact that my parents had fallen away. He, on the other hand, knew of various Catholic people he admired, and he had read a lot in authors like G.K. Chesterton and Russell Kirk, as well as the Anglican C.S. Lewis. During our third meeting, he said that if Christianity were not "true," then he'd like to go out with a bang. The image he invoked was of taking a tremendous amount of drugs and driving a motorcycle off a cliff at sunset.
"Truth," for me, had been a very limited notion, insofar as I had had a notion of it at all. Long before that time, I had accepted the principle that there is no truth, that all is relative in this world of mirrors. People who divide the world into the true and the false, I thought, fail to see all the gray areas -- which are chiefly in the moral realm. I think this is the natural conclusion of a mind that hasn't learned to reason clearly, whenever the resolution of two conflicting views would mean that one reputable person's deeply held conviction must be wrong. Or, worse, that someone would have to change what he is doing.
But once I considered the possibility that things could be true or false -- that there actually is a Truth -- my whole world turned right side up. Fired with youthful hope for goodness, I was as excited as I had been when I thought that perhaps the Lord of the Rings had really happened. My habitual effort to look happy -- or as happy as was consistent with the knowledge that the world in general is not going well -- was replaced by actual hope and soaring joy. I realized how much despair I had been carrying around as a skeptic.
Now, clear as could be, I had before me again the question: Is there a God, or not? Having just come to see how glorious it was that there is truth, it was not hard to see Truth as a name for God. Or to accept what the authors I took to reading had to say about the alternatives: either there is a God, or this world is not only meaningless but a cruel joke.
The first remedial work I read was C.S. Lewis' "The Weight of Glory", which was not written as an introduction to Christianity, but was very beautiful. It served to demonstrate that there exist in the world intelligent people who can discuss Christianity without sounding like gullible idiots. Not that I had read any gullible idiots on the subject; I had just presumed it was that sort of a religion.
Next I read Russell Kirk's discussion of the demise of higher education, which rang entirely true, and made much sense of my experiences with college. Then I read Lewis' space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. They likewise rang true, and they were complete eye-openers as to what is really happening in the world. Lewis is also very good at bringing out the Magic of it all. And yes, to believe in God meant believing, or rather, knowing, that limitless Good, the very best kind of magic, is really real.
At David's urging, I also read the Thomas Aquinas College handbook, and its statement of purpose, called the "Blue Book." It struck me as possibly a bit narrow-minded, since the authors thought you could search for and find truth and be a Catholic at the same time, without these coming into conflict. But I was willing to be proved wrong. After weighing my fear that it wouldn't be as good as it sounded, and my realization that I would no doubt be shocking my parents, I decided to apply. That meant starting college all over again.
At Thomas Aquinas College, I found actual higher education, completely new and yet what I had thought all along that college was supposed to be. Near Lent, in my freshman year, I entered the Church. Many of the students were influences in my conversion, but my roommate was especially pivotal. She knelt by her bed every morning and night to pray, and never pried or pushed her religion on me, but always thoughtfully answered my questions.
I also think my maternal grandmother had been a "prayer warrior" on my behalf. I didn't really know her, and hadn't written her letters since I was a child, but when I converted, I wrote her a letter telling her about it. She died a few months later, and I was told this letter was very precious to her.
Once I accepted that there is a God, I had no problem with miracles or doctrinal things, since God can do anything and He calls the shots. I did have habitual thought patterns to undo. It took me a long time to really see that abortion is wrong, even though I promptly accepted that this is the Church's teaching. I had to experience as a mother the passing of time from morning sickness through to a baby in the arms to come to see that one. I also feared that an obligation to go to Mass every Sunday might be too hard to keep, as I'd never made such a long-term commitment before, and I'd had a good deal of experience at flaking out. But the college, offering constant food for thought and faith, was a good place to be a fledgling Catholic.
At the same time, of course, I discovered what a suffering Church she is and learned of the scandal and corruption that seem to be part and parcel of the human condition. In our country Catholics in general do not seem to be awake in their faith, and I think it's probably because we don't suffer enough.
But I know that discouragement is a failure to hope, and that with God all things are possible, so I am not willing to give in to the kind of bitterness I have seen in some fellow Catholics at the internal disorders that afflict her. These trials should elicit from us a clamor of prayer, rather than bitterness or withdrawal. I know Christ's Church isn't going to fail. Her treasures are so great that even when we diminish or veil Her beauty with watered down liturgies or bad homilies, His living grace still turns people's lives around and makes them whole.
Now that I have seven children, I do worry about passing the faith along to them. The self-serving habits of a lifetime tempt me away from fully living the virtues I'd like my children to see in their mother. But I try to remember that God works through His weak servants to accomplish His will, and He doesn't ignore prayer. I don't know how I could have gone on living if God had not rescued me, and I'll never be done thanking Him!