in communion

Well, I received the Blessed Sacrament in the Catholic Church this morning... for the first time in nearly 13 years. And I registered in my parish.

It was actually not a huge transcendent experience. I have been having some health issues lately - some lower abdominal pain. I know that the techs doing an ultrasound the other day found ovarian cysts... but I don't know the size or whether they are benign or malign. And I've had some extra-curricular bleeding. Like spotting for one week. Then nothing for one week. Spotting for one week. Then nothing for one week.

Since I'm 50 years old, this did not particularly alarm me. But given the presence of cysts, it's starting to alarm me. It now seems more likely that it's related to cysts than a perimenopausal menstrual freak out.

The long and short of this is that I started bleeding lightly this morning. And it looked more like normal blood than like menstrual flow. It was really alarming under the circumstances. And it started a couple hours before Mass.

So I was distracted by thoughts of cancer and dying. And then during Mass, I was also distracted by problems with the music. And then after Mass, no bleeding.

But I persisted and received the Eucharist. And I'm back in communion in the Catholic Church.

so... they let me back in :-)

I went to confession a week ago, after a long hiatus from the Catholic Church. There was one issue that needed to be resolved before I could be in communion. I got married in the Orthodox Church.

Now, the Catholic Church does regard Orthodox sacraments as valid. I already knew that. And in a Catholic-Orthodox marriage, it's more common for the Catholic to get married in the Orthodox Church than for the Orthodox to get married in the Catholic Church... because Orthodoxy does not accept Catholic sacraments. (is that complicated enough?).

So there was no question, really, that I technically had a sacramentally valid marriage. But there was an issue involved. I had left the Catholic Church before I got married. This was not a Catholic-Orthodox wedding. It was an Orthodox-Presbyterian wedding, and I was the one who was Orthodox. The priest decided that he needed to consult with a more knowledgeable priest at the cathedral in order to sort out my situation. I just needed to be patient.

Well, on Monday I got a phone call from the priest. He had spoken to someone at the diocese, and we set up a meeting for last night. I had no idea what the upshot of the meeting was going to be. I figured that I'd be going through a period of discernment. Maybe RCIA. Maybe dig up my sacramental certificates. Maybe get the marriage blessed. I really had no idea.

As it turned out, he was counseled to find out if I'd given this some thought. I told him how I decided to return to the Catholic Church (clearly the Holy Spirit!)... and it reminded him of St. Augustine's conversion experience as he heard St. Ambrose preach. Except, of course, that I had already been confirmed Catholic.

Here's basically what happened. Catholicism had surprisingly started to look more and more like the only Christian refuge from the ravages of dualism - as it is expressed in the modern world and in the other churches. I had also recognized, as soon as I heard of it, that Mother Teresa's spiritual darkness was not atheism but the dark night of the soul. Her darkness comforted me actually. Regardless of these musings, I had not had a single truly serious thought about returning to the Catholic Church.

Then, I found myself with a tight Sunday schedule, but still wanting to go to find a church where I could worship God. I figured that the local Catholic parish would be my best bet because I knew their doctrine and knew that they would have several Mass time options. So I went on Google and typed in "catholic falls church." Up came the parish, and I found out the Mass schedule.

The music (guitar Mass) hadn't changed at all over the years. It was sounding tired and dated. But as soon as I got past that and into the readings and responses, I really knew that the Mass was speaking directly to me. The readings were about coming home. And then they sang one of my old favorites: "Hosea" (come back to me).

It was like I was being directed to do something that I had not once considered seriously in 12 years. The ease with which I put on my Catholic self during Mass astounded me. And more to the point, my Catholic self was clearly my TRUE self. By the time I walked out of Mass, I knew that I was still a Catholic Christian in my heart. The Catholic Church was where I needed to be. And I was willing to do whatever it took to sort it out and figure out a way to return... even revisit the Immaculate Conception.

When I spoke about this with my priest last night, he confirmed my belief that this was the real deal. I had not given a lot of conscious chronological time to the decision. But instead, I'd had a definitive experience of the Holy Spirit's guidance, and I KNEW. And the experience had already changed my life.

So instead of having to go through a lot of waiting, which I was actually planning to do, he offered me the opportunity to make a profession of faith right there in his office and return to the communion of the Catholic Church (I guess he did find out that the marriage was valid in the eyes of the Church). So of course, I made a profession of faith. And he welcomed me home.

As I said to my old friend George, "They let me back in!" To which George replied, "I kind of thought they would. :-)"

honor your mother

This is a tribute that I wrote for my mom's memorial service in August 2004. I just came across it a few days ago and thought I'd post it before it gets lost again in a stack of papers and computer files:

My mom liked to tell me the story of how one day, she practically jumped out of her skin when her 5-month-old daughter uttered her first comprehensible English word: "Hi." Years later, in flipping through my baby book, I came across a rather extensive list of my pre-1-year-old vocabulary. So I guess you could say that I'm the verbal one. But I'll try to keep this brief and just tell a few anecdotes that I think give a pretty good character sketch of my mom.

One day when I was 5 years old, I was in the kitchen hoping to lick the icing bowl as my mom baked a cake. Either she was in a contemplative mood, or perhaps she sensed that her rowdy little daughter was also her most contemplative child, but she started talking to me about the Russian writer Dostoevsky. Okay... like I'm a 5 year old, and my mom is telling me about one of the most philosophical of all novelists, and for her it's like the most natural thing in the world! What's funny is that she was totally on target in gauging my interest. In fact, what she said haunted me for years. That day, she primed me for what was to come fourteen years later, when I finally read Dostoevsky. I fell for his work like I've never fallen for any other writer, except maybe Shakespeare. Dostoevsky spoke the language of my soul. He challenged me in matters of faith and mind and spirit, and I eventually wrote my Master's Thesis on his novel CRIME AND PUNISHMENT—the very novel my mom had spoken of on that day when I was 5 years old. It's like I had not even developed seriously abstract thought yet, but she knew me. She just knew I was her Dostoevsky girl.

Years later, she shocked everybody by cashing out her retirement to buy my brother a computer. The kid had already gone through other expensive equipment that was now sitting on the shelf, so nobody—including me—thought this computer thing was a very good idea. But my mom knew her son. And today, thanks to my mom's investment and belief in him, he manages the team that gets your NVidia Graphics card to communicate with your computer.

But let's back up for a moment. My mom—Jean Collins— was born in 1919 on a ranch outside of Hugo, Colorado, but she grew up mostly in Sedalia, Missouri. Her mother was a painter. Her aunt a piano virtuoso—a child prodigy who played classics and ragtime, and who later helped found the Scott Joplin Festival in Sedalia. My mom never thought she had the kind of talent that her mother or her aunt had. But don't let her self-effacement fool you. My mom was a culinary artist. That is, she was a champion cook. She won 9 prizes in a national contest which had 12,000 entries. She won 33 ribbons at the Los Angeles County Fair. But she never talked about those accomplishments. The only reason I still know about them today is that I came across a collection of newspaper clippings on my mom's baking feats.

See, my mom didn't talk much about herself. But she DID keep clipping files. A few years ago, I got a great example of just how deep her files went regarding me. She had already given me the contents from my college years—my first newspaper article, the program from a musical I'd played woodwinds for. But her files, it turned out, went much further back than that.

One day, I got a manila envelope in the mail. It was from my mom. When I opened it, it had just this old, yellowing piece of notebook paper in it. That's all. When I turned it over, though, my eyes opened wide. I could NOT believe she'd kept it!!!!!

You see, when I was about 10 years old, my mom enrolled my brother and me in a karate studio. One Saturday night, my studio was hosting a karate tournament that was being judged by this young TV actor I was a fan of. He wasn't a legend yet. He was just the guy who played Kato on THE GREEN HORNET. But over the years, as Bruce Lee became a seminal figure in kung fu cinema, I often wondered what became of the autograph I'd gotten him to sign that night. When I opened up the manila envelope, that old autograph was right there in my hands again... probably for the first time since the night, some 30 years earlier, when Bruce Lee had jotted it down on the flimsy piece of notebook paper I handed him. My mom had kept it... not knowing that he'd someday be a legend. She kept it because she knew it meant something to me.

I'm sure my siblings got similar gifts from her files as she cleaned them out in her later years. She'd kept them for her kids—who were, I think, the stars in her life. A week before she died, I walked into the room and with all the little strength she had, she beamed at me and said "There's the one I love." At Sunrise of Falls Church, where she spent the last few months of her life, they said she didn't talk or smile much when I was not around. But, before she lost her sociability to dementia, she would talk at length about her kids and grandkids, her mother and sisters, my dad's family, my cousins. I could tell you all about what my sister was experiencing in Jerusalem when I was 5, or what my cousin Dan was experiencing in China when I was in grad school. I heard all about it when my brother found his niche and started excelling in math and computer science. But I never could tell you much about my mom's life before she met my dad in Kansas City because she was so quiet about herself.

Probably because she grew up with a severely disabled older sister, my mom was a team player, not the star or her own world. At my mom's wedding, her younger sister, Marion, had been the Maid of Honor. But my mom wanted to make sure that Evelyn—her disabled sister, whom she adored—knew how much she, too, was valued. Six days after she was married, my mom sent this message on a postcard, specifically addressed to Evelyn:

Dear Evelyn—Boy, you sure looked pretty the day of the wedding! How did you like it? This is a very pretty place but we can't get used to the noise of the tide coming in. It sounds like it is awfully stormy and blowy. Jean Collins

When my grandmother needed some respite from taking care of Evelyn, my mom would take her sister into our home, to spend a month or two with us.

By the way, my mom was also resourceful... so resourceful that I still cringe when I tear the wrapping off a Christmas present because my mom had always been so adamant that the wrapping could be saved for later use if we gently removed it from our gifts—a quirk that I think was left over from the Depression.

You know, back in college when the question sometimes came up: "What does YOUR dad do for a living?" My friends would say stuff like "Oh, 'My dad's a judge.' Or 'My dad's a lawyer.'" I could top them all because my dad had bought nukes for the Air Force.

Of course, that sort of job doesn't really impress anybody in Washington, DC. But it got me a lot of mileage in Denton, Texas. Funny thing is: Nobody ever asked about my mom. Well, without my mom my dad would never have been able to do what he did. She paid the bills. She ran the errands. She got the kids to and from music lessons, to and from karate lessons, to and from band practice, to and from whatever we needed. She would go to the library and take out books to fan my interest in the English Wars of the Roses, or Homer or Virgil or Beowulf. She called the Jazz Deejay in Los Angeles to tell him about her daughter who wanted to play jazz. He turned out to be the guy who recommended that I attend University of North Texas. She followed my interests, she read the books I was reading in grad school. She just basically devoted her life to her kids, throughout all stages of our lives. And into my early adulthood, she also worked a full-time job.

My mom, in other words, was amazing. In her last few months, I would tell her that she "rocked." That she "TOTALLY rocked." And she would laugh. My mom was the woman of noble character from Proverbs 31.

so WHY zerocrossing?

It started as an inside joke. I was playing Mahjongg Towers Eternity (MTE for short), and created a very difficult puzzle that kept crossing at a center point - like an x. I called it "zerocrossing," in honor of the audio concept.

Months later, in MTE, I decided to go back to the beginning of the journey with a new username. So I chose the name of my most popular puzzle: zerocrossing. I liked the name immediately.

It could mean "silence." It could also mean something more theologically elevated, like "I am nothing, while the cross is all."

Neither of those definitions fits me very well. I do not find quiet easy, much less silence. It is difficult to still my inner being. And it is also very difficult to put Christ before my own desires. My life is filled with noise, and I am filled with self-will.

So calling myself zerocrossing is almost like a prayer - to be able to find the silence, the stillness, the place where the "edits" in my life are made possible by coming before the cross and allowing myself to decrease while He increases. I'm a learner. Not a teacher.

immaculate conception

continuation of conversation with my old friend George...

So, George, you know what just happened to me? I suddenly understood the Immaculate Conception. Or at least I think I did.

I have been thinking about it as something needed for Jesus to come. And it didn't make any sense. Why would the mother of Jesus need to be born without the stain of original sin in order to bring Jesus into the world? That would seem to take Mary out of the commonality of the human race... and defeat the whole purpose of the Incarnation and Christ's sharing in our human nature.

But I just got it flipped on its head. It's not about conditions necessary for Christ's birth. It's about salvation for Mary, as an example of salvation through Christ for us. The Immaculate Conception is about possibilities. Not that we are going to be immaculately conceived, but that we have the potential for salvation and holiness through Mary's Son. Just as the OT is full of "types" which serve as prefigurings, IC is an example, an illustration, of human potentiality in Christ (i.e. sanctity), not a condition to be met because the Catholic Church is squeamish about the Mother of God being born a part of sinful humanity.

Am I on the right track, do you think?



Old friend,

Actually, I think you've described two major aspects of the teaching, and one complements, rather than precludes the other, like looking at two integral facets of the same diamond. I think the emphasis you have insightfully realized provides an approach for you to this mystery of grace. The Immaculate Conception is about the salvation of Mary in anticipation of her being the Mother of God. She is the beginning of the church, carrying the Eucharist in the Tabernacle of her womb. In the restored state of her humanity, a gift of grace at the moment of her conception, she had the power, unhindered by sin, to choose or to reject God at the moment the angel came to her. God is the Lord of second (and third or fourth, etc.,) chances, and this was a second chance for humanity to cooperate with the grace of God in solidarity with Mary. As the Fathers wrote, she is the archetypal New Eve, sinless like Eve before the archetypal fall, as Christ is the New Adam, so her solidarity with humanity is really more profound because the injury of sin also injures the solidarity of our humanity. (Evil is a deprivation of good, which has no substance in itself.) All Marian dogma is an affirmation of who Jesus truly is, just as her fiat to the angel presages the line from the Our Father, "May your will be done," which is what constitutes the kingdom, "as in heaven, also on earth" (the literal order of the prayer in ancient Greek). In other words, I think you have experienced a moment of enlightenment. (Besides, her prayers have literally saved my life more than once, I am deeply grateful to her for her prayers.)

Pax,
George



Hello George,

Okay, so instead of limiting Mary's freewill (turning her into an automaton who is BOUND to obey God), the Immaculate Conception gives her absolute freewill – i.e. the same freewill experienced by Adam and Eve before the Fall, but which we do NOT experience as a consequence of sin. Our freedom of will is always circumscribed by sin (or perhaps experiences static as a result of sin). So she is TRULY able to make a choice to obey God, without the static interference of sin.

These are perspectives that make sense to me. The idea I was reacting to (not expressed by you, but expressed by others with regard to the Immaculate Conception) is that God is too holy to touch anything impure. That, to me, just does not make sense in conjunction with Christ's actual down-in-the-grit ministry. If confronting sinfulness and brokenness on the frontlines were against God's nature, then I don't see where we would get Christ's engaging sinners - in opposition to the Pharisees (who WERE too "holy" to touch sinfulness) – or even where we would get the crucifixion. So the difficulty I was having was in seeing Immaculate conception in the sense of a holy God who did not want to truly embrace humanity... not in the sense of grace that afforded Mary the perfect will to obey freely. In other words, I was perceiving it as essentially anti-Incarnational.

But the idea that in the Immaculate Conception, God offers Mary true freedom of will to obey Him and that the Immaculate Conception anticipates and prefigures our salvation and sanctification – those concepts I can grasp and embrace.

And frankly, if I can work with the Immaculate Conception, then I can work with Papal Infallibility. My issue with Papal Infallibility WAS the Immaculate Conception. (I know you understand the conncetion).

You write:

God is the Lord of second (and third or fourth, etc.,) chances, and this was a second chance for humanity to cooperate with the grace of God in solidarity with Mary.

I write:

I'm usually working on the etc. chances. :-)

You write:

In other words, I think you have experienced a moment of enlightenment.

I write:

Epiphany. :-)

I made an appointment with the parish priest. Sacrament of Reconcilation. Tomorrow (Wednesday night - probably "today" by the time you read this). I'm Catholic at core. And I don't see any reason to postpone my homecoming.

so what's a zerocrossing?

People always ask me what my username—zerocrossing—means. I'm acquainted with it as a term used in digital audio to indicate the place where the signal - the sound wave - crosses the baseline.

Here's a photo from a sound file:




Now, if we expand the view horizontally, we end up with something that looks like this:




See the horizontal line being crossed by the squiggly lines? That's the baseline. The squiggly lines are the left and right stereo fields of the soundwave. The gray vertical line is where the soundwave crosses the baseline in both the left and right fields. That's a zerocrossing.

A zerocrossing is silence - though the silence is usually too brief to hear. But because it is silence, it's the best place to cut if you want to make a seamless edit to an audio file. If you cut when the wave is not at a point of silence, you usually end up with crackles and pops in your audio.

The baseline of silence is the best position from which to learn.

a sort of homecoming

Let me make two things clear...

I have not returned to the Catholic Church over politics. Politics is merely a symptom of a deeper disease. I have returned because of the disease.

So why did I leave the Catholic Church in the first place? Because I could not buy into the notion of the Immaculate Conception. Now I have finally come to terms with it. And that makes it possible for me to stop flailing around and finally go back home.

Allow me to recount a recent conversation with my old friend George, who is a permanent deacon in the Catholic Church:

Hi George,

I haven't been Catholic for 12 years. But I found myself unexpectedly in Mass yesterday morning. I've been attending an Anglican (not Episcopal, but CANA - i.e. Nigeria-affiliated) church. But that didn't fit my schedule yesterday, so I went to the local Catholic parish. It was surprising. I didn't feel like an alien. I feel like an alien in Orthodox or orthodox Protestant churches. They are so angry and ideological. (I don't bother with seriously heterodox Protestant churches). I actually felt at peace during Mass. Anyway, that experience has got me revisiting my argument with Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility (THE reasons I'm not Catholic). Just thought I'd share that with you.



Hello, old friend,

I understand the tangible substantiveness of the peace you experienced very well, and I am glad you had the experience of feeling at home in the Mass. There is something real in the Catholic faith that transcends time and place and human fallibility, and which is not irrational but transrational. Were it not so, I should have been distracted from it long ago by the nightmare of history. The Mass is for me a sacred place which like a moveable feast I also carry within me, congruent with the sacred vision I have lived by and for since I was young. So I live with one foot in both worlds, only as it were, for the two realms are actually united with each breath we take.

Thanks for sharing a spiritual moment. Wherever your spiritual journey takes you, I wish you well.

Pax,
George



Hello, old friend,

I love your response. I think I have at least a vague idea of where my spiritual journey is taking me. You know what the readings were yesterday? That did not escape my notice.

We are living in the nightmare of history, and the other churches are enmeshed in it - even contributing to it. The predominant "christian" ideology of our times seems to be manichaean in nature. I kept wondering why Christians could do such crazy things as endorse torture. But when the world is divided so neatly into dual opposites, and you are on the side of "light," then I guess it makes a kind of perverse sense. It has really had me down - to the point that I was wondering if there could be anything true. But then the news of Mother Teresa's spiritual darkness came. And it was, shockingly, a huge relief to me. I grasped it - and knew that she had persevered in spite of it. It was very interesting to watch non-Catholics try to comprehend the meaning of it.

Anyway, I've been bashing my head against the wall for the past several years, thinking that I could convince people they were doing crazy things in the name of Christ. I think yesterday helped me see that there's no amount of convincing that can be done. It's embedded in dualism.

I don't think I ever anticipated having more than an intellectual understanding of your diagnosis of the nightmare of history as a result of dualism - maybe because I grew up in the culture of the "victors." But now that it is unfolding in front of me - with supposed Christians leading the charge - it is finally viscerally hitting home. I think that's why the Mass yesterday seemed like such a refuge. Christians whose agenda is Christ. And who approach Him with humility. What a concept!



It is to me like walking in an unfamiliar dark woods and hearing music in the distance, so you follow the music, and when it becomes more distinct, you know you are on the right path, and if the music begins to fade, you know to pause and listen closely, and then again follow the music until you come to the safe encampment.

Let me know how things go with you in the future, old friend.

now's the tme

I have suddenly found myself back in the Catholic Church - after a 12 year hiatus over theological differences. I wasn't away from church, but from the Church.

I have recently been pondering something my friend (insert pseudonym...) George had talked a lot about when we were grad students. One day, he told me that he had figured out the fatal flaw of Western civilization. Dualism. Not the idea that good and evil exist. But good and evil as equal opposites locked in war with each other. (In the manichaean version of this construct, good needs our help because it can't win the battle by itself).

Protestantism, he asserted, was enmeshed in it. Catholicism, on the other hand, recognized that evil was not a substance in itself, but a mere deprivation of good. Good had substance because it came from God. Evil, OTOH, had no substance. It was only a negation. In other words, God had existence in Himself. Satan did not. Evil could not create. It could only mimic.

I found the concept interesting, and I occasionally dug it out in order to try to make sense of the Evangelical obsession with politics. It made some sense of their idea that God NEEDED them to put order into an evil world. It made sense of their notion that they NEEDED to flail around in the political sphere, hurling insults at and creating dehumanizing caricatures of their opponents... rather than seeking transformation of the world through lived holiness (the way that Catholic saints had been doing throughout the centuries).

But it was still more conceptual to me than real... until the past 6 years, when it became painfully real. This was not some philosophical or theological construct. I could see it up close in the Evangelical Protestants that I knew. Frankly, I could also see it in a lot of individual Catholics. But it was not a position that held any credence in the actual Church. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were not manichaean-style dualists. Neither were the vast majority of Catholic theologians..

The Catholic Church could not be contained within the manichaean dichotomies present in the American political system. It was neither conservative nor liberal. It transcended labels. It embraced policies dear to the right. It embraced policies dear to the left. And it did so by keeping its eyes on Christ, not on an ideological orthodoxy.

Somewhere, beneath my theological disagreement with the Catholic Church, this was resonating. I was meditating upon it in my heart. The answer was through lived holiness, not - as so many American Christians believe - through making an idol out of party or nation or ideological position.