The Full Story: How I found Rome (Revised)

For most of my life, Roman Catholic culture has hardly ever had any real pull on my heart or senses. As an American raised in the States, I have a general tendency to be skeptical about any politico-cultural system that is not built around the "respect" of individual rights. It is in my blood to think that way. Any environment that expects me to act in a prescribed form of behavior strikes me as a threat to my liberty and free rights. It is "Communism", "Socialism", "Totalitarianism", or whatever - it is anything but Capitalism, which is a cultural cornerstone of the concepts of "freedom" and "liberty" for any American, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not.

But that has only been my first hindrance to any real attraction to Catholicism. I was also raised as an American Evangelical. I think it is fair to say I was unintentionally raised to think that every true experience of "freedom" must only be expressed in enthusiastic spontaneity and bold charisms. For instance, I do not talk to the people I genuinely love in the same scripted and ancient words every day to express my love for them. Whenever I greet my mother, I do not say "Hail Dana, Full of Grace..." or "Peace be with you." I do say "I love you" every time I hang up the phone with my mother, but that is not said in some pretentiously holy and archaic language. I would not say "I loveth thou" in Old English, and certainly not in Latin. Why would I talk to God that way?

I perceived Catholicism (along with all its rituals, statues, mosaics, tradition, and images) to be an artificially forced movement that built on its own dead and dying doctrines to keep itself alive. It accidentally survived through the Protestant Reformation over 500 years ago but no longer had whatever life it might have had before that. There was hardly any breath left in its over-aged lungs. It was bound to die out in the next couple of hundred years or so; that is, unless it morphed with the changing colors of the world.

But, as I have already implied, Catholicism was mostly not worth my focus. It was just that other thing going on with other people who were unfortunately raised in that wholly other and tragic environment. My idea of being a Catholic was being raised in shackles. Only the enlightened Catholics, or the ones who received a helping hand from a “real Christian”, were able to break the chains. Occasionally there were a few Catholic stragglers who stuck around in the Church, but that was just because they had some deep nonrational feeling of obligation to their families. Either that or they just did not believe all the Roman Catholic Church taught.

I remember a lot of the Christian cultural trends and movements in my high school years, ones that are still breathing and flourishing today. I remember when the mega-Church movement became very prominent in the 90's and early 2000's, and, sure enough, that was curbed by Christian leaders wanting to bring "Christ-following" back to grips with its more rugged and revolutionary roots. And there were (and still are) quite a few other young churches digging a little deeper into orthodoxy, in order to retain some type of form to Christian worship while still breeding its creative expression in art and culture. I think modern theologians often call this type of thing "ressourcement". I have recently discovered that it was a very important term used in drawing up the Vatican II documents in the 60's. Each of these movements, in its own way, was and is essentially trying to find a way to bring life to a western culture in great need of cultural identity and better health. This is all very attractive to me. In my high school and early college years, I did not notice that the Roman Catholic Church had been taking these same actions and initiatives for a very long time, while leaving a most noticeable fingerprint. It was always right under my nose, but I could not ever manage to see it.

26 percent of the world's healthcare facilities are overseen by the Catholic Church. A plethora of colleges, universities, and other educational institutions have been founded by various religious orders within the Catholic Church. She has also produced some of the most pivotal voices in global history (Tertullian, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, John Henry Newman, Pascal, Edith Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II, Dorothy Day). And after learning about the Catholic social teaching of bringing salvation to the entire embodied human person (physically, intellectually, and spiritually), I can't help but to begin to see the relation between this Catholic social doctrine and these international phenomena.

As I grew up in a Christian school system, my developing ideas of Christianity were gradually collected from literature and different people from diverse religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives. I was really hit in the face with how complex my world actually was the first year I became a student at a more or less secular university, however. Sense that first year, my life has never been the same. My education gradually exposed me to the variety of religious representations of the Christian faith, and how plausible each one was in itself. In this way, I developed a strong sense of respect for the tradition of my faith, including Catholicism, as well as other cultural and religious traditions.

My general appreciation for Christian tradition probably began during my first encounters with Presbyterianism. My attraction to Presbyterian tradition (about my senior year in high school) struck a positive note in the context of my search for much bigger things. As a young teenager, I generally assumed that traditional church settings (e.g., Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic) were reserved for cramming spirituality into a methodical category, allowing people to inhibit the possibility of a slightly less comfortable life. As a matter of fact, I often thought these people had no sense of true "spirituality" whatsoever. They did not know "true freedom" and had a repressive hand over their children and grand-children to keep them in the same fold. Like the Catholics mentioned previously, the life goal of these other Protestant groups should have been to free themselves of this enslavement. Yet, I learned that just because every-Sunday-Churchgoers at a Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic church rarely expressed their personal feelings about their faith did not mean they were not deeply and freely committed to that faith. On the contrary, I found this pervasive silence culturally reflected a reverence for faith and sincerity in one's commitments that was not present in louder and chattier contemporary church settings. Like contemporary Evangelicals, these more orthodox types had a very special way of communicating their faith. They would talk about "prayer" and the need to "live a more holy life" but would rarely announce they "loved Jesus", out of fear of being vain or simply not living up to that statement. It wasn't because they didn't deeply love their God; it was because of a holiness they recognized in their God that they rightly did not recognize in themselves.

Whenever I was painfully forced to think of Catholicism, the big word that emerged next to a stained glass window and a crucifix was “tradition." Although I never consciously thought or spoke this way, it was always in the back of my mind that tradition was inherently comprised of old and dying things. But I learned more and more, through reading Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Edwards that upholding my Christian heritage, like any and every family heritage, was a natural component of my life as a human being. I was no less obligated to the life given by my spiritual family than my biological family; both should have mirrored each other. There was an important parallel here. I was naturally prone to honoring and loving my parents and siblings at home, because I had an inborn affection for these family members and the biological/cultural life I shared with them. We played Scrabble, barbecued outside the house, sang the same happy birthday song on everyone's birthday, and watched the same family films and shows together. These festivities comprised and nurtured the life we already shared together. They were the familiar places and activities we so often turned to and developed into rituals. Even more, I had to acknowledge that there was nothing vain about celebrating our lives together at dinner tables and living room games. They truly reminded us of who we were as a family and as individuals within that family. Every family had its rituals and familiarities that made its life, as a single unit, meaningful. My friends' families had rituals and traditions, just like ours, to illuminate the cultural uniqueness of their own households, as well. They were traditions that kept us under a common roof and a common family and allowed us to respect, honor, and celebrate our family members as fellow natural participants in the same unique narrative.

I am convinced I gravitated toward more traditional religious environments because I developed a need for a more profound and synchronized experience of the rituals I was already, albeit subconsciously, keeping. One of the most memorable experiences I had in a more formal, higher liturgical environment was attending R.C. Sproul’s conference at Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church in 2006. From the moment I walked into the church, I could not avoid the reality that these Presbyterians had a deep sense of reverence for who they were worshipping and how small they were in light of it. After more exposure to Presbyterian and, later, Lutheran celebrations, their church architecture and hymns successfully communicated this vertical dimension of the Christian Faith to me. It was something they obviously had in common with Catholics. Presbyterians and Lutherans first opened my eyes to the meaning of Catholic architecture, liturgy, and sacred space. Their archways, vaulted ceilings, organs, and vestments collectively embodied an atmosphere that taught me something about the grave importance of silence.

Sometime around my first year in college my dive into theology deepened. Authors like St. Paul (the Apostle), St. Augustine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and contemporary authors like Thomas Merton began to paint a more complex image of Christian devotion for me. I began to understand the depths of what it means to humbly listen before speaking. Christian devotion, I learned, demanded the full offering of my whole self: mind, body, and emotions. Forms of sacred worship were to express that offering; the offering of body and soul was the same offering of Christ in the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Following Christ was self sacrifice (giving Christ our body, souls, and our undivided attention). This more holistic sacrifice of listening was a way of sanctifying the basic human act of listening and thus made one even more human and more free. It was a remarkably beautiful paradox of the Christian Faith. Through genuflecting, kneeling, and other humble postures of the human body, these high cultural and liturgical environments preserved the necessary and non-verbal form of this expression.

I progressively found this expression of devotion to be a desperate need for American Christians to understand. American Christianity was and still is in desperate need of a deeper and stronger aesthetic sense of reverence, silence and devotion. It's the type of devotion one might find at a wedding ceremony, a devotion performed with extreme care and attention to details. This was a certain beauty I later found in the Catholic Mass. Mass was that wedding ceremony I had been looking for all along. When I found the Mass, I found the depth of Christ's ultimate sacrifice. I found the Sacrifice of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a mutual sacrifice. We come to give, because, in giving, we receive. We come to actually receive Him in the Bread and Wine by allowing Him to receive us, and this is harmonized in the ceremonial wedding portrayal of the entire Mass. It was a pivotal and humbling realization the moment I came to it. Unfortunately, I was not yet there on my journey. I did not experience the unspeakable joy of joining Christ in the sacrifice of Holy Communion just yet.

As I entered my first year of college, I met my philosophy advisor, Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown’s presence as a devout and informed Catholic had a way of provoking me to account for why I was not a Catholic. I never exactly knew why that was. For some reason, informed people who are simply “around” have an unspoken way of commanding our justification of why we are who we are and not them. It is a very unique phenomenon. Not only was Dr. Brown informed and a very reasonable person to converse with, he was a Catholic convert. “Who converts to Catholicism!?” Nonetheless, within about a year I was reading and hearing about various Protestants and other non-Catholics who later entered the Catholic Church: G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman, Jay Budziszewski, Scott Hahn, St. Augustine, John Neuhaus, Steve Ray, Francis Beckwith, Tony Blair ... the list goes on, and names are still being written on that list.

My stronger and more intellectual sympathies for Catholicism began taking form at this time, but I was still very far from her. I liked looking at her from a distance. Anything closer would have made me feel irritated and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, this sympathy provided me with a security in picking up Catholic literature. I was less afraid of getting “duped" into appreciation for Catholic culture, because Catholicism was already becoming an institution and culture I could sentimentally identify with at that safe distance. My exposure to Catholic literature began with ancient and medieval works (I never got into Catholic apologetics at that time).

The Catholic tradition, I grew to believe, was a sacred tradition of scholarship. It was not simply authoritative on its own two legs. Its beginning root was in Christ and the Apostles (as persons), and that was why Catholics professed belief in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church every Sunday. I then realized the signifiance of Catholics reciting the Nicene Creed every Sunday. It was an acknolwedgment of the Apostles' personal, authoritative presence and the groundwork they laid for the Curch (as St. Paul writes to Timothy, “the church is the pillar and foundation of truth").

Regardless of all these wonderful musings about Holy Mass, at that time I still thought my arguments for my staunch Protestant beliefs could not be answered, let alone addressed, by Catholics. I did not care to hear what the Catholic Church had to say regarding my soul. Not because I was scared. It did not grip me, on a salvific level. It was not a threat. Like many Protestant seminarians and informed theology students, I acknowledged myself as a "little 'c' catholic." I was comfortably situated in a cozy and confusing middle ground between orthodox Protestant versions of Catholicism and contemporary Evangelical sentiments. I was never hostile toward the Roman Catholic Church. I did, however, feel some antagonism toward her because of my misconceptions. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote that “there are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Roman Catholic Church; there are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.” That was very true of my condition.

New Covenant Church, the church I was raised in, had a very firm footing in community life. I naturally appreciated family and valued obligation to elders and parent figures in this church. For this reason, it may be important to make a point clear at this stage. To say I was not Catholic just because of my satisfaction with misconceptions would not entirely be true. I felt a strong obligation to New Covenant, and I felt I had no right to become Catholic even if I shared a good portion of sympathies and agreements with the Catholic Church. I certainly did not feel a moral obligation to the Catholic Church. That obligation would have to be generated by a much deeper encounter with Catholicism. For an institution that claimed to be the only true Church founded by Christ Himself, my decision could not merely come about by abstract convictions. I found this type of consideration would demand a certain experiential knowledge of Catholic people and the rituals that defined them. Like John Henry Newman and many others, I did not authentically understand Catholicism until I engaged, on some basic level, in its liturgical activity and parish life. One has to share in some kind of life of a certain culture to truly understand its scripts, stories, and sacred texts. We learn by imitating other people. It is fundamental to how we understand the world. Yet, when I did this I knew I was playing with some kind of fire, but it was fire I felt I had to play with.

As an odd combination of general religious skepticism and considerations of Catholicism loomed larger and larger in the background of my life and academic studies, I gradually became an unsteady person (emotionally and intellectually). I distinctly remember expressing some of my religious struggles with a certain friend and student I frequently confided in on a daily basis. I found myself utterly frustrated with the tension in my life. More importantly, my cultural attachments to New Covenant were certainly dying, as they had since my parents’ divorce when I was seventeen.

As controversial as they are, these are some of the convictions I came to. The influence of skepticism had me thinking that if Christianity, in particular, was going to be meaningful at all (aside from whether or not it was really true), its texts would have to be an outgrowth of an already existent tradition of people that at least claims to have written those texts in the first place. As a philosophy student, I was well aware of all the ways you can twist a text to fit your presuppositions and desires. I learned I could do it anyway I liked, and feel pretty damn honest about it, too. Because of that, I was not happy with choosing a tradition that agreed with my individual notions of Scripture or religious texts (a pervasive cultural and epistemic turn after the Protestant Reformation). It became very far-fetched and implausible to me that anyone could come to even a basic objective understanding of a cultural text written 2000 years ago (e.g., "the Bible") without the strict guidance of an identifiable tradition. At some point in our lives, we have to acknowledge that we already do receive our knowledge from other people. No one reads the Bible and has an "aha" moment without that moment being prepared by some language and culture. We define ourselves and our world by our relationships, and those relationships are given to us. We are born from, out of, and into relationships. Our freedom is in our response to those relationships and their influence on our lives. In this way, Catholic converts do not suggest anything new by responding to Rome as their Mother. They acknowledge a mother that claims to have been and still is there, before, during, and after a social revolution like the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation was a stance on something new. Rome already explicitly rejected the Protestant pillar of Sola Scriptura 3-400 years before Luther. That was the difference between me wanting to join Catholicism and someone wanting to become a Protestant. Instead of standing "alone" on some other entity (e.g. the Bible), Catho are acknowledging a Mother that claims to have the rightful claim over who they actually are. In this sense, I could not avoid the fact that the very soul of Protestantism rejected a fundamental cornerstone to Christian living. Whether or not Protestantism was "right", it cut itself off from its Mother. Although their original intention was to preserve the identity of Roman Catholicism, the end result was that the Reformers came to reject their fathers and mothers. By standing "alone", Luther affirmed his commitment to his own individual convictions, whether it was about what St. Augustine and other early church fathers "truly" taught or what Scripture taught, or a hodge-podge of both (which it was). Even more, various others joined him in that stance even after the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, which made it clear that the pillars of the Reformation (e.g. Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, etc.) were misguided and inconsistent with the Roman Catholic faith. Could western Christian culture truly understand itself at that point? I experienced an identity crisis after continuously mulling over this. I cannot say that an “identity crisis” is too bold of a categorization for this experience, either. I suffered much stress and anxiety from this personal acknowledgment. It swept everything I stood on right out from under me, before I even knew I stood on it.

At this point, the struggle was not so much figuring out what to believe. Rather, it was figuring out where I belonged, and what beliefs came along with that sense of belonging. The more I read Scripture and the more I read early Christian perspectives, the more I realized that community was absolutely essential to the foundation for individual beliefs. Most American Christians like the idea of community, because they think of things that comfort them (e.g., "support" and “fellowship”). However, for most, if not all of the early Christian writers and Fathers, the community was binding on every aspect of your lifestyle (your beliefs, your thoughts, your convictions, your actions, your decisions, and your cultural identity). You did not have a right to disagree with your pastor, because your pastor was not only your pastor; he was your father. In his Letter to the Magnesians, St. Ignatius of Antioch (at the end of the 1st century) wrote, "Take care to do all things in harmony with God, with the bishop presiding in the place of God, and with the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and with the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father from the beginning and is at last made manifest." Many modern minds (which includes my own) think they have the right to judge the appropriateness of their mother and father's decisions and teachings before respectfully acknowledging them as a mother and father. The idea behind true Catholic reform is to dialogue, and maybe even argue, with Mother Church for the hope of future reform. At the end of the day, however, as harsh and overbearing as it first sounds, mother holds the right for the final say. If you still disagree, well, that's a risk you must be willing to take, and I was certainly unwilling to take that risk. I have told many people, time and again, that this was the pivotal turning point of my move to the Catholic Church. Christianity made too many far-fetched claims for me not to recognize an appeal to the final authority of Rome's Magisterium, anyway. There was too much to figure out and so little time for me to try. And it was time I was unwilling to spend, as a non-theology student.

As long as I was outside the walls of this heritage, I was on unstable ground, and I would be until I formally submitted to it. In February of 2007, I had a drink with a close friend of mine at the time. He was a fellow philosophy student and member of the church I grew up at. That night, a night that will never escape my memory, I told him I needed to regularly attend Catholic Mass. I spoke with some of my other close friends within my non-Catholic circles (greatly admired and respected) and with two of my elders at New Covenant after that. It was a very difficult and nerve-racking decision to make, but I knew I had to make it. So I made a decision I cannot deny as hasty. When you are at the point that you are feeling much like a prodigal son, however, it is hard to see any other option but to run back home. For me to deny the call of Rome, at this point, would have done moral damage to my character. That is why I did not waste any time, and one might even say I was in a daze when talking to my elders and leaders about my decision. My obligation to the Church, at this point, was a moral obligation more than anything. It involved my safety and health as a human being.

The problem may have been that I identified with the Catholic Church too early (as many have suggested). Maybe I gave too much of myself without enough evidence, and that is very possible; there is nothing unsettling in that admittance. I began to identify with the Catholic Church like I identified with my own biological family. It was not about disagreements or agreements at that point. It was about identity and which community had the rightful claim over who I actually was meant to be and how I was meant to live. I found the Catholic Church to have this human right long before the Catholic Church even gave me Scripture. St. Augustine argued that "I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church." The point here is that St. Augustine, like me, belonged to the Apostles before we ever belonged to the Apostles’ Words (Scripture). It is very easy to manipulate a mother's words, but it is not so easy to pretend the authority of your own mother is not actually there, that she really isn't your own mother. I belonged to a household before I belonged to that household's beliefs. That was the crux and heart of the whole issue, no matter how much I wanted to fight it. John Henry Newman rightly observed that Roman Catholicism was a fundamentally person-oriented Faith, in this regard.

Again, St. Augustine (who would later become my confirmation saint) influenced my personal desires to join Rome: "In the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly keep me in her bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep (Jn 21:15-19), down to the present episcopate." It soon became the case that I no longer could find my identity outside this Church, nor did I feel any other heritage had the right to claim it.

Since I became apart of this Family on the night of the Easter Vigil, March 22, 2008, I have not had a single doubt that this is where I should be. I imagine doubts will come in the future, but there is also much to learn about this heritage that will keep my thoughts busy for a very long time. It is very hard to doubt when you sense you are on Holy Ground. And when you realize you are on Holy Ground, it is impossible to leave. That is how I presently feel, and it is my hope that I will spend the rest of my days here. I have always felt like non-Catholic Christianity was a part of a whole (whatever that “whole” was) that I was implicitly aware of the moment I began to take religion seriously. After being received into the Catholic Church, I never wanted to reject what I learned or lived in that non-Catholic community, and, in a certain sense, I am still living and learning in that community; I have just found a much bigger community that contains it. I have discovered that the Catholic Church rejects nothing and nobody, and she accepts everything and everyone - whether you’re coming in as a Charismatic, a Calvinist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Presbyterian, an Anglican, an Orthodox, deist, atheist, non-denominational Christian, or a Lutheran. Some people do not understand this, because all of those rigid Catholic doctrines and dogmas give the impression that it is an intolerant and repressive institution. Understandable, but within those Catholic household rules, however, are values and beliefs exchangeable and sharable with every other religion, sect, and ideology. This is true because the Catholic Church believes all of Creation is good and sacred, and a good part of a bad system is, regardless, a good part. Rome has been around too long and has learned from too many mistakes to avoid this truth. When converts enter the Roman Catholic Church, they do not often like to refer to their conversion as a “conversion” but a “full reception." Rome receives everything good that you once believed and allows you to keep it. There is a reason why the Church calls Confirmation “full communion.” Every other person in this world, by means of whatever good things and deeds they endorse, are, in some way, communing with the universal (literally, “catholic”) Church. But we are not fully a part of the Mother Church until we fully commit to her. In this sense, I always was Catholic.

I get the impression that many people expect a canned answer when they passively ask me why I became Catholic. I suppose this is mostly an American mentality. I simply cannot respond with a couple of cliché sentences when asked of my decision. It does not work. I have practiced for some shotgun lines in response to these sorts of questions, but I have never been able to settle with one. No two or three lines can communicate the immensity of this experience. That is partially because the Catholic life does not begin at any identifiable point in time. Rome is not a school of thought that can be bagged and handed out. You cannot make someone Catholic by giving them a Bible tract. The Catholic life is a life lived in dutiful and familial love, and, as I mentioned earlier, we all live part of it without even knowing it. The way I see it, asking me why I am a Roman Catholic is like asking me why I acknowledge the Nichols family as my family. It is just a part of my heritage. It is a part of who I am as a Christian in western civilization, and it is part of my duty to who I am. I feel wrong to ignore it or set my beliefs above it, at least at this point in my life. Thus, I acknowledge that my mother is my mother and my father is my father, no matter how many mistakes they make.

"Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church." - St. Ignatius of Antioch (written between the year 98 and 117, Letter to the Smyrnaeans).

The Converted Heart

I should probably add the tune of chirping crickets to this sleeping blog of mine, and I don't have much of an excuse. It’s been a summer of decision-making, friends’ decision-making, and deciding to talk about decision-making. Work and play.

More specifically, this summer has been a hotbed of faith transitions and deliberated faith transitions among many old friends and new friends. I am questioned here and there about acquaintances recently deciding to enter the Roman Catholic Church. I can only say so much about fellow students and friends entering and wanting to join Rome. I run the risk of trivializing their experience when I do that. Conversions of friends are not subjects of commentary for me. I’m not a spectator. I’m involved, and I am partially responsible for their decisions (as everyone else is). I am very enthusiastic about anyone willing to become Catholic.

As I seep myself more and more in the devout culture of Catholicism, everyday it seems I hear a new story about some friend or friend of some other friend running to the front doors of Rome. It’s really not uncommon. When I was a non-Catholic this was, at best, befuddling, and nothing much more than that. It’s not that non-Catholics don’t care or they don’t even talk about these conversions for a very long time. They do. It just doesn’t grab them in an enthusiastic way. They are interested and fundamentally detached, while feeling some things in between. And that is what I’ve learned about westerners in most every intercultural confrontation. In previous centuries, someone who deserted our culture for another would be ostracized to the point of ceased interaction. Nowadays, instead of criticizing a conversion, we project it as a comedic move (not necessarily comedic in a “haha” way). We place ourselves above a convert’s experience by treating it as a subject of interesting, sentimental, and trivial talk rather than a stimulant for reflection. We are much like a Jane Austen character in one of her drawing rooms. Instead of reflecting, we talk around it, chat about it, pleasantly misrepresent it, and thereby steal the same sort of pleasure we might gain from reading an entire book. It makes us feel as if we’ve confronted a conversion experience without genuinely confronting it. That is why it is interesting, at best, sentimental, and not disturbing, frustrating, mesmerizing, or gripping.

I avoid lengthy conversations about my friends’ conversions. I do care, and I have not lost my zeal for the drama of Catholic conversions. I only fear the comedy routine. I want friends and family to truly share in the silent drama of giving up everything. Non-Catholics need to understand that this is not, at bottom, a change of beliefs or ideas. It is a dramatic and heart-breaking cultural change. It is a conversion that converts the whole person: spirit, soul, and body. After all the tiring explanations are finished and these Catholic candidates are finally confirmed in the Sacraments, they feel different and start acting in dramatically new and different ways. It is sometimes painful and sometimes exhilarating and sometimes depends on the day.

My new Catholic friends know I wholeheartedly support their decisions and know what it means to leave behind Protestant America. I left my background because I wanted to complete it, not reject it. It’s not that the Protestant sect of Christianity didn’t have what I found here, it just didn’t have everything that I have found here. Catholicism is a colossal Yes to works, to sacraments, to family, to sacred teaching, to more mothers and fathers, to more community, and to every belief and activity a human needs to fulfill their humanity. It is big in every possible way to explain it.

To speak from experience, recovering from the loss of family (biological and religious) involves stress and sacrifice, and it’s not a true conversion without stress and sacrifice. At the end, however, it is truly exhilarating and even rehabilitating. You have to push and push and push, and it takes determination. There is nothing more heart-breaking than feeling misunderstood and also disappointing those siblings, parents, and closest friends. It is devastating and makes you want to squirm in your pew if you think about it too much. There is no complete apologetic for this decision, and that is why Catholic converts must always hold themselves responsible for their family’s sadness and expressed disapproval. At the bottom of all this is a movement that is sometimes paradoxical in theory but, at the very least, respectable. It is taxing to take responsibility and keep silent, but no one can take away the work you put into it. Silencing your heart while others demean it, degrade it, and demoralize it is more than a sweat. It is emotionally tormenting. And, unfortunately, you humbly learn to bear it, without puffing yourself up as a hero.

An older Catholic once wrote me a letter for my Confirmation. In a brief and pointed part of the letter, he wrote: “win souls, not arguments”. I continue to learn that every time I engage someone in an argument without the intent of showing them the Body of our Lord, I have given them ugliness. Mother Teresa puts it this way, “This is what we have to learn right from the beginning: to listen to the voice of God in our heart, and then in the silence of the heart God speaks. Then from the fullness of our hearts, your mouth will have to speak…. Then in the fullness of your heart, because it is full of God, full of love, full of compassion, full of faith, your mouth will speak.” When we take in the Body and Blood of our Lord, we are first silencing our rambling mouths. We are trying to find Christ’s voice before we find our own. That is the particular burden of every Catholic convert. We must learn sincere, genuine, and charitable silence. We can’t win or win souls without it.

There is no full-fledged defense for our decision, because this is not an experience comprehensively defined by a conversion of thought or interpretation of Scripture or Scriptural principle. It is in essence, as it is defined by its end, a movement. We are no longer struggling through a theoretical maze. We are, rather, moving to our home, even though theorizing showed us where that home is. Because this is a movement and not an apologetic defense at the end of the day, it is foolery to everyone else. We can not propositionally define a movement. We can only give ground, provide space for it, and pray that others will make sense of everything else. We can give probable reasoning, but, after probability, come virtues of a non-rational force: faith and charity. John Newman, in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, wrote, “…It is faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in itself. Faith and love are directed towards an Object; in vision of that Object they live; it is that Object, received in faith and love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal conviction.” When they see that reason must stop short, when we make a decision out of sheer dutiful love, they will learn that, at the end of all these spats, we had to give ourselves up. That is always what the world must see. Such is sacrifice. When we have explained ourselves, our mouths must shut, and there is nothing left but love.

“… in certain instances it is, undeniably, more worthy of respect to give oneself up to an enthusiasm, even though it be an irrational one, which none the less proceeds from a great love, than not to give oneself up to it at all.” – Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

Globalization: Our Poor Excuse for Sacrifice

After reading through the April edition of The Antlantic, listening to the various subjects of interest on NPR, and giving attention to Obama’s recent world tour, I can not think of a more giddy subject for American political analysts than globalization (even amidst our current economic crisis). This also ties into an article in the January edition of The Economist, on the concept of “sharing” through internet networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Amidst all the abstractions and romantic musings on this new exciting wave of chatter, it is really hard to identify what exactly is “globalization”. Of all the identifications given, Robert Wright seems to offer the clearest example of what the term “globalization” might connote in most circles. .

In his article, "Why God Loves Globalization", Wright focuses on the big question we all implicitly want to get at when we present “globalization” as a subject of discussion. Religion always seems to be looming in the background when we treat the subject. Understandably, westerners really want to see how we’re all going to get along at the end of the day, even if proselytizing is a goal religious westerners seek. In Wright’s view, values, within our religious traditions, will have to form given the practical demands of the difficult circumstances we find ourselves in. If I were to analogize Wright’s words: we all want a piece of the same pie, but particular cultures and religious groups will have to develop values to tolerate the other cultures who want a piece for themselves. Wright sees this increasing tolerance of other ethnicities and faiths as an ever-developing reality sense the Stone Age, and he attributes this cause to our ever-expanding network of trade and urbanization. The concept driven home presents “globalization” as something we might be able to grab, and that is “mutual understanding” while we all try to acquire the diverse ends we seek for ourselves.

I would agree that in many cases our improvement in communicative technology has allowed us to interpret and empathize with other cultures and religious traditions without resorting to an inarticulate battle of force. Although, it really is hard to mark a point of progress, given the amount of bloodshed spilled in the 20th century. At the face of things, this expanding “social” network would seem to allow for recognition of and respect for cultural dividing lines and barriers. Yet, through all the internet networking and shoddy treatments of other cultural distinctions in the media, the best we seem to produce is sentimentality. And what we mean by “social” when describing these social networks is really rooted in a fundamentally different notion of “social” than traditional and ancient notions.

In Roger Scruton’s book, Modern Culture, Scruton criticizes the substitution of “sentimentality” for “sympathy” in much of western high culture. Sympathy, Scruton argues, requires the sacrifice of an individual to develop a particular form of character in recognition of ideals existent outside of herself. Sentimentality is not open to this capacity for development as a necessary goal, because it is self-interested. The sentimental culture does not look above itself for any ideals or any rites of passage into adulthood, referencing no prescribed moral criteria for its development. It prescribes its own development.

Because this culture has no reference above itself, it is, instead, self-referential. I would argue that it creates its own concept of space, even, and consumes everything it wants from the rest of the world within this ever-expanding space it creates. Our current western culture has gone so far as to presume that nothing exists outside of its own form of language. And this is when Derrida truly hits the tip of the iceberg. Here, concepts like God and love and space and time are trapped in a world of language with no reality to reference outside of this self-enclosed linguistic world. We, essentially, create the space we want to work within. There is no moral space outside of us to subject ourselves to or discover. The motive of most internet networking is to create a space where all the pleasant feelings consumed in friendships are available for our selective consumption, without having to engage the people and cultural ideals providing these consumed pleasures. In the same way, we can control our own individual expansion, selectively treating the world as a market for our individual goals and appetites. We are able to withdraw or “sign out” or “log out” when we face a potential tragedy or conflict or moral demand. This form of “socializing” is hand-picked and resolves into marketed consumption. While the word “social” remained before our eyes, its definition was entirely substituted before we were able to put a finger on it.

As globalization develops, networking and increased international media coverage will never make a demand on us to see the world we do not want to see. So far, the concept of globalization has been cast under the umbrella of international diplomacy, communication, and global awareness of cultural diversity. Yet, we have never stopped to ask why this increased understanding is a good, and, if it is a “good”, where did that “good” come from? So far, we have only increased our desire to feed our own economic self-interest, while cooperating with other cultures pursuing that interest. In the meantime, tension is caked over with glamorous political smiles and cordial gestures. As long as we do not identify a moral space which demands our genuine sympathy, we will be trapped within our own selfish worlds along with our networking toys to provide us pleasure. And all this will be under the fantastic pretense that we are sympathizing, when really we are only reaping the sentimental pleasures derived from sympathy. Genuine moral values can not develop out of self-interest for their grounding, as Wright suggested in his article, because self-interest has no interest or demand outside of itself.

Prior to the References and Opinions: Origin and End

The various years I have spent as a philosophy student have understandably been burdened by random spurts of darkness, which often resolve into a never ending game of skepticism. To many contemplatives, Plato’s depiction of the soul emerging out of the cave as it gradually acquires Truth always appears to be that tragically unachievable aspiration we all can relate to. But I think I can confidently say that most contemplatives and philosophy students eventually understand their seemingly endless whirlwind of skepticism to be a phenomenon that often occurs when they lose a sense of their belonging in the world. It’s that Dark Night of the Soul the religious contemplatives often refer to. Fortunately, it’s not the end of the game for many and most of us. In reflection, we often recognize those spurts of skepticism to only be chapters in our already written narrative - a concept we so often criticize but intuitively perceive as already there for us to discover and place ourselves in.

That concept of “what is already there” has been agitating my mind for the past several months, and I have been through a roller-coaster of anxiety in response to it. It agitates me, because, without an already existent reality, all of reality is human craft. In everything I have read in my life, I can not see any way around that consequence, and it is a very bothersome consequence. I have read a good portion of books with that concept infusing every page of every book I read this past year. Recently I finished a book by John R. Searle, entitled Mind, Language, and Society. I chose Searle, because I already read the argument from theist Natural Law thinkers. I wanted to see how the argument could possibly be extended outside of a theistic context. Searle was going to be my atheist bridge in hopes of finding a world existent outside of my language (as I used language to get off the ground in talking about it).

In the very beginning of the book, Searle defends against the notion that all facts are relative to language (e.g. “The world is everything that is the case”) and the continuous flux of social constructs and meanings. His chief concern was that of thinkers like Derrida and Foucalt, who seemed to make all of what we mean by “reality” to be a craft or tool of man in his will to power. Yet, as I will elaborate below, this seems to truly only be a fear of Searle’s on an individual scale, not a collective one. Searle’s original response is one I would stick with: we would not attempt to get at reality or the world or explain reality if we did not presuppose an independent reality already there for us to discover in the first place. His argument is that there is an ontologically independent reality outside the meaning of our language (as in things and “facts” already existent before and after our explanation and meaningful portrayals of them).

This was not much of a disagreement on my end until he reduced teleology and human values (in a few pages) to the result of useful ends collectively sought by individuals. What begins as a system of use develops into a system of valued ends. A wall, for instance, is originally used to block out the enemy but then develops into a staple of cultural identity. It consequently receives its end value by its assigned function, which apparently arises out of a human need. Previously in his book, without explicitly drawing out the value of life in the same way, he argues that the functions of certain organs would not be assigned if there was not a presupposed value of human life. Even natural human and animal functions and values are dependent on the way we want to see the world. At this point, I could not resist…. If all value of human life and other relational values we hold are not independent of us (as were neutral scientific phenomena for Searle), then they are qualified by needs and are not values at all. If we are consistent with Searle’s system of causation, the value is only a product of utilitarian means. It is some purely biological need we have. The social institution is constructed for the manipulation of brute facts in service of our biological urges. If values are only seen and assigned as good ends, then, following his original argument against anti-realists, what is the point in aspiring to an explanation of them as existent? And if the end pursued is pursued on the basis of collective agreement, what basis does a society have to criticize the value system of another society? What is the resource for Searle’s “realist” at that point? This, to my surprise, was not much of a stated or recognized concern for Searle. Even if it is a misrepresentation of his argument, I am surprised it is not within his concern to treat the subject. But then I remember his original intent was to provide “clarity” to a world we can have a progressive understanding of, a way of getting at the world intelligibly, and his primary starting point in justifying knowledge was “consciousness”. I believe this is the fundamental result of a system that is closed within the world as we know it. Searle’s world is justified by human consciousness, and its value is at the service of humanity.

So I went back home to a religious response. I ran to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on the relationship between faith and reason (Fides et Ratio). A very small principle can go a very long way, and John Paul II’s principle did. According to John Paul II, Man, in his approach to the world, must see himself and begin his enquiry about the world in relation to the rest of humanity. Hence, at the outset, he finds himself theorizing within a context of faith, hope, and love with other beings. He thinks and must think with and for them. He can not rip himself from this context, and he is destined to theorize about his world within it. He can try to ignore it, but his system inevitably falls into a system like Searle’s or Derrida’s or Hegel’s when he fails to recognize a world of value to be discovered, and a world of value he is already in. Following Searle’s logic, it does not logically follow that because we are bound to explaining value and function within our accepted system of meaning and biological needs, that those values and functions must be reduced to those systems and needs. Man can’t simply begin to justify his world in relation to his mind, because, at the outset, he excludes other minds, other values, and the entire human person (who is naturally received with intuited value). Man must see himself as a receiver. He must receive a spiritual heritage of concerns, ideas, values, and ends, and it is this complex pilgrimage to begin with. I cease to be so anxiously skeptical of my world when I place myself into this relation. I am fundamentally bound to it. The question I must then inquire after is the Origin and End of this relation.

“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.” – Alexander Schmemann

From Isolation to Ignorance: My Life in Philosophy

I was required to include this in one of my applications. I figured it would be nice to share it here.
Kierkegaard, or maybe Socrates, taught me that the pursuit of wisdom is a fundamentally tragic pursuit. Since my exposure to ancient philosophy, I have progressively sought to clear the calculative grime from my mind and articulate this tragedy within myself. Before this, I only had a disinterested and propositional understanding of the human person. In all my years as a philosophy student, I have never found a sufficient answer to the question of “why philosophy?” Philosophers are aware of truth precisely because they are aware of their ignorance. “I know nothing” is not a proposition; it is a condition. A philosophical vocation is a recognized condition born out of the mind’s essential awareness of itself. This is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom begins with a self awareness which begs the assertion: “I know nothing.” The vulgar do not recognize their ignorance, because truth is not any larger than themselves. Truth is their craft. They are truth, and this is their neglect of a life of wisdom.

My life in philosophical studies has ranged anywhere from petty focuses of in-house theological debates to the existentially unsettling questions more native to ancient and Continental thought. When I first attended Lindenwood University, my pursued interests were still largely influenced by an attempt to philosophically articulate and defend my Reformed beliefs in the moral arena of the world. Wanting to maintain my identity as a Reformed Evangelical, I chose to explore my options within the Calvinist culture of theology. For many years, I busied my philosophical studies with the background of a cultural conflict between Kuyperian theology and re-packaged versions of “Presuppositional” apologetics lingering in my mind. It took a very long time for me to get over this hump. Much of my time was spent confronting theological debates and dilemmas strictly within the Protestant sect of Christianity.

While my philosophical inquiries expanded, concerns about post-enlightenment and pre-enlightenment metaphysics began to demand a new consideration of how I could and should define myself as a citizen of the western world. My failure to first see myself within a western context was the cause of much directionless searching. As many philosophy historians have pointed out, the Reformation presented a paradigmatic shift in the way individuals historically defined themselves. Simply put, the post-Reformation definition of a western identity was now undertaken as an individual project rather than a communal enterprise. This social phenomenon set the platform for a new definition of human freedom to take form.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s more modernized approach to Aristotelian metaphysics helped me respond to this troublesome condition. His portrait of humans as inter-dependent co-authors of their own narrative was a depiction more feasible than many fragmented perspectives I was previously exposed to. This illuminated a deep intuited concern I had with modern depictions of human autonomy and faulty missteps in modern epistemology. Since the Enlightenment, modern intellectuals have continuously sought an autonomous definition of themselves without a presupposed end for their existence. I neither see this as a good or bad approach but a new beginning point we can not avoid in our human narrative.

I do not believe we will ever universally restore the old way of assuming an identity with a cosmologically evident telos (e.g. “eternal communion with God” or “the contemplative life” etc.). Yet, we can still open avenues for individuals to define themselves in such ways. Our human freedom is understood without this assumed horizon, but this horizon can still be offered as an alternative context to articulate our human freedom. This has given me hope that the quest for a religious identity is still not a lost cause. Augustine’s famous principle, fides quarum intellectum, may not be a condition in which we currently find ourselves anymore. The Post-enlightenment rejection of a cosmologically evident human telos has left us with a new creative beginning point.. We can not “believe in order to understand” in the way we once did, because our metaphysical ends are no longer “evident”; they are options in need of analytical exploration and definition. In Charles Taylor’s words, they are no longer “unproblematic”.

People have often suggested that my conversion to Catholicism was due to a loss of identity after my parents’ divorce. I can not deny this personal isolation was often echoed in my frustrations with many modern portraits of the Self. Yet, I also can not deny this personal dilemma revealed a new and tangible landscape of human isolation. As I mentioned above, the first step to wisdom begins with recognizing our condition. My parents’ divorce allowed me to identify that condition in a way many others have not. The best way to interpret a cry is to first recognize that we ourselves are crying. The mourned isolation of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Kafka, Sartre, and Camus is undoubtedly real, and I can not reject this as a universal cry. Divorce is a fundamental expression of this estrangement. It is a cry I fundamentally sympathize with. I have gradually adopted Wittgenstein’s argument that philosophical language is a way of projecting a picture on to our world. The ambiguity of the image we present is often the cause of our modern anxiety. The first misstep of some modern thinkers is their autonomous attempt to paint their identity without first objectively situating themselves within a metaphysical horizon and heritage. There is no landscape to the image in which they see themselves, because they have divorced themselves from this landscape. Hence, they have lost their location.

My conversion to Catholicism contained this very practical consideration. I felt my duty to the West was a recovery of a lost narrative. Before I was ever going to be a Protestant, I was first going to define myself as a Roman Catholic. Since my conversion, the rift and estrangement between the non-Catholic world and the Catholic world has been too strong for me to ignore. I have delved more into the philosophy of language and dialogue in hopes of improving conversation among various cultures. Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger have played a significant role in my understanding of the revelatory aspects of language. Language has a potency that discovers and articulates a problem which is previously unidentifiable. The tragedy is that along with this new articulation comes a new set of problems. It is a very unique condition we find ourselves in, but I do not believe we can ignore it. My interest in cultural dialogue and linguistic concerns is fed by a desire to translate these new problematic concepts.

I have been through many intellectual transitions in my life - from adherence to Calvinist theology as a younger Protestant, to a much larger belief in post-Vatican II cultural dialogue as a current Catholic. Above all, my pursuit of wisdom began after recognition of my ignorance. From the beginning of my philosophical pursuits until now, I have sought to retain and pursue all that has been good and true in my formation as a human being. I am now at the fore of a much longer academic road ahead of me. This same fundamental belief in the Good still drives my search for everything in all things and the contemplation of all these things to be passed on to the universal community.

Working out our economy and our problems

The western world is very disillusioned with the prior dependence it has placed in its economic flow of mind. The greatest difficulty in academia is offering an answer that is right, and theorists are never always right. Life is and never will be a science, as far as we ever understand it to be "life". There will always be metaphysical leaps and bounds, missteps and enthusiastic hops, but we will never give up our attempt to approach our conflicts and problems with inadequate equipment. At times the theorist (whether his title is an economist, scientist, political theorist, or philosopher) projects dilemmas onto a world which was previously much better without them. He sometimes wreaks more problems upon the common man than were already there in the first place. It is part of the drama of our lives and theories about our lives to confront problems, difficulties, and conflicts, and the way that we approach these intuited conflicts is by articulating them. Sometimes we articulate them wrongly, or sometimes we articulate them ineffectively. In other words, nothing is concluded into a productive science at the end of this battle because of too many ambiguous or ineffective words. And yet, we are forced to dynamically engage a world that does not fit under our thumb. We have to approach it with the pen and the mouth as well.

I read an article once by a scientist (I don't care to remember his name) who argued that we are much better off without "philosophy", and that philosophy has never given us anything to hold on to. In short, it has never given us answers, facts. I do not know how to respond to this other than clarifying that the aim of philosophy has always been to pave the way for a clear methodical way to make our lives understandable. Physics was once philosophy. Biology was once philosophy. Economics was, and still is, philosophy. Yet, we always want to blame our philosophers for not giving us a clear-cut science. Alan Greenspan can not be held responsible for economic problems in the West because he got something wrong. Part of his job is to get things wrong. His social role is to theorize, to project frameworks and contexts in which we can articulately sift through our problems of judgment, value, and the network of money flow. Yet, this does not mean we are better without him. It means that we depend upon his mind. And at the end of the day, we can have a president very profoundly say that it's not about "big government or small government"; it's about what "works" and is working. The meaning of Obama's message here is that the old way of articulating our economic crises is not working, and so we need to let go of our attachments to the previously vocalized categories. At the same time, we would not be where we are if we had not articulated the problem this way in the first place.

Not everyone is responsible for a life of study or persistent academic pursuits. We are all situated in a world which demands a type of excellence in whatever condition we find ourselves. The intended life of excellence can not always produce excellence, and this is often very tragic. My life as a philosopher is full of mistakes, misgivings, and words I would have retracted if ever given the chance. Yet, I can not say that I ever regret being a philosopher for the distress and pain I have sometimes caused others, either immediately or intermediately through what I've written or spoken. Sometimes we are wrong, and sometimes we are very right. The wave of postmodern criticism that philosophical theory should be kept as fragmentary as everything else, because of its failure to provide answers to life, is really due to a misunderstanding of philosophy as theory. Theory provides and continues to provide a framework in which the interconnection of all the other sciences and doctrines of these sciences makes the most sense to us and improves our lives. We will always perceive a need to improve our lives as a community. For this reason, we will always keep defining and trying to define what is not yet working but needs to work. It's not an easy job, but it's important to always remain sober and reasonable before we become too intolerant and resort to force.

The Home of Love before Society

The cultural milieu around me is developing too much beyond my categorizations these days; it's difficult to say much of anything about different social groups. The variety of cultural distinctions even in the suburbs is striking to me. An ever-expanding media network provides a market of choices for different people. I would also say that it's a social phenomena demanding a new type of reflective Stoicism if we ever want to adjust to the changes.

While working on my grad applications at the Bread company a couple of days ago, I had the privilege of sitting next to a good ol' home-body group of suburban Pentecostals (and I think they were UPC). I never know what's going to come out of a devout charismatic's mouth, so I'm always on the edge of my seat in settings like these. To my surprise, I developed a certain affection for them, as they continued with their conversation on inward change and transformation. There are too many religious groups trying to focus on contemporary social issues, under the pretense that it's time to start moving "out" and getting things done. It's my opinion that it's the simple pull of the market on these young and ambitious minds. Our excuse is that we must adopt the language of our current market in order to function effectively. We have to situate ourselves in the ever-transforming amoebic wave of society to facilitate some change and movement. Yet, it is one of the last places for us to situate ourselves. In order to spout about the proper political policies which best exemplify our notion of love or whatever, our first responsibility is to return to the kitchen and dining room table. It's the same reason why Aristotle constructs his theoretical society on the functioning of proper friendships. Our souls must first be transformed at home with our closest ones. Our identities must be shaped here in conversation with loved ones, and if we do not choose this priority, our identities will be shaped by a more impersonal and abstract social institution. We can not get caught up in implementing contradictory notions of the most important and complex virtues we have brought with us only half-formed in that place we once called our home. Such is what happens when the conflicting advertisements in the market become our new home. This quote, by Hans Balthasaar, stood out to me tonight as I was reading about the complications of what we mean by "love": "the site from which love can be observed and generated cannot itself lie outside of love (in the '"pure logicity"' of so-called science); it can lie only there, where the matter itself lies–namely, in the drama of love." We are too often satisfied with these half-packaged notions of love under the pretense that "at least we are actually doing something for society" or "living out love". The reality is that we only hurt our society when we are encouraged with unreflective social activity. We must spend time at home before we become marketers. The quiet and reflective pace prevalent in our homes is where we identify the true substance and value of the love we so often seek to find, or even proof that such a concept exists between people. It is at the home and in closest friendships where love actually exists between two people, not between a seller and consumer. This is where the true drama of love is actually played out. It's a social context which provides people in close quarters, where arguments are forced to be confronted and conflicts are in a constant state of repair. This is where we find our most evident forms of love and affection. It is where we can universally identify that fleshed out example we all seek and so often struggle to discover.