I was born into a Catholic family and baptized as a baby. I attended mass on Easter, Christmas, and maybe 6 or 8 other Sundays each year.
I fell in love with rationality as a teenager, doing well academically and convincing myself that rational analysis solved the issues that needed solving. I dropped the church, seeing it as an anachronistic collection of odd practices and ideas that had no utility for me.
It took me decades to notice just how much being raised Catholic affected how I looked at things. We are all imperfect, do unto others, we needed to be charitable and loving to all, render unto Caesar,… I was pretty much Catholic in outlook, just not in faith practices. I also noticed an affinity for Mass. I always felt a little better during and after going to mass, but since I mostly only went on Easter and Christmas I chalked that up to the beauty of the service and the music. I didn’t think in terms of grace and exaltation at that time.
I married a Catholic woman who believed. She prayed for me to return to the church, and made sure our children got some indoctrination and took first communion. I went to church due to her influence – I wanted to keep her happy.
In 2001 I got to fly to Rome for a sales conference in February. I was able to go to St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museum of Religious Art (Cistine Chapel!) as well as several other amazing sites. In the basement (catacombs?) under St. Peters I saw a golden crucifix with a large multifaceted gem. It was simple and beautiful and it touched me on some level I didn’t recognize. I tracked down a description and found that a jeweler and a gem-cutter had worked together to create and donate this to the church several centuries before. I now think that it touched me spiritually, that I felt grace just looking at it. The feeling was somewhat foreign to me outside of mass, so I didn’t quite get it, but I felt it. With all the art and archeological treasures in Rome, I felt it repeatedly and powerfully.
My father suffered from scoliosis, which twisted his spine and eventually his ribs. This led to stress on his aorta, which tore and left him paralyzed below the waist. As he recovered in the hospital, his kidneys failed. We were told he had a few weeks to live. I’ve never felt so helpless. Mom insisted that the doctors had told her to expect she could bring him home after 2 weeks and she was going to do so. Being in a hospital and paralyzed was horrible for my dad.
I couldn’t sleep; rationality was a joke. Rationally, my dad would be dead in 2 weeks. He’d never meet his grandson, never be around to talk to, I just couldn’t fathom it and couldn’t bear it. I was getting exhausted, to the point that I needed to sleep or I’d be unable to do my job, and we couldn’t afford to lose my job. I was out of options, rationality went nowhere. I tried to find a way out. What would my wife do? She’d pray. I hadn’t tried that yet, so I prayed.
I felt grace and calmness as I prayed. I threw myself on God’s mercy, admitting I had no power, and prayed that Dad would live long enough to get to know his soon to be born grandson.
Two weeks to the day after Dad went in, mom and my brother went down to get him out. The nurses and doctors acted surprised and opposed the thought of dad going home.
Mom argued that Dad preferred to die at home, since nothing the hospital had done helped the kidneys at all, he was still dying. After an exhausting, trying 8 hour shift of arguing with a doctor then yet another specialist and so on, they wheeled dad out and brought him home.
Within days of coming home dad’s kidneys kicked back in. His blood recovered quickly, and he was as fine as he was going to get as a paraplegic. He recovered enough to take the dog on runs down by the beach from his wheel chair and he attended my son’s baptism, getting to know him over the first few years of my son’s life. Dad died years later after a full and happy life. His last years were progressively harder as his health issues mounted, and when he finally died I was as ready for it as I was going to get.
As a therapeutic/creative effort, I try to write songs on occasion. The words are often not put together consciously, they just sort of bubble up. I consider myself a mostly happy, well adjusted person, but the song lyrics that bubble up are almost invariably downbeat and depressing. One day a particularly powerful verse (at least to me) that included the phrase “to try to fill the aching spiritual void” bubbled up.
Wow! I thought. Do I actually have an acing spiritual void? The answer was obvious as soon as I thought about it. By purposefully blinding myself to the spiritual I ended up coming up with rational justifications to seek those moments of grace. I crave the grace to fill my spiritual void but refused to admit it to myself. Without a spiritual life and grace we are helpless in the face of the most important events in our lives. We don’t fully appreciate the mystery and majesty of our lives and God’s creation, and we don’t have the tools to understand or survive the worst that life can throw at us.
I’ve since applied my rationality to filling that aching spiritual void. Many things grant me grace. Praying, mass, confession, volunteering, being of service, helping out, experiencing art, accomplishing useful tasks, listening to a great performance, sharing and loving. There is grace all around us, and we are finely tuned – dare I say evolved – to experience it if we don’t blind ourselves by oversimplification.
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