The First Trip To The Post Office

I've been a Catholic now officially for more than half my life. I was confirmed and received my first Eucharist in a sleepy Byzantine church in central Pennsylvania in December, 1998, at the age of 18. Getting married at 18 seems unthinkable today; and yet walking down the aisle, I had the acute realization that I was being wed, for better or worse, to Christ and his Church, in a lifetime commitment and to a future unknown. Much to my surprise, and by the grace of God, I haven't left yet.

My own experience of conversion was unique and yet commonplace, and has followed a predictable pattern as it has for many others. The cycle of fascination, excitement, zeal, disillusionment, cooling, and--sometimes--abandonment, is not uncommon for converts to the Faith.

As I reflect on it now, I am reminded of an article I came across in the New Yorker some years back, reflecting on the life and character of one of the Church's most well known and oft-quoted 20th century converts, the writer G.K. Chesterton. Adam Gopnik writes,

“In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiousity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. 

The newly adapted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time, and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and over-glamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. 

Chesterton writing about the church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on the label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you are new to mail."

New to mail! LOL.

As insightful as I think Gopnik's critique of the naive zeal of the convert (Chesterton, in this context) it just misses the target. If one is attracted to the Church as an intellectual curiosity, or a country club-type situation, or a large multiethnic family, an amazing bureaucracy, or even as a supernatural dispenser of graces, it may very well be only a matter of time before trust is shattered, disappointment sets in, failures are noted, and disillusionment with the institution as a whole takes hold. What his critique does not take into account is when someone has a face to face encounter with the Living God, the Bridegroom of the Church himself.

I try to walk the line, to borrow Johnny Cash's words--between reverence, devotion, and obedience to the Church as the Bride of Christ while simultaneously recognizing Her beurocratic, institutional, and human dimension. Between recognizing that the Pope and bishops possess the authentic power of legitimate apostolic succession, and that sometimes they simply set a bad example for how to follow Christ. Between tribalizing in a religious ghetto or echo chamber, and associating too much with the world and all its trappings. It's a constant balancing act.

Rather than seeing the Church as a post-office, I think the marriage analogy squares better. We are in relationship, with God in Christ by virtue of our baptism.

We are not employees, but children, friends, and heirs.

We are in need of constant forgiveness and reconciliation. We yell and rage and run away, curse, trample, hurt, and experience homecomings.

We carefully and delicately place our trust in the hands of men who have the potential to hurt us and betray that trust.

We love--we love the Source and we love all the tributaries of the source because of where they lead.

We sacrifice and live in a state of deferment, hope, longing, voluntarily reign in some desires so that others might be given more room.

We experience the rush of ecstasy that comes through the occasional and grace-filled moments of divine communion--the gift of tears, of gratitude, of deliverance and the sweetness of freedom from sin.

The Church is both human and divine. We don't have to idolize Her, as a young man does his first trip to the post office, and if we do as wide-eyed neophytes within her walls for the first time, than so be it, for honeymoons don't last forever. When faith is tested in the refining fire as the years go by, and if vows and promises (so idealistic!) are the only things that keep us from walking away, than so be it, for such tempests themselves don't last forever either.  When trusts are betrayed and institutions are exposed, and disgust and dillusionment take root, than so be it, for what spouse hasn't said, "I can't stand to even look at you in this moment? And when we are on our deathbed, a breath away from seeing the Bridegroom himself in person for the first time, and being anointed with our last rites, then so be it. For those who persevere to the end will be saved, after all.