Coming from such a personal and ransoming experience that I had trouble putting into words, I guarded it carefully. If I was going to follow this Jesus who I had heard about, the route had to be original. There could be no whisper down the lane; I had to go to the source of Truth itself. And the source was His Bride, the Church. In fact, when I walked down the aisle to receive Him for the first time in December of my freshman year of college, in a sleepy Byzantine church in Hawk Run, Pennsylvania, I knew this was a marriage about to be consummated, and that it was for life.
I spent my remaining three years at Penn State getting acclimated to the community of believers and being a part of something rather than a lone wolf: the little 'c' church. I got involved--making friends on a retreat that I eventually ended up directing my senior year; experiencing the life of joy and poverty in Haiti; and spent most of my junior and senior years discerning a call to monastic life, after our priest invited a few of us guys to a vocation weekend at the Abbey.
I hadn't really developed habits of virtue though, keeping one foot in the door of my B.C. life: I partied and got drunk most weekends like I did in high school; I rarely said no to the opportunity to hook up with girls, though now I felt guilt about it. The elderly but emotionally pre-pubescent and co-dependent priest who catechized me was old school, but not in a healthy kind of way ("make sure you don't get hit by a bus before going to Confession," that kind of thing). I felt guilted in to attending the small Byzantine Divine Liturgy when he came to campus from his small rural parish, when I really wanted to be with my friends at the Roman masses. I had no appreciation for liturgy, it was just pomp and incense in my eyes.
It was about this time I started making weekend trips to a Catholic Worker community in Harrisburg with some other students and a married couple. I connected with the radical nature of the Worker right away, as well as with Bruce, the one half of the Peter-and-Paul team that ran the St. Martin de Porres House of Hospitality for homeless men with drug and alcohol addictions, and spent a year after college there practicing the Works of Mercy and serving the poor. Bruce was in his mid-forties, smoked Benson & Hedges menthol cigarettes, and, as I learned later, was HIV positive as a result of his midnight homosexual rendez-vous.
When mismanagement and scandal began to surface, and Bruce suddenly left in the middle of night and disappeared, I was left to run the place with his counterpart, Naed, a man with a mysterious past who I had heard was fired from his job as a campus minister at King's College because of some scandal (but never knew the whole story of what happened). Naed's non-heirachical, organic approach to governance was much different from Bruce's, who took a structured approach to running things. He put most of his energy into the community garden, and protesting at places like the School of the Americas in Georgia.
During this time I was kind of stuck between two worlds. I was reading volumes of Eastern monastic spirituality like The Philokalia and The Way of the Pilgrim, all while discerning a nagging calling to religious life. But on the book shelves at the Worker were books by authors like John Deer and the Berrigan brothers, which I also read. I had a strong desire to serve the poor and live a life of voluntary poverty, and admired Dorothy Day, but was less crazy about the political activism of the CW and her communal legacy.
When I left the Worker in the Fall of 2002, I didn't have a plan. I had lost my virginity my junior year of college to a Samoan girl in New Zealand, and I went back to visit, but it didn't end well and I ended up just hitch-hiking around the country for a month after she kicked me out of her apartment. I came back home to my parent's house and got a job at a factory painting propane tanks.
In the spring of 2003 I came across a website for an organization called the "Catholic Campaign for Human Development," the Social Justice arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in DC. They were sponsoring a cross country bike ride from June to August called "Brake the Cycle of Poverty," and I was game. I made the cut of 24 riders, and flew out to San Francisco for the start of the ride that June to raise awareness about the problem of poverty in America, and how CCHD was working to "address the root causes of poverty" by providing grants to community organizations as a means of breaking the cycle.
As we traversed the Sierra Nevada mountains, crested the Rockies, and made our way up to Chicago, Pittsburgh, and eventually DC, we held press conferences, did interviews with local newspapers, and spoke to parishes about the importance of working for justice. Our slogan was something to the effect of "We Can End Poverty," which didn't seem to jive with Jesus's words "the poor you will always have with you," but I kind of chalked it up to ideals that nobody seriously thought would ever manifest completely.
Most of the people on the tour were of a liberal, social justice bent, with the exception of one. His name was Brian. He was about my age, hailing from Kansas City, MO. He was quiet but friendly and prayed the rosary, something no one else on the tour did (at least not in public). He was a small-town, faithful, simple kind of guy--a square in my eyes--and I couldn't stand him. Even the way he pedaled--a huge gear at a low cadence--earned my scorn. I thought bad thoughts about him. I wished him ill. I saw him as a threat, but to what I didn't know.
One of the riders and I got romantically involved about halfway across the country. She was tough as nails, quite a few years older than me, and covered in tattoos from head to toe; a South Philly boxer and bartender, a talented photographer, who had financed her schooling by stripping. We hit it off, and after the tour ended, I moved to Philadelphia, and we got engaged. By the grace of God, the relationship fell apart a month before the wedding.
I got an apartment in Northwest Philly, a great one bedroom with ten foot ceilings and windows that you could walk out of to the vegetable garden in the front yard. I made friends with all my neighbors, growing marijuana in my closet, chain smoking inside and watching episodes of Lost and Battlestar Galactica together. After a breakup, I shaved my head and flew to Thailand and meditated in a jungle at a Buddhist monastery for 11 days without speaking and doing yoga every morning. Not long after getting back I bought a schoolbus and converted it to live in. I was also struggling to reign in my mind, which would get a way from me due to my diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Life was a kind of series of kicks and going with whatever presented itself. As long as it wasn't square, like that guy Brian.
I had been Catholic for almost ten years by this point, but I was a walking contradiction, and I knew it, and I embraced it. After the engagement broke off, I had stayed in touch with the Jesuit priest who had done our Pre-Cana and he became my spiritual director. He was kind and taught at the Jesuit university nearby, as he had written a book on 're-examining' sexual ethics. I appreciated the time he spent with me, but it was fruitless, since he basically kind of affirmed everything I did and spoke very lightly and understandingly of sin (though he was also my regular Confessor).
I was like a wayward son without a spiritual father and no discipline, an orphan trying to figure out the spiritual life and the way of the saints on my own. It's not easy to raise yourself in the faith; we need guides. The influence of my time at the Worker and with CCHD kept me in left-learning crowds, both Catholic and secular. I simply did not know anyone who was orthodox who could "give me a word," as those who approached the hermits in the desert would plead.
It wasn't until 2009, when I met my future wife, that things started to take a different direction. It was a slow slow process, like turning a U-boat. Thankfully I had kept up the practice of Eucharistic Adoration, even (and especially) in my sin and darkness. I would go to the chapel in Manayunk (when I was in between jobs and not working) and just lay down before the Lord like a bum and lay it all out, my whole mess. I had no posture of prayer, no discipline--just the same helplessness to improve or change or make things right that I experienced during my conversion in the wilderness.
But I did pray to meet someone, a spouse (since the monastery did not look like it was going to work out at this point), as I remembered our priest in college telling us. "Pray for your future spouse," he would say, "even if you don't know them." I did, before the Blessed Sacrament. My future wife, for her part, was praying also during the same time to meet someone. When we met, got engaged, and married, it became clear that we were God's provision to one another for the benefit of sanctification.
We contracepted early in our marriage (figuring "God understands"), and it wasn't until I came across Dr. Janet Smith's talks on the subject that put a little thorn in my conscience about it. It took a long time and a lot of agony, but when we made the move to trust the Lord, by his gentle nudging, and get in a state of grace--that was a pivotal point in both of our lives. Because then he could work. For so long I had my hand to the plow and was looking back. But you simply can't advance in the spiritual life in an efficacious manner until you leave death-dealing sin behind for good. When we began trusting also in the Mother of God, wearing the Miraculous Medal we found by chance, and making frequent Confession, Mass, and daily prayer a part of our lives, things really began to change.
You can't change the world from the outside. It has to start within, and it has to start with you, and by extension, your family--the domestic church. That's where I think the left gets it wrong. The promise of social utopia here on earth woefully neglects the dreadful reality of the Fall, and the rejection of clear, authoritative teaching and Reason, puts us back in the pre-creation dis-order of chaos. There is great diversity and expansiveness in the Church...as long as we are all playing by the same rules and not trying to subvert them for our own misguided ends.
I mentioned the guy on the ride, Brian, to whom I harbored so much unfounded hatred because of his conservative orthodoxy. A few months ago I got his number from a friend and was able to connect with him after fifteen years. He was as pleasant as could be, and invited our family to visit. He is now a lawyer, and he and his wife have ten children. They live a rich Catholic life in the country, and I have no doubt he is on his way to sanctification. I confessed to him, thorough tears, how much I hated him and thought ill of him, and asked for his forgiveness, which he had no qualms with extending. They even sent a hand written card when we experienced our first miscarriage to express how sorry they were and how they were praying for us. I look to him for guidance in my spiritual life today.
It's hard when you don't see the true faith lived, or see it lived as a subversive counterfeit, which is why St. Paul told the Corinthians "be imitators of me," to give them a flesh-and-blood example of what is possible with God's grace. I thank God for my orthodox, faithful friends, for shining their light before them so people like me can see the way out of chaos.
"Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from your law."
(Psalm 119:18)
I am glad you are seeing your way out of chaos! God speed brother!
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