Preparing to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ on Saturday Night, gathered in one room, not knowing it about each other, were:
- A Fraternity Brother whom I’ve known for 30 years.
- A Coworker whom I hadn’t met yet.
- A Goddaughter from the Orthodox Church, and her husband, now returned home.
- A musician with enough Anglican History to pick all the right sort of music and keep me singing most of the night.
- Two people with whom I’ve spoken maybe 20 words? Who had a gift for me I wasn’t expecting.
- A man with a bad pun on my name.
- A whole lot of new friends I didn’t know I had.
- Quite a lot I already knew.
That, in a nutshell, has been my experience of the Catholic Church. “Here comes everybody.” The Anglican, Prot, Eastern, Benedictine, Marian… all meet here. And some new things: the Courage Apostolate, the Angelic Warfare Confraternity, the Jesus Psalter. I used to be afraid of Dominicans… cuz of the Inquisition, you know. I didn’t know my family included a Catholic martyr. The number of Lapsed Catholics – or as my friend, Bernardo says, “Collapsed Catholics” – that are in my life is astounding. Everything is here.
There are good places and bad places in the Church. There are good and bad people. There are corners of Mother Church that are nuttier than the darkest pools of Orthodox Converts on the internet; there are folks more triumphalist and sectarian than the bazillion Holy Remnant “True Churches” of Orthodoxy. Yet there is a wideness in God’s Mercy, and a depth in the Church that cannot be obscured by the shallow bywaters. For every Saint Maria of Paris there is a Dorothy Day, for every Czar Martyr Nicholas, there is a St Louis. There’s something else as well: I can’t put my finger on it. Only half-jokingly it seems, Tu Es Petros really is a thing, after all.
Maybe it’s just sheer numbers for in Russia or Greece it must be the same for the Eastern Church. Orthodoxy preaches the same divinely revealed moral teachings as the Roman Church. Yet in this country she rarely gets accused (other than by her own members) of interfering in modern secular “values” and “moral choices”. Orthodoxy is “Mystical” whereas the Catholic Church is political and scary. Those politics can be viewed as isolated from the Church’s Doctrines and thus as “Left” or “Right”. Or they can be taken as an integral whole and seen as transcending earthly partisanship. But these political actions can (nearly) never be confused with “mystical” and “spiritual but not religious”, therefore, “safe” for the modern world.
Perhaps in Russia or Greece, she does hospitals and orphanages and food for the poor. I say “perhaps” but I’m reasonably certain of it. Were I in Russia, it’s Catholicism that would be the Boutique. Here, it’s hard for a member of the Orthodox Parish Council to donate a sign to hang outside with service times for fear the wrong sort of people will come in the door.
Some would say I’ve left the Boutique and gone to Wal*Mart. But the grace is no less dearly given, nor the piety less deeply prayed, the teachings no less strongly struggled for or lived. The podcasts tend to be about beer, politics, and birthin’ babies. The priests tend to sound rather like Bros and Bubbas. Or – and I’m hella lucky here – Surfer Dudes.
I’m on Aisle 42, near the avocados, hunting camo, and inflatable pools. I’m trying to engage the culture and learn New Evangelism, Theology of the Body, and Rosary-based-but-not-the-Rosary forms of prayer.
Also I’m in love.
Doxos 
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