Portland Magazine
June 14, 2019
I’M ALWAYS IN AWE, each year, when we meet the new catechumens—people newly entering the Catholic Church. They stand shyly before the altar, like new fawns trying to find their first footing, longing for some steadiness that the world has not provided.
Yet I also shake my head in wonder. Don’t they know what’s become of our Church? Haven’t they read the papers about the sexual abuse scandals, the thousands of people that our Church has betrayed and harmed?
And yet I’m there at Mass longing for that steadiness too. So I turn the question to myself. Why, in spite of the betrayals of my Church, do I keep coming back?
Part of my answer has to do with my own restlessness—some of which derives from my own nature, some of which is a byproduct of our society. “Our hearts are restless,” St. Augustine wrote in The Confessions, “until they find rest in Thee.” I, too, long for the sweet rest that Augustine prayed for. How to find it amidst capitalism’s relentless consumerism, Freud’s notion of the primacy of desire, the Internet swallowing our attention, causing us to skitter like insects along the screens of a virtual world? And then there is the deep shame I feel, that our Church has been the cause of suffering for so many vulnerable people. Our hearts are terribly restless, and so many of us have lost trust in the Church—and by association, God—as the way toward inner calm.
AND YET SOMETHING keeps calling me back. When we started coming to St. Dominic Parish in Shaker Heights, Ohio, we felt so welcome. My wife, Amy, and I would take turns weeping during Mass at the loving words spoken by Father Tom or the soaring chorus, exhorting that all are welcome in this place. We wanted to raise our children in the Church—not because it is perfect but because it is a place and time where we set aside our busy lives and seek communion, to seek encounter with the divine. I love what Father Greg Boyle has said, that Church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners, those seeking wholeness, those longing to be healed.
When I was a child, I was bored as hell by the Mass. But as I’ve grown, I’ve become more and more rapt by it—the singing, the asking for mercy, the recurring stories and their parabolic power, the kiss of peace, the gathering at table, the procession toward communion, the rhythms of liturgical seasons…and this enigmatic, beautiful, challenging, luminous, loving figure at the heart of it.
The skeptical side of me balks, struggles against teachings that strain understanding. I bridle against the Catholicism that suggests we are stained, our bodies are sinful, and the world is corrupt. Aren’t we also made in the image of God? Doesn’t creation sing the glory of the Lord?
YET ISN’T THE STRUGGLE part of the faith? Jacob, Sarah, Job, Jonah, Mary, Martha, even Jesus—in the end, who didn’t wrestle with God? The struggle has spoken to me more loudly than submission. So I go, praying, wrestling with the angels, trying to overcome or be overcome, trying to quiet my cynicism, to make a space in myself for God.
Sometimes, when praying, I feel totally present to the moment; sometimes I go through the motions; sometimes I question every word of a prayer. It can be easy to start wrestling with the words, because the prayers are old translations from other tongues, from ancient worldviews. If I believe, as St. Ignatius of Loyola teaches, that we might see God in all things, then even in my struggles, distractions, lazy prayers and poems, the divine is curled, sleeping, and dreaming of waking.
When God becomes weaponized, used to damn people, justify wars, accelerate the fires of hatred, I’m disheartened and want to flee from being associated with the faith. Yet I long for the God behind the God of religion. The God hidden in the God we have constructed, the one at the core of the mystery of existence. I long for a Church as great as the love that the faith invites us to.
Perhaps it is a weakness of mine that I don’t want my existence (indeed, all human existence) to have been a random biological accident. But this faith rhymes with something in me and to reject that would be to lie. I love too much the idea that we are invited into the fullness of divinity insofar as we stand with the marginalized and the broken, the imprisoned and the exiled, the hungry and the forsaken (Matthew 5:3–12). It seems to me that all the great faiths meet in the following ideas: That we belong to each other. That each person is an encounter with the divine mystery, a door to some almost-imaginable place (John 14:2), in which we all can come home.
PHILIP METRES is the author of Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening, and Sand Opera, and is a two-time recipient of the NEA and Arab American Book Award.
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