Identity

Garb yourself a beverage. Settle down in your most comfy chair. I have a story to tell.

Twelve years ago I found myself in a dark place. My family was in shambles - arguments, petty bickering, and long-standing abuses had coalesced into a sort of dystopian existence for me. I was, for the first time in my 40+ years on this planet, divided from my family, irrevocably. I was rapidly sinking in a wide sea of pain and loss. Sinking, even, too deep for salvation.

Salvation. We'll get to that in a bit.

Conversations began about a possible return to church. We hadn't been in over 20 years (see dystopian reality above). We, well I really, felt a strong pull to join something bigger than me. Something that might give me purpose.

Oh hell - let's be honest. I was looking for a life raft.

Easter Morning, 2010 - hubby & I are outside, ready to go to his family's for Easter dinner. As if from heaven itself we heard the bells of a nearby church. Now, we'd lived in our home for over 20 years at that point and never, in all that time, had we heard these bells. Not once.

We took it as a sign (which of course, it was; I've likened it to a 2X4 upside the head, from God). The next weekend we quietly began a return to church. Our small town is blessed with churches of nearly all Christian practices so...we began a round-robin of attendance. Figuring one of them would, eventually, resonate with us. We had no timetable. As I've said many times, God's Time is not something we can calculate or understand. We figured when it was "time", God would let us know.

Funny how that works.

We started with the Catholic Church. We tried all the others, in turn. Returned to a few of them here and there, but we just kept being called to the Catholic Church.

Sure - the people were kind and welcoming. The priest was charismatic, funny, and a man of profound faith. The Church is 1.5 miles from our home. It's a small, country church nestled in our beautiful, rural, picturesque village. 

And yet - I found something there I didn't know I needed. I didn't know I could belong to. I found something my battered spirit, shattered heart, and scarred soul yearned for without my knowing it.

Home.

In the 12 years since being called back to church, and finding a home in the Catholic Faith - I have fallen deeply in love with God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. And quite surprisingly for someone raised in a Christian, evangelical, fundamental faith - I found rituals.

My former faith "threw shade" (that's being kind) at the Catholic Church. Phrases like "the vain repetitions of the heathen" were spoken frequently and with deep loathing for the imagined subject. Yet, 12 years ago I also fell in love with the ritual identity of being Catholic. 

It's hard to describe the feeling. Going from an austere aesthetic that derided even a whiff of "ritual" to the very foundation of rituals in Christian life - was a harsh pivot to make.

Yet I made it with gratitude and thanksgiving. I won't say it was easy, exactly. Rather it felt natural, like this is what I should have been doing all my life. 

Home. My home. Where I belong. And even now, 12 years later, every time I hear my voice united in prayer with my friends - I say a side prayer thanking God for saving me. For calling me out of the darkness. For bringing me in from the wilderness of my wanderings.

Salvation. In the purest sense of the word, God saved me. From my family, my pain, my loss, myself. He brought me HOME, to the rituals of being Catholic. To his love, that reckless love that could only come from him.