My Pilgrimage
COMING HOME TO THE CHURCH
It’s comforting to know that other people have spiritual crises in their adolescence, too.
Mine came early. It may be that it converged with the emotional bewilderment that sometimes hits kids at that age because of our newly changing bodies and fluctuating moods. It has to do with hormones, some say; but it also has to do with faith.
My mother and father are quiet, steady, gentle, domestic folk. All through my childhood, my father did unskilled labor at a laundry. He never made a penny more than the minimum wage. He walked home every afternoon sweat-soaked and tired, occasionally with red burns on his arms from having touched a steam pipe. But he didn’t seem to mind if my older brother and I climbed all over him. This is what his life consisted of: work, his wife and two kids, his reading (philosophy and botany), and his garden.
My mother was, and is, a housewife. Our life with her also included going to Mass (Roman Catholic) on Sunday. My father didn’t go, except at the Easter Vigil and Christmas Midnight Mass: he liked the Gregorian chant. When that was discontinued, he didn’t go at all.
I used to get into my father’s books, even in grade school: skimming rapidly what I couldn’t understand, and reading avidly what I could. So it was that I came upon a series of tracts against religion. They were called Little Blue Books, published by E. Haldeman-Julius, and they featured essays by such men as Bertrand Russell, Sir Julian Huxley, and Clarence Darrow.
You May Also Enjoy
Neuhaus’s plea for the restoration of religious values in the public sphere and for the believing community to act there on the basis of its beliefs is proper and necessary.
In Catholic worship, the truth of God and man is revealed. The revelation takes root in only those who harmonize themselves within the hierarchy of God and man.
Some Catholics say we should leave "anonymous Christians" alone, that they have at least a partial grasp of the truth and that will be enough to bring them to salvation.