Faith in free fall without connection and inclusion
In what might be a profound revelation of faith or simply a good old-fashioned midlife crisis, I have started going to church every Sunday I can. Not just any church, of course, just the only true Holy Roman and Apostolic one. To paraphrase Paul Keating, if you’re not a Catholic you’re camping out.
This has been a very long and slow process but also a very deliberate one.
I was baptised and raised in a Catholic family, but thanks to a hippie father and a flat-out single mother I never completed my confirmation.
This never bothered me during my wild and hedonistic youth.
But more than a decade ago, when I was about to get married and have children, I realised I was finally ready to renounce Satan – and hippies – and get right with God.
Thus I received my first communion as an adult, my wife and I were married in a Catholic Church and my three children were baptised.
Of even greater relief, my eldest child received his confirmation and first communion on time and on budget. The sins of the father, it seemed, had at last been absolved.
But why? Why all of this? Why any of it? Even after my long-awaited confirmation I rarely attended mass in the 10 years since.
There is an old joke about a Catholic priest who comes to town only to find his new parishioners despondent about a horde of bats in the belfry. They have tried everything to get rid of them, they tell him, but nothing works. “Leave it with me,” the priest says, and sure enough the next day all the bats are gone.
“What did you do Father?” they asked incredulous.
“I baptised them,” he said. “Now they’ll only come back at Christmas and Easter.”
Yet for many years I struggled to make it on even those auspicious dates. Part of the reason was just life – three young children and a local church that was now on the other side of the city. But a bigger and more important part was that I needed to wrestle with God for a long time.
I needed to reassure myself that the church, for all its faults, was truly and fundamentally good. This meant reading and re-reading countless secular and theological texts on the life and work of the historical Jesus.
Unlike more fundamentalist strains of Christianity, Catholics are big on history and context – mainly because we have so much more of it.
By contrast, cherrypicking quotes from the Bible without any understanding of their nuance or background is a recipe for fundamentalism and disaster.
Once I felt I understood it all enough, I was ready to start taking communion again.
After all, if you’re going to eat someone’s body you want to be pretty sure that you know Him.
Yet still that weekly ritual remained something of a mystery to me. Perhaps the apocryphal “mystery of the faith” or perhaps something else. All I knew was that I loved going to Mass and always felt an almost primal sense of peace while I was there but I still didn’t know why.
Intellectually, of course, I still wrestled with God and all the myriad biblical edicts and pronouncements and predictions that even unto themselves are often messy or vague or contradictory – not to mention contrary to all known laws of biology and physics in their ultimate conclusion.
So why did this thing I knew to be wholly irrational bring me such quiet relief and euphoria every Sunday morning?
It was only a few weeks ago that it finally dawned on me: Connection.
Faith is on face value a connection to something greater than ourselves, but it is also a connection to thousands of years of human history and tradition and fellowship.
And, most importantly, it is also a connection with those with whom you gather.
Connection. Togetherness. Peace and good will. This is the very core of Christianity and the only reason it survived in its early embryonic life and has endured throughout the ages since. But today – in the West at least – it is somewhere between decline and free fall. Again, why?
A clue lies in the desperate attempts of some church leaders to cling to the absurd and absurdly ineffective practice of gay conversion.
You only have to imagine a woke gender ideologue demanding a straight man convert to homosexuality to realise how utterly insane this is, but that insanity is just the first part.
The real damage is that it takes the universally inclusive and loving message of Christ and turns it into a message of exclusion and hate. This is morally wrong in and of itself but also a self-combusting mission from religious leaders who lament the decline in faith while at the same time trying to exclude people from it.
That is an even greater insanity and I desperately hope the church simply quietly leaves its problem with gay people in the dustbin of history, as more and more Catholic groups are now calling for.
Then perhaps finally we can move forward and deal with the real problems that are facing society.
Like Protestants.