I haven't been Catholic since 2000 -- I became Orthodox then (and am kind of one foot in, one foot out at this point for various reasons), and was an Eastern Catholic for a few years before that, too. Having traveled that trajectory, and reading of your own path over the last few years, as well as your impressions of Eastern Christianity in your younger years ... my own view is that this would not be the best of ideas in terms of good options for you. Too many dissonances, oddities and so on that would likely distract more than anything else, given where you're coming from.
I do understand the sense of liking the "residue" of having been a believer more than actual belief but I honestly don't know that it's possible to instill this in others (eg, kids) if they do not, themselves, go through a period of actual belief as an adult, whether they subsequently lose their belief or not.
This is the tricky thing, I think, about the present moment.
Many people are realizing that a life without some basis for moral foundation beyond the "care/harm" standard leaves a lot missing. A relatively small minority is fine with this, very self-driven, self-curating and so on, but a larger group feels adrift by it, and is looking for a fix for that. But I don't know of any way that has ever actually worked for any significant number of people for any significant period of time without actual belief. It seems very hard to get the residue without actually having been a true believer at some stage. And founding new religions (or spiritualities or what have you) is incredibly difficult to do in our age, because of the intense, ever-present global panopticon that scrutinizes everything in real time. I very much doubt that any of the leading religious systems of today would have survived that withering glare in their formative stages.
And yet ... it's hard to argue with the problems that faith poses -- that is, with people who have problems with it, for various reasons and from varying perspectives. I just haven't seen another source of the kind of "binding together" of many people in a "sticky" sense of certain moral rules and behavior, as you say (again, beyond the minimalistic care/harm standard).
Recently, I read an article about how many protestants are leaving their churches in droves to join the more "masculine" Orthodox Church. I wonder if you have any thoughts on this, what effect it will have on the Orthodox Church in America, and will it be short lived. I tend to think guys like Jay Dyer have had a huge influence in converting tons of disaffected young men, who seem to flood the com boxes in his livestreams.
It's happening, but it isn't new. Back when I was inquiring into Orthodoxy back in the late 1990s there were also many people coming in from various Protestant backgrounds, typically either single men or married men who had their (sometimes reluctant) wives in tow. The flow seems to periodically spike and then slow down, based on external factors.
When people say Orthodoxy feels more "masculine", what they mean is typically a couple of things: (1) Orthodoxy's aesthetic isn't like the current Western Christian churches (no praise bands, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend songs, no guitar masses, etc), (2) some roles are male only (altar servers, and in many churches readers as well), and (3) Orthodoxy, when followed rigorously (which many born Orthodox do not do!), has kept more of the rigors that were present in pre-V2 Catholicism (generally fasting) and has a serious tone about it.
But ... Orthodoxy tends, as well, to attract people who are trying to flee modernity for various reasons that don't have much to do with Eastern Christianity, per se, and this can result in both (1) weird external "larping" of presumed "old country" Orthodox ways of being Christian that are not actually followed by a significant number of born Orthodox today and (2) departures after the shine comes off (a problem with all religious converts really). The waves of converts tend to spike and fall over time, but it's important to remember that the total number of people we're talking about here is very, very small compared to the number of people received by the Catholic Church in North America annually, for example.
Orthodoxy is very different from Catholicism, which is perhaps the biggest surprise for people who come in from a Catholic background. From the outside it kind of looks like a traditionalist Eastern (Greco-Slav) version of Catholicism from the past without the Pope. It's basically what I thought as well, perhaps because I had been Eastern Catholic for a while and therefore assumed it would be similar to that based on many, many visits over a number of years and speaking with clergy and members and so on. But ... it's different in ways that have to be lived and experienced in order to be appreciated. The orientation inside the religion, the way it's related to and practiced, by the serous believers at least, is quite different in mindset even from most of Eastern Catholicism. Not necessarily better, or worse, but different.
Thank you for the reply, that was excellent. One last question if I may: You mentioned that you had one foot in and one foot out of the EO Church, do you find that their claims of Christianity are as unverifiable as anyone else? I'm in the same boat with Catholicism, barely holding on. I have no interest in going to another church or tradition, so it's likely that agnostic could be my final destination. The whole thing is disorienting, I wonder how you have been navigating this faith dilemma. 1.6.25
Yeah -- for me it's more about general doubts about some of the formulations of Christianity, and how things came together in the very early church as compared with what was settled later on. At the same time, I do feel pulled towards various aspects of it as well, still. Unclear to me when/how that will resolve, or if it will.
I'm generally not a big believer in "finding the true church" -- I did that in the past and it doesn't have much of a hold on me now. I tend to see the advantages and disadvantages of each "version" of Christianity, in the current time frame, rather than looking for the one true one. Orthodoxy has both advantages and disadvantages, both as lived in the West and as lived in the Orthodox world (which I have been lucky enough to observe for extended periods on several occasions over the last couple of decades). I also have no great interest in any other version of Christianity, like you, at this stage.
As for how I am navigating, I guess for me it's more of a listening process and being patient with myself and with what may come, one way or the other, without trying to actively find an answer. I find the latter approach tends to favor finding an answer over waiting for the right one, at some stage, based on past experience.
It sometimes helps to embrace ourselves as a walking paradox. The forces that created us in the end are arbitrary and irrational (whims of culture, genetics, parents etc.) and hence no amount of introspection will ever provide us all the clarity that we would want (even if it does occasionally provide some).
There can be great strength in being paradoxical as well. Christianity itself provides an example for this. In the Roman Empire, Christianity was a paradox - a jumble of contradictory visions and unresolved potentials. At that point it was strong and was poised to take over a powerful empire and (later on) half the globe.
Around the 18th century, it had been resolved into cleverly argued syllogisms, axioms, legalistic arguments and concrete structures. At that point it began to fell apart and younger, more swashbuckling ideologies took over the momentum.
Life is filled with chaos and paradox and can be made sense through a lens that itself contain chaos and paradox. If you create a lens with too much order, you are setting up a brittle house of cards. This then falls apart when the infinite vagaries of life pierce the lens by manifesting something that the structure of syllogisms says should be impossible (e.g. for Catholicism, a pope that acts like a heretic).
Well I recommend you hold a Sunday family meeting if you can't (or don't want to) go to church, using a St. joseph's missal (or use the internet), and just sit around and pass the missal (or tablet) around and one person reads the first reading, one person does the responsorial psalm, etc., right thru the gospel. Takes aboit 20 minutes, including the critique.
Then have a discussion, which can be a critique. This is what my family did as NYC escapees for 2.5 years during lockdowns. Try out "Magnicat" subscription. These monthly issues are so priceless i give them out by leaving them in back of church at the end of each month. $49 a year. It's the little essays, the vignettes, the profiles of holy people living and dead. And the ART!
THE ART and art criticism are unbelievable. This little periodical moved me from the 3rd mansion to the 4th mansion in the Interior Castle over two years, I sensed (hard to know these things, I am guessing), but then I back slid probably back to the second mansion in last 6 months. And why is that? Ah, too long, let's just say overburdened with worldly cares and sense of approaching mortality and health deterioration due to aging. Approaching mortality is supposed to motivate one to try to advance through the castles, but in my case, it has imposed work deadlines on me (mundane stuff, ugh, where are the car titles, where is the will). I am trying to explain to the family what to do in the event of my demise. No, I don't have a terminal diagnosis, except the general one we all have, but I can tell I am "aging" and friends and extended family in my age cohort are dying here and there. It isn't up to us when we go. I pray for all people who don't have faith or doubt or have lost the faith.
I read this post a few times, intending to absorb the forest through the trees, through the several details that attract my attention. I hear how you are stuck between two bad or impossible options, secularism and religion, and how your responsibility to your family is implicated in the question. What a worthy cross. There is not much more that I dare to say about that directly.
But to follow up on one of those particular remarks that draws my attention, it’s the observation that the parish liturgy was not the doorway to sacred mystery that it should have been. It is fair to say that in this domain my dander has also been raised since coming into the Catholic Church, and I have not yet concluded how disappointed I can rightly be by it.
The question is wide, and the sweep of my thoughts feels circumscribed today, so I’ll come at it by contrasting the reality of pre-Mass chitter-chatter with the ideal of prayerful preparation. The world is full of coffee shops and kitchen tables at which one can discuss one’s husband’s upcoming Pickleball tournament, so that I can only wonder at how the one place and time that is specially dedicated to prayer is itself shattered into nugatory fragments of worldly trivia.
Having sought for years, passed through spaces where some idea at least of the sacred was cherished even if we were powerless to attain it in full force, engaged New Agey practices where hours of silence were called for and observed, and now convinced I had entered a space of truth where God dwelt bodily, my first experience of Sunday Mass raised a few yellow flags. Yet I set them to one side with a convert’s first blush of fervor, intent on reaching my goal of Baptism and full participation in the Eucharist, and picking at a side dish of some green and untried ideas of obedience to the institutional Church and humility before my fellow man.
What after all is a sense of the sacred? To be sure, it’s something I want, crave, am dying for over here. It feels as though the world should be more integrated, our vision should reach further, a pit of sinking despair should not be but a stone’s throw away, and somehow the sacred is a space of supreme coherence, love before which the tears will never cease falling from human eyes, and beauty that bathes every pore and every high-flown feeling in the most golden pure white light, a holy plane of being where painful failures and the creeping sense of emptiness have no claim.
Yet how is this more than a drug trip or some high fantasy world-building? Are we just looking to feel good?
At Mass, despite it all, I will often feel this subtle uplift, this energizing abstraction from the muck and mire of the world, from the mattress store commercials on TV and the petty insecurities that my new colleague has drawn out of me.
But is this really more than a mild state of self-hypnosis? Could I get here with binaural beats? Isn’t this something that a cool glass of white wine could do as well?
Of course, I wouldn’t be here carrying on like this if I didn’t expect to get to my “and yet” sooner or later. We are in quite a state in the world, profound disorientation reigns and everywhere people are grasping at straws or sitting pretty in some complacent backwater. Things fall apart. My vote of no confidence is rendered.
Yet the sacred cannot be attained on our own terms, and the hour is late: though elders of a gentle race descend from the sky and we are all found to be psychic, now is not the time for a new religion. Jesus is Lord. I don’t see how that reality is threatened by either the revelation of non-human intelligence or by our rediscovering ancient truths about the nonlocality of consciousness. Padre Pio would frown at a penitent for what he hadn’t confessed, and C.S. Lewis told a beautiful story about a scholar from earth helping the Eve of the planet Venus to resist the wickedness and snares of the devil after having his mind and heart enlightened by the living wisdom of those who dwell on Mars.
I respect that not everybody is there with me. I hope to have some epistemic humility such that, though I be convicted in faith, I recognize my fallibility as a human being who could be wrong after all. I sound like a simpleton, and intolerant, to a number of important people in my life if I say it, but one cannot do better than to cling to Jesus and call upon His Name. He is present, and He is love and light, very God and truly our Friend.
We Are Supposed to Walk and Talk with God and We Can’t Do It On Our Own Therefore God has to Help Us and Why Wouldn’t He, He is Good, I Guess I am Doing it After All: This Life is It and My Finest Intuitions, Angels of My Better Nature Do Proclaim, Holy, Holy, Holy…
Say what you will about the chatter, I have come out of my shell since going to church, become more of a joiner than I ever expected to be, met people in small groups I am better, more whole for having known. That sounds like the lesson of a very special episode of a preteen drama, the real sacredness being the friends we made along the way, but I stand by it as far as it goes.
As for the rest, the sacredness is kind of nowhere and kind of everywhere, in a sage-like riddle. I really do find more simple glimpses of sacredness, purity, and hope in the Church than I ever did outside. I’ve yet to be persuaded that those eclectic open-minded New Age folks, wonderful as many of them are, really have access to anything that I lack in the presently stodgy and greying Catholic Church.
And for my part, I’ve yet to convince anyone to be Catholic (or any kind of Christian), and I get that there’s perspectives from which it seems improbable that this could really be God’s privileged Way. I just… well, everything else seems to me even more unchancy, or like it’s given up on truth before it’s even really started, content just to pass the time with some nice ideas.
The general tenor of the times does seem to be shifting. Enchantment is breaking in. We'll see what happens next, I guess.
I think I've mentioned before how my own faith experience has a few similarities to yours, what with my growing up in the Mormon church, realizing when I was around age 20 that I just couldn't believe its exclusivity/infallibility claims, but knowing at the same time that atheist materialism is much, much, worse.
I don't at all envy your experience - since all this happened to me before I could marry or have children, I've never had the problem of being responsible for anyone else's spiritual welfare as I did this. Also, since Mormonism is quasi-universalist (i.e. according to their doctrine, almost nobody spends eternity in a place that most Christians would recognize as "hell") I was never really angry at the Mormon God... I just recognized a lot of aspects of it as rather farcical.
I think that religions in the modern age are facing a Scylla and Charybdis situation. They have to navigate this narrow strait between two monsters. If you whitewash your history and emphasize your claims to be the One True Faith, you're sailing close to Scylla, who will thrust forth her long next and devour a bunch of sailors from off your decks - this is what happens when churches like the Catholics and Mormons loses a whole bunch of their cleverest and most curious and empathetic members each generation... it's so easy in the modern age to get information about other points-of-view and how non-unique your own faith actually is that you will always have high attrition especially among your best people. (i.e. people like you and me 😀)
But on the opposite side of the strait is Charybis - the whirlpool that will swallow your whole ship. Sailing by Charybdis is what happens when your religion makes no demands of its people (like Episcopalianism and other liberal Protestant churches.) This is even worse than Scylla - instead of losing a few sailors each time you pass the monster, if you make no demands of your people to hold them together, then in a little while... you just don't have a ship.
Since I actually believe in the existence of God, and I believe that God wants to be worshipped, I have do doubt that, over the next few centuries, a bevy of new religions will arise that can "square the circle" as it were, and hold their adherents to a code of morals and ritual that persists through the generations, without making implausible claims about (1) their own history or (2) the illegitimacy of all other faiths, that drive away intelligent and conscientious people.
The downside is I think it will take several centuries to happen. And the present time is (as I think some other readers have pointed out) a poor time for new faiths to be born, due to the sheer number of information-age distractions that exist.
Good that you still have the drive to seek the transcendental truth. Don't give up!
I haven't been Catholic since 2000 -- I became Orthodox then (and am kind of one foot in, one foot out at this point for various reasons), and was an Eastern Catholic for a few years before that, too. Having traveled that trajectory, and reading of your own path over the last few years, as well as your impressions of Eastern Christianity in your younger years ... my own view is that this would not be the best of ideas in terms of good options for you. Too many dissonances, oddities and so on that would likely distract more than anything else, given where you're coming from.
I do understand the sense of liking the "residue" of having been a believer more than actual belief but I honestly don't know that it's possible to instill this in others (eg, kids) if they do not, themselves, go through a period of actual belief as an adult, whether they subsequently lose their belief or not.
This is the tricky thing, I think, about the present moment.
Many people are realizing that a life without some basis for moral foundation beyond the "care/harm" standard leaves a lot missing. A relatively small minority is fine with this, very self-driven, self-curating and so on, but a larger group feels adrift by it, and is looking for a fix for that. But I don't know of any way that has ever actually worked for any significant number of people for any significant period of time without actual belief. It seems very hard to get the residue without actually having been a true believer at some stage. And founding new religions (or spiritualities or what have you) is incredibly difficult to do in our age, because of the intense, ever-present global panopticon that scrutinizes everything in real time. I very much doubt that any of the leading religious systems of today would have survived that withering glare in their formative stages.
And yet ... it's hard to argue with the problems that faith poses -- that is, with people who have problems with it, for various reasons and from varying perspectives. I just haven't seen another source of the kind of "binding together" of many people in a "sticky" sense of certain moral rules and behavior, as you say (again, beyond the minimalistic care/harm standard).
Recently, I read an article about how many protestants are leaving their churches in droves to join the more "masculine" Orthodox Church. I wonder if you have any thoughts on this, what effect it will have on the Orthodox Church in America, and will it be short lived. I tend to think guys like Jay Dyer have had a huge influence in converting tons of disaffected young men, who seem to flood the com boxes in his livestreams.
It's happening, but it isn't new. Back when I was inquiring into Orthodoxy back in the late 1990s there were also many people coming in from various Protestant backgrounds, typically either single men or married men who had their (sometimes reluctant) wives in tow. The flow seems to periodically spike and then slow down, based on external factors.
When people say Orthodoxy feels more "masculine", what they mean is typically a couple of things: (1) Orthodoxy's aesthetic isn't like the current Western Christian churches (no praise bands, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend songs, no guitar masses, etc), (2) some roles are male only (altar servers, and in many churches readers as well), and (3) Orthodoxy, when followed rigorously (which many born Orthodox do not do!), has kept more of the rigors that were present in pre-V2 Catholicism (generally fasting) and has a serious tone about it.
But ... Orthodoxy tends, as well, to attract people who are trying to flee modernity for various reasons that don't have much to do with Eastern Christianity, per se, and this can result in both (1) weird external "larping" of presumed "old country" Orthodox ways of being Christian that are not actually followed by a significant number of born Orthodox today and (2) departures after the shine comes off (a problem with all religious converts really). The waves of converts tend to spike and fall over time, but it's important to remember that the total number of people we're talking about here is very, very small compared to the number of people received by the Catholic Church in North America annually, for example.
Orthodoxy is very different from Catholicism, which is perhaps the biggest surprise for people who come in from a Catholic background. From the outside it kind of looks like a traditionalist Eastern (Greco-Slav) version of Catholicism from the past without the Pope. It's basically what I thought as well, perhaps because I had been Eastern Catholic for a while and therefore assumed it would be similar to that based on many, many visits over a number of years and speaking with clergy and members and so on. But ... it's different in ways that have to be lived and experienced in order to be appreciated. The orientation inside the religion, the way it's related to and practiced, by the serous believers at least, is quite different in mindset even from most of Eastern Catholicism. Not necessarily better, or worse, but different.
Thank you for the reply, that was excellent. One last question if I may: You mentioned that you had one foot in and one foot out of the EO Church, do you find that their claims of Christianity are as unverifiable as anyone else? I'm in the same boat with Catholicism, barely holding on. I have no interest in going to another church or tradition, so it's likely that agnostic could be my final destination. The whole thing is disorienting, I wonder how you have been navigating this faith dilemma. 1.6.25
Yeah -- for me it's more about general doubts about some of the formulations of Christianity, and how things came together in the very early church as compared with what was settled later on. At the same time, I do feel pulled towards various aspects of it as well, still. Unclear to me when/how that will resolve, or if it will.
I'm generally not a big believer in "finding the true church" -- I did that in the past and it doesn't have much of a hold on me now. I tend to see the advantages and disadvantages of each "version" of Christianity, in the current time frame, rather than looking for the one true one. Orthodoxy has both advantages and disadvantages, both as lived in the West and as lived in the Orthodox world (which I have been lucky enough to observe for extended periods on several occasions over the last couple of decades). I also have no great interest in any other version of Christianity, like you, at this stage.
As for how I am navigating, I guess for me it's more of a listening process and being patient with myself and with what may come, one way or the other, without trying to actively find an answer. I find the latter approach tends to favor finding an answer over waiting for the right one, at some stage, based on past experience.
It sometimes helps to embrace ourselves as a walking paradox. The forces that created us in the end are arbitrary and irrational (whims of culture, genetics, parents etc.) and hence no amount of introspection will ever provide us all the clarity that we would want (even if it does occasionally provide some).
There can be great strength in being paradoxical as well. Christianity itself provides an example for this. In the Roman Empire, Christianity was a paradox - a jumble of contradictory visions and unresolved potentials. At that point it was strong and was poised to take over a powerful empire and (later on) half the globe.
Around the 18th century, it had been resolved into cleverly argued syllogisms, axioms, legalistic arguments and concrete structures. At that point it began to fell apart and younger, more swashbuckling ideologies took over the momentum.
Life is filled with chaos and paradox and can be made sense through a lens that itself contain chaos and paradox. If you create a lens with too much order, you are setting up a brittle house of cards. This then falls apart when the infinite vagaries of life pierce the lens by manifesting something that the structure of syllogisms says should be impossible (e.g. for Catholicism, a pope that acts like a heretic).
Well said. Christianity is a lot healthier and vibrant when it's messy and full of paradoxes.
You might check out Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Cary. Nice little Byzantine Rite Catholic church.
Well I recommend you hold a Sunday family meeting if you can't (or don't want to) go to church, using a St. joseph's missal (or use the internet), and just sit around and pass the missal (or tablet) around and one person reads the first reading, one person does the responsorial psalm, etc., right thru the gospel. Takes aboit 20 minutes, including the critique.
Then have a discussion, which can be a critique. This is what my family did as NYC escapees for 2.5 years during lockdowns. Try out "Magnicat" subscription. These monthly issues are so priceless i give them out by leaving them in back of church at the end of each month. $49 a year. It's the little essays, the vignettes, the profiles of holy people living and dead. And the ART!
THE ART and art criticism are unbelievable. This little periodical moved me from the 3rd mansion to the 4th mansion in the Interior Castle over two years, I sensed (hard to know these things, I am guessing), but then I back slid probably back to the second mansion in last 6 months. And why is that? Ah, too long, let's just say overburdened with worldly cares and sense of approaching mortality and health deterioration due to aging. Approaching mortality is supposed to motivate one to try to advance through the castles, but in my case, it has imposed work deadlines on me (mundane stuff, ugh, where are the car titles, where is the will). I am trying to explain to the family what to do in the event of my demise. No, I don't have a terminal diagnosis, except the general one we all have, but I can tell I am "aging" and friends and extended family in my age cohort are dying here and there. It isn't up to us when we go. I pray for all people who don't have faith or doubt or have lost the faith.
I read this post a few times, intending to absorb the forest through the trees, through the several details that attract my attention. I hear how you are stuck between two bad or impossible options, secularism and religion, and how your responsibility to your family is implicated in the question. What a worthy cross. There is not much more that I dare to say about that directly.
But to follow up on one of those particular remarks that draws my attention, it’s the observation that the parish liturgy was not the doorway to sacred mystery that it should have been. It is fair to say that in this domain my dander has also been raised since coming into the Catholic Church, and I have not yet concluded how disappointed I can rightly be by it.
The question is wide, and the sweep of my thoughts feels circumscribed today, so I’ll come at it by contrasting the reality of pre-Mass chitter-chatter with the ideal of prayerful preparation. The world is full of coffee shops and kitchen tables at which one can discuss one’s husband’s upcoming Pickleball tournament, so that I can only wonder at how the one place and time that is specially dedicated to prayer is itself shattered into nugatory fragments of worldly trivia.
Having sought for years, passed through spaces where some idea at least of the sacred was cherished even if we were powerless to attain it in full force, engaged New Agey practices where hours of silence were called for and observed, and now convinced I had entered a space of truth where God dwelt bodily, my first experience of Sunday Mass raised a few yellow flags. Yet I set them to one side with a convert’s first blush of fervor, intent on reaching my goal of Baptism and full participation in the Eucharist, and picking at a side dish of some green and untried ideas of obedience to the institutional Church and humility before my fellow man.
What after all is a sense of the sacred? To be sure, it’s something I want, crave, am dying for over here. It feels as though the world should be more integrated, our vision should reach further, a pit of sinking despair should not be but a stone’s throw away, and somehow the sacred is a space of supreme coherence, love before which the tears will never cease falling from human eyes, and beauty that bathes every pore and every high-flown feeling in the most golden pure white light, a holy plane of being where painful failures and the creeping sense of emptiness have no claim.
Yet how is this more than a drug trip or some high fantasy world-building? Are we just looking to feel good?
At Mass, despite it all, I will often feel this subtle uplift, this energizing abstraction from the muck and mire of the world, from the mattress store commercials on TV and the petty insecurities that my new colleague has drawn out of me.
But is this really more than a mild state of self-hypnosis? Could I get here with binaural beats? Isn’t this something that a cool glass of white wine could do as well?
Of course, I wouldn’t be here carrying on like this if I didn’t expect to get to my “and yet” sooner or later. We are in quite a state in the world, profound disorientation reigns and everywhere people are grasping at straws or sitting pretty in some complacent backwater. Things fall apart. My vote of no confidence is rendered.
Yet the sacred cannot be attained on our own terms, and the hour is late: though elders of a gentle race descend from the sky and we are all found to be psychic, now is not the time for a new religion. Jesus is Lord. I don’t see how that reality is threatened by either the revelation of non-human intelligence or by our rediscovering ancient truths about the nonlocality of consciousness. Padre Pio would frown at a penitent for what he hadn’t confessed, and C.S. Lewis told a beautiful story about a scholar from earth helping the Eve of the planet Venus to resist the wickedness and snares of the devil after having his mind and heart enlightened by the living wisdom of those who dwell on Mars.
I respect that not everybody is there with me. I hope to have some epistemic humility such that, though I be convicted in faith, I recognize my fallibility as a human being who could be wrong after all. I sound like a simpleton, and intolerant, to a number of important people in my life if I say it, but one cannot do better than to cling to Jesus and call upon His Name. He is present, and He is love and light, very God and truly our Friend.
We Are Supposed to Walk and Talk with God and We Can’t Do It On Our Own Therefore God has to Help Us and Why Wouldn’t He, He is Good, I Guess I am Doing it After All: This Life is It and My Finest Intuitions, Angels of My Better Nature Do Proclaim, Holy, Holy, Holy…
Say what you will about the chatter, I have come out of my shell since going to church, become more of a joiner than I ever expected to be, met people in small groups I am better, more whole for having known. That sounds like the lesson of a very special episode of a preteen drama, the real sacredness being the friends we made along the way, but I stand by it as far as it goes.
As for the rest, the sacredness is kind of nowhere and kind of everywhere, in a sage-like riddle. I really do find more simple glimpses of sacredness, purity, and hope in the Church than I ever did outside. I’ve yet to be persuaded that those eclectic open-minded New Age folks, wonderful as many of them are, really have access to anything that I lack in the presently stodgy and greying Catholic Church.
And for my part, I’ve yet to convince anyone to be Catholic (or any kind of Christian), and I get that there’s perspectives from which it seems improbable that this could really be God’s privileged Way. I just… well, everything else seems to me even more unchancy, or like it’s given up on truth before it’s even really started, content just to pass the time with some nice ideas.
The general tenor of the times does seem to be shifting. Enchantment is breaking in. We'll see what happens next, I guess.
I think I've mentioned before how my own faith experience has a few similarities to yours, what with my growing up in the Mormon church, realizing when I was around age 20 that I just couldn't believe its exclusivity/infallibility claims, but knowing at the same time that atheist materialism is much, much, worse.
I don't at all envy your experience - since all this happened to me before I could marry or have children, I've never had the problem of being responsible for anyone else's spiritual welfare as I did this. Also, since Mormonism is quasi-universalist (i.e. according to their doctrine, almost nobody spends eternity in a place that most Christians would recognize as "hell") I was never really angry at the Mormon God... I just recognized a lot of aspects of it as rather farcical.
I think that religions in the modern age are facing a Scylla and Charybdis situation. They have to navigate this narrow strait between two monsters. If you whitewash your history and emphasize your claims to be the One True Faith, you're sailing close to Scylla, who will thrust forth her long next and devour a bunch of sailors from off your decks - this is what happens when churches like the Catholics and Mormons loses a whole bunch of their cleverest and most curious and empathetic members each generation... it's so easy in the modern age to get information about other points-of-view and how non-unique your own faith actually is that you will always have high attrition especially among your best people. (i.e. people like you and me 😀)
But on the opposite side of the strait is Charybis - the whirlpool that will swallow your whole ship. Sailing by Charybdis is what happens when your religion makes no demands of its people (like Episcopalianism and other liberal Protestant churches.) This is even worse than Scylla - instead of losing a few sailors each time you pass the monster, if you make no demands of your people to hold them together, then in a little while... you just don't have a ship.
Since I actually believe in the existence of God, and I believe that God wants to be worshipped, I have do doubt that, over the next few centuries, a bevy of new religions will arise that can "square the circle" as it were, and hold their adherents to a code of morals and ritual that persists through the generations, without making implausible claims about (1) their own history or (2) the illegitimacy of all other faiths, that drive away intelligent and conscientious people.
The downside is I think it will take several centuries to happen. And the present time is (as I think some other readers have pointed out) a poor time for new faiths to be born, due to the sheer number of information-age distractions that exist.