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<\/a><\/p>\nHolly Taylor Coolman teaches theology at Providence College.<\/p>\n
This is a guest post.<\/p>\n
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I remember quite clearly, a number of years ago, reading R.R.Reno\u2019s description<\/a> of his experience of becoming Catholic. \u201cIt felt,\u201d he said, \u201clike being submerged into the ocean.\u201d (And the ocean, he went on to note, \u201cneeds no justification.\u201d) What I myself felt upon reading the these lines was being mad as hell. I was an Episcopalian, as Reno had been just prior to this ecclesial plunge. It seemed clear to me that what the Episcopal Church needed at that moment\u2013as it faced serious challenges\u2013was for every single one of us to put a shoulder to the wheel. (Or maybe, pick up a paddle and row.). So, in my head, I began writing a letter to the editor, in response to Reno\u2019s piece. \u201cIf Professor Reno is longing for the feeling of being submerged, I\u2019ll be happy to take him deep-sea fishing. I can push him off the edge of the boat, and leave him for awhile. Then I\u2019ll reel him back in and we can continue to do the important work that needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s probably good that I never sent that letter, since, in the intervening years, I myself somewhat unexpectedly became Catholic, too. What could have possibly led from there to here? Reno himself recently offered a helpful list<\/a> of things that might lead people to go to Rome: universality, beauty, the saints, etc. In my case, though, it was none of these. I had all of that, and I believed I had everything I wanted. Then, suddenly, I came to feel there was something more.<\/p>\n There was trouble brewing for Episcopalians\u2013and for the whole Anglican Communion\u2013after 2003, when an ordination in the U.S. violated a prior Lambeth resolution against \u201cordaining those in same gender unions.\u201d Suddenly, diverging opinions on the issue came into direct conflict. What I was focused on was how this was all worked out. Bishops and archbishops gathered and issued a warning that the actions of the U.S. church threatened to \u201ctear the fabric of our Communion at its deepest level.\u201dA \u201cCommission on Communion\u201d was appointed, and they published a report with a similar tone the following year. It was the response of various voices in the U.S. to that report that caught me up short. I, too, had been worried about tearing apart of communion, but many insisted that this was actually an overblown concern. The Anglican Communion, they said, had never been connected by obligation to one another, and certainly not by any need to submit to the whole. The connections between various groups of Anglicans were really best described as \u201cbonds of affection.\u201d And bonds of affection, I was seeing, could be broken\u2013or simply ignored.<\/p>\n But that was not how I had come to understand \u201cchurch.\u201d Church, I thought, meant a oneness of indissolubility. The same action that made us one with Christ was what made us one with one another, and I thought it had the same strength and permanence. I tried some ecclesiological jujitsu to see if I could allay what was surely\u2013what had to be<\/i>\u2013a naive concern. I recall a distinct, physical sensation of falling.<\/p>\n When Artur Rosman invited me to make a contribution in this series, he joked, given a little blog post<\/a> I wrote recently, that I should explain \u201cWhy I Remain a Non-Polarized Catholic.\u201d But that title actually reveals the heart of the matter. Especially when it involves finding one\u2019s identity in an ideological camp, and allows dismissal of those in the opposite camp, \u201cpolarization\u201d seems to me to be the precise opposite of \u201cchurch.\u201d This is what made me, and keeps me, Catholic.<\/p>\n There are some philosophical and theological edges to all this. The only context in which conflict makes any sense, I\u2018d argue, is shared commitment. The only context in which conflict can be called \u201cChristian\u201d includes a commitment precisely to those we oppose. In Catholicism, there is an old-fashioned doctrine of the \u201ctreasury of merit<\/a>,\u201d which, as far as I can tell, means that even our hope of salvation is an immediately and profoundly communal matter, that even the good we do can benefit others not only as recipients, but as if they themselves had acted. In the mysterious calculus of the divine economy, it allows the possibility that it is precisely the love, the goodness, even of someone with whom I am at odds at the moment, brings<\/span><\/span> me to God.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the Brothers Karamazov<\/i><\/a>, Grushenka tells Alyosha:<\/p>\n Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; \u2018She once pulled up an onion in her garden,\u2019 said he, \u2018and gave it to a beggar woman.\u2019 And God answered: \u2018You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.\u2019 The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. \u2018Come,\u2019 said he, \u2018catch hold and I\u2019ll pull you out.\u2019 he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This one good deed, the story seems to say, will save them all. The peasant woman, though, is not happy:<\/p>\n . . . she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. \u2018I\u2019m to be pulled out, not you. It\u2019s my onion, not yours.\u2019 As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.\u201d Grushenka ends the story in this: \u201cI am that wicked woman myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wish I could tell you that that I don\u2019t mean any of this talk about church in a sentimental way, but the truth is that I do. (Is it only a mellowing into middle age<\/span><\/span>?) I find myself not just \u201cwilling the good of the other\u201d in a detached way, but feeling waves of affection\u2013for those inside and outside the Catholic Church, inside and outside the larger community of all those who follow Christ. I am foolish and lovestruck, to be honest.<\/p>\n My response to this invitation was to say that I would write an essay with a slightly different title: \u201cWhy I Remain a Non-Polarized and<\/i> Super-Sexy Catholic.\u201d I meant it as a joke. I have teenage children now, and I have to keep up my end of the bargain in embarrassing them whenever possible. But again, this title sort of writes the essay itself. Sex, it turns out, is a lot like the Catholicism that I love. I don\u2019t mean so much the earthiness of Catholic practice, the way it revels unabashedly in the physical. I mean the longing for the other that propels us toward sex, the longing that is filled when sex is very good<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Sometimes at Mass, when the congregation moves to reception of Eucharist, I fail to pray piously, as perhaps I should. Instead, \u00a0I watch those who receive Christ into their own bodies. I feel like a voyeur. But at that moment, the source and summit of the Catholic faith, is about them, just as it is about the liturgy and the elements themselves. It is them-in-Christ, Christ-in-them, and the unexpected way that our best chance may be hanging onto one another\u2019s heels.<\/p>\n