Yeah, everyone at Patheos Catholic — or many of us, anyway — are writing on this topic.
but I’m afraid that I don’t have an inspirational story to tell you.
Sure, I could tell you the story of how I came to be Catholic in the first place. But that’s not the topic. The question is more on of: at whatever crisis of faith you’ve experienced, be it sexual abuse scandals or indifference of those around you, or whatever else it might be; why did you stay?
Now, I can’t really point to a deep crisis of faith, so much as the week-to-week challenges of small children on Sundays, especially in Germany — including a Sunday when my kids were particularly noisy and, afterwards, I got scolded by an old lady in Germany, to whom I dearly wanted to say: “sorry, but the fact that you don’t welcome children at church is a large part of why American families still go to church and German families don’t” and, well, I stumbled through something but my German wasn’t great at the time, so I wasn’t particularly persuasive. (Other Sundays, we went to the English-speaking church, which was quite kid-friendly, and we eventually found that rare bird of a kid-friendly German church — they’ve since then merged with the neighboring church and have abandoned the weekly “family mass” as a result.)
But the reason why I didn’t give up on churchgoing during those years with small children is simple: at Easter Vigil, back in 1994, I made a commitment.
There’s also the reality that a consequence of the way my mind works, is that in the back of my mind is the awareness that Christianity isn’t particularly logical and dosen’t necessarily always make sense. But still: commitment.
Yeah, I know that seems kind of dorky or maybe even a little show-off-y. (“Unlike the rest of you who aren’t true to your word, I am.”)
But that’s what it is.
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