It’s time for me to write about this blog and how it started and how it has continued. I have written on two previous occasions about “minor miracles,” one involving my father’s final days and one involving my beloved bride. (There are several more Katie mm’s I could recount, and I probably will before my blogging days are done.)
I was goaded into this post by Mary P., whose second comment on my St. Paul post of yesterday was too provocative to pass up.

In her first comment Mary began with St. Paul: It’s not like he got a book of instructions. . . . How do those of us waiting for that lightning strike figure out if something is God’s will? I’ve taken it to mean if you’re drawn to something, such as a particular action, but that action looks really challenging, but you can’t seem to get it off your mind, then God is probably calling you to do it. If you’re wrong, then God will make it pretty clear. 

In her second comment Mary wrote about this blog: You thought or heard or dreamed or SOMETHING and that started it. Your intention was different than what it is now. That doesn’t mean you didn’t or aren’t doing what God wanted/wants you to do, just because you thought you were doing it for another reason! Am I right that you hesitated when you realize the blog was morphing? Please understand I’m not picking on you, but you are the obvious example. The blog grew, and you began to see that it was having an effect on people that you never conceived when you started. Then Frank came onboard (did you think that was an accident? Not me!), and look at it now!

So, the bolt of lightning . . . or maybe . . .

Chapter 1 — The Breeze
I was in Maine with Katie in August, pretty much as you see me in the picture at the top of this post, a picture Katie took from her kayak. Yeah—relaxed, happy, open.

I had been thinking about starting a blog for my memoirs business. No techie myself, I had heard from a friend how easy it is to start a blog. So one day I logged on to Blogger.com and started Memoirs Unlimited, the blog. Clickers will find that there are all of 5 posts at that site, versus 280-some-odd posts and counting at YIM Catholic. Does that tell you something?

Back in the spring, I had been in touch with an old college friend, who I wrote about here. He’s #5 and #13 on the list. My friend asked me why I had converted and I had no ready answer. But being a writer I promised him I would write him some short essays about my conversion experience. Which I did, for his eyes only.

Two posts into my Memoirs Unlimited blog, the lightning bolt hit, although it was more like a gentle breeze from the open window of the bedroom where I set up my writing shop when we are in Maine. The breeze said, “That’s not what you want to do. You want to write about your conversion experience. And you’ve already written the first three posts, including one about the book that started it all, by Fr. James Martin.”

Now, here’s the beauty part. That thought made me pretty happy, so I logged onto Blogger and hit the start-new-blog button. As before, with Memoirs Unlimited, Blogger asked me what I wanted to name my blog, which would establish the unique URL. I stared at the screen, then typed: Catholic Convert. Blogger informed me that Catholic Convert was already taken, dummy. I typed something else equally generic, like New Catholic. That was already taken too, stupid. I typed two or three more ideas, was rejected each time, then stopped for a moment: What do I want to write about? I want to write about why I am a Catholic. . . . Well, obviously we have to come up with something oddball to beat this overloaded system. Then I thought: Acronym. Or maybe it was: Rebus. Or maybe there was no thought at all. I typed: YIMCatholic. Blogger dinged at me: Congratulations! You have a blog! Begin entering content!

Within minutes, the consequences of this chain of events hit me: If the title is “Why I Am Catholic,” every post will have to be an answer of sorts. That hit me like inspiration. Not my inspiration, I can promise you that. I did not think through the consequences before choosing the blog title. The consequences were there.

Chapter 2 —The Lightning Bolt
That was August 17, 2009. Over the first ten days, I posted eight times, including three of the essays I had written for my friend. I was very happy, almost giddy, writing some of these posts, but I thought I was running dry. Then, on the evening of the tenth day, while back home in Massachusetts for some business meetings, I received this e-mail:

Dear Mr. Bull,
Many thanks for your beautiful post,
which a friend passed along to me.
I’m delighted that my book helped
you so much, and so happy that the saints
have been your patrons and companions
in your journey into the church.
Welcome!
Jim Martin, SJ

I was flabbergasted. I had no idea anyone was even reading YIM Catholic. Honestly, I had next to no ambition about it, except to send each post to Katie, our daughters, Father Barnes, and three friends in the parish, Ferde, Carol, and Ellen. I thought that was my readership, give or take a lonely late-night Web surfer in Altoona.

If there was any lightning bolt in this story, that was it, the e-mail from Fr. Jim in New York. I called Katie in Maine the following morning and gasped. She gasped back.

Chapter 3 — The Ego Trip
Chapter 4 — The Crisis of Faith
Chapter 5 — The Crazy Marine from the Old South Who May Be An Angel Or Something
Chapter 6 — Building a Community

To be continued . . .

I promised St. Athanasius (297–373 AD) to our readers tomorrow, but it turns out that, although the Orthodox Church celebrates his feast on January 18, the Catholic Church doesn’t do so until May 2, in keeping with the tradition of using the date when a saint’s soul leaves this world for the next.

So instead, I’ll leave these fully baked thoughts from chapter one of St. Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation, in which he begins his defense of Church teaching against the followers of Arius and Arius’s notion that Jesus, although chosen by God, was merely a man and not the Word made Flesh. (more…)

Posted by Webster
As Frank wrote here and here, Mass is Mass, wherever you go. But man—the local variations!

For Christmas, Katie, Marian, and I attended Mass in a parish near my mother’s home in Vermont. From the modern interior of the building to the setting of each prayer to a Christmas melody, it was a bag of new tricks for this old dog. Sorry, but after four weeks without a Gloria, I don’t want mine set to “Greensleeves.” And even Father Barnes might have raised a clerical eyebrow at the Kyrie.

But what might have been the most distressing element of the Mass turned out to be the most moving. This helped me to remember that whatever the setting, however cold or warming the architecture, however good the music direction—without the priesthood we have no Mass, no Eucharist, no sacramental connection with Christ.

The pastor of this Vermont parish is the kind of person who bugs me most in all the world: a guy who looks older than me but is probably five years younger. I run into people like this all the time now, as I approach 60, and 50 continues to look like 70.

But this was not the potentially distressing element of the mass. For this Christmas service the parish priest, “Fr. Young,” had invited an older priest, “Msgr. Old,” to celebrate. And the monsignor was clearly suffering from the persistent and powerful tremors of midstage Parkinson’s disease. The older priest made his way up the center aisle flanked by two strapping altar boys, who would bookend him throughout the Mass. As he said the opening prayers and led the Kyrie (that Kyrie!), and as we sang the Gloria (that Gloria!), I began to wonder how the homily would go or what would happen when Msgr. Old’s shaky hands distributed communion to the faithful.

I needn’t have worried. Fr. Young read the Gospel and delivered the homily, which he began by introducing Msgr. Old, for those who didn’t know him. He explained that the monsignor had been his mentor at some stage and acknowledged his debt feelingly. My heart began to turn.

As the monsignor celebrated the Mass, I found myself leaning forward in my pew, my chin now on my hands, contemplating the beauty of the moment. There were hints of impending disaster, but all went well until the Our Father. Then the monsignor began the Lord’s Prayer and the congregation rushed ahead of his quavering voice. I thought immediately of Father Barnes, who has made it clear that the priest should be the one to lead the Our Father; the congregation should not rush ahead willy-nilly. This Christmas congregation in Vermont was both willy and nilly. But Father Young’s voice rose on the public address system (he was standing at the rear) and powered us through the latter half of the Our Father at his pace, which was also the monsignor’s pace.

Communion was served by Fr. Young and lay ministers of the Eucharist, while Msgr. Old sat benignly behind the altar. Then with a nearly invisible gesture, Fr. Young turned over the proceedings to his old teacher, who said the closing prayers and a gentle benediction. As we left the church through the back lobby, I noted that Fr. Young had disappeared and Msgr. Old was left to receive the grateful thanks of the congregation as we passed him. I took his hand firmly and wished him a Merry Christmas. I made a mental note: Based on the quality of his skin and the color of his hair, the monsignor probably was not all that much older than me.

My campaign to promote Kristin Lavransdatter as the Great Catholic Novel is gaining momentum, one reader at a time. In an early post, I laid out ten reasons why I find this trilogy by Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset (left) so moving. Now comes a letter from a friend—a non-Catholic—confirming the convincing spiritual power of this epic set in 14th-century Norway.

(Warning: The letter reveals the ending of Kristin’s story, but takes away none of the pleasure of reading it.)

Dear Webster,

How often do we finish a book and sit there stunned and sad—that’s it and there is no more. And so it was when I closed the cover on the 1,145-page trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. I wanted to read more. That was not to be as Undset had made closure with the life of Kristin. And so must I. She has become my benchmark for what the Nobel Prize in Literature should be.

I went to our local library to find more of Undset and found a copy of the 1935 volume—an earlier and more archaic translation. It has a beautiful sound and I’d probably enjoy reading it but won’t because the font size is difficult for these old eyes, even with glasses. 

The years preceding the Black Death were unknown to me. Oh, I knew of them, but didn’t know details of daily life and priorities. The landscape of Norway became vivid with its deep gorges edged by steep mountains. Kristin’s life was ruled by the world surrounding her. That world was unlike any I’ve ever known but perhaps not far removed from the mountain people of East Tennessee who settled that area in the 1600s. It wasn’t an easy life and yet it wasn’t poverty. I was fascinated by the giving, the largesse, the hospitality extended to all who came to her door. Strangers were fed and given a place to sleep for the night—sharing a bed if need be. 

I was touched by Kristin’s devotion and the presence of faith in her life. It seemed that most everything was accomplished with prayer or bargaining with God. Saying that, I was surprised when she climbed the mountain that last time to take vows to become a nun. Somehow she dealt with the issue of no longer being in control or not needed in the running of the household as a mother-in-law by taking her vows. At first, I was surprised thinking she had run away but then realized this was the natural extension of her life. She had always given and was a natural healer. 

For me, I treasured the beauty of her literature while absorbing a world of faith. Thank you for wanting to share this with me and providing one of those rare moments when a book ends and I didn’t want it to. . . .

If after reading this you are still not ready to invest time in an epic like this, take a look at the fantastic assortment of reader suggestions posted in the past ten days in response to my question, What Catholic fiction has inspired you? The post and the comments are right here. And more suggestions can be found in this follow-up post. These will keep you busy for a while.

This morning, by chance, by grace, I remembered again why I am a Catholic. I can hear the chorus: More than 80 posts in 10 weeks about YIM Catholic and you can’t remember? Dear Webster, Are you losing your mind?! The short answer to which is, there’s remembering and there’s remembering.

Jesus tells us that unless we become like little children, we’re going to have trouble storming the gates of heaven. Problem is, we all become “adults” in the faith so fast, even us converts. Everything gets old. Routine sets in. But this morning I was a child again, thanks to my never-failing friend Ferde.

At St. Mary Star of the Sea in Beverly, we have three regular adult altar servers for morning mass, but one is in her ninth month of pregnancy and another recently broke her arm. So Frank, the third morning server, suggested that Ferde and occasionally Webster fill in. This means training for Webster, so this morning, Ferde—who usually serves only for funerals and other special occasions, why waste his talents as a lector?—walked me through Altar Server 101: where everything is kept in the sacristy, where to set it in the sanctuary, when to light the candles and turn on the overhead lights, and so on.

Then, and this was the beauty part, to watch Ferde closely while he went through his paces during mass, I sat on the Epistle side of the nave, not in the sixth row on the Gospel side, where I routinely sit. Here, closer to St. Joseph (left), I had a better angle on the action.

The freshness, the beauty, the naked thrill of learning to be a Catholic all came back to me, in a series of flashbacks to my first days in this church when, even before I entered RCIA, I sat on this side of the nave—until my troubles with Fr. Charles’s accent sent me over under the pulpit, where I could more easily read his lips.

I used to come very early, when the church is dark and only Flo and Frank and two or three others are here, each alone in his or her quiet conversation with God, telling the beads, silently moving the lips. I had come early again this morning, to be schooled by Ferde, and even after the lesson, there were still twenty minutes to go before seven o’clock mass by the time I had settled on the Epistle side. This morning, I felt traces of that predawn stillness I had once felt when I arrived, a newcomer, at six-fifteen or even six o’clock.

I pulled out my rosary beads and I remembered: Two years ago, my only experience of the rosary was a memory of joining in with chanting thousands at Lourdes nearly forty years ago. Two years ago, I still thought that the second half of the Hail Mary began “Hail, Mary,” instead of “Holy Mary.” I knew nothing about the Mysteries we are invited to meditate on as we pray. I had yet to memorize the “Hail, Holy Queen” or the “Oh, my Jesus.” But for some reason, on my second or third morning in this church, Father Barnes (left) spoke of the rosary from the pulpit, urged us to say the rosary daily, and said, “If you don’t know how, Google it.”

I Googled it. Then I went to Amazon.com and bought a rosary with wooden beads, something like this one. And I bought a couple of booklets on the rosary, this one, I think, and this one. And I waited excitedly for the UPS driver, the way I once awaited a shipment of Sea Monkeys.

These details don’t really matter. What mattered today—again—was the sudden inrush of innocence I experienced, the joy again of becoming Catholic. When and where did I start to lose that? Definitely by the time I considered myself too busy with an important book project to arrive at mass much more than five minutes before the hour. But probably long before that. By pieces, by tiny pieces.

I have to start coming early to mass again, though I’m sure even this will become old. I’m going to have to start tricking myself somehow. Or making extra efforts. Or somersaulting up the aisle to my pew, while chanting a Hail Mary. I’m not sure what will keep the child inside me alive so that I can continue to live my faith with the joy and purity I once experienced every morning. But I’m going to do my best to figure it out.

When I was 13 and Dad sat me down for Birds and Bees: The Advanced Course, I remember thinking, “Hunh?! Three years ago, he taught me about sex between a man and woman. I get that. The bodies fit together. God engineered it that way. But man and man? Woman and woman? What fits what?”

I report this 45 years later not to sit in angry judgment on anyone. I have friends who are homosexual. In professional theater, which I thought might be my profession when I was all of 17—either that or Episcopal minister—I became aware that there were many people of the homosexual persuasion. (We have since learned that the line does not stop at Episcopal minister, or Catholic priest, for that matter.) To work in theater, you had to work with homosexual people, and some of these people became my friends, for whom I still admit a certain fondness.

Fine. But with the innocence of a 13-thirteen-year-old boy utterly clueless about sex, I had this simple thought when first confronted with the notion of homosexuality as carnal action: What fits what? (1) I had a fundamental, innocent belief in God. (2) I believed that God made the world and that the world therefore is well engineered. (3) I could not understand the engineering of homosexuality. Ergo, God did not intend this to be a normal form of human interaction.

I still think that 13-year-old was on to something.

I was reminded of this last evening when I ran into a former client of mine, or rather I thought of the connection upon waking up this morning. Since 1988, I have worked—on again, off again, and now on again—with elderly people helping them write their memoirs. There’s more about this on my relatively undeveloped blog about that. Anyhow, I ran into a former client I’ll call Mr. Smith last night, and the encounter was a testament to marriage in the one-man, one-woman, one-life Catholic sense of the institution.

I have worked on over fifty memoirs since 1988. Mr. Smith’s was unique because it was not just Mr. Smith’s memoir but Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s memoir. When his son introduced me to him and I proposed the idea of writing his memoir, Mr. Smith demurred. Because it is my business to do so, I pressed the matter. Finally, I understood that Mr. Smith had no objection to publishing his memoir, so long as Mrs. Smith was an equal partner in the work.

So we invented a new form of memoir, in which the couple alternated chapters. First her ancestors, then his. First her birth and upbringing, then his. The two strands approached one another (the families spent summers on adjoining properties) until the book arrived at her chapter about meeting him and his about meeting her. This is a long way of saying that Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s marriage was one of the most beautiful I have ever observed, and I think their braided memoir was a proper testament to that beauty.

Mrs. Smith died a few years ago, and I ran into Mr. Smith last evening at a book event. Mr. Smith is relatively frail now, walking on a stick, but still radiating an unsurpassed kindness. You run into someone who knows Mr. Smith, and the first words out of their mouth usually are, “He is the nicest man!”

Mr. Smith is an old-line Yankee and therefore probably of the Protestant persuasion, though the Smiths’ religion never came up in their memoir. I wouldn’t doubt that his kindness is rooted in faith. But working closely with the Smiths, as I was privileged to do, I also observed an extraordinary kindness between them, a mutual respect as much him for her as her for him. They held hands in my presence. I’m sure they often held hands.

When I saw Mr. Smith last night, I recalled Mrs. Smith and told him what an inspiration their marriage had been to me in my marriage to Katie. I told him that Katie and I are celebrating our 25th next week and that it is my fond hope we will be as happy at our 50th as I observed the Smiths to have been in their later years. With simple words and a quiet smile, he acknowledged his love for Mrs. Smith.

In the old Boston library that hosted the book event, I noticed that Mr. Smith was seated behind a column, and I asked him if he didn’t want help moving to a seat with a better view. No, he said, he preferred this seat, because it was “close to my family.” He nodded sideward, and I saw then that his son and daughter-in-law were seated directly across the aisle in the sold-out room. I was touched by this. I knew he was referring to a closeness that was more than physical.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith are for me another confirmation of the fundamental wisdom of traditional marriage. In making a point, it’s usually good to look at the opposite, and I’ve tried to do that here. As a 13-year-old, I thought that homosexuality involves faulty engineering. As a 58-year-old, I observed that the opposite—especially in a committed, lifelong relationship—makes all the sense in the world. I think it always will.

You know how God used to speak to a teenage girl on the TV show “Joan of Arcadia,” like a modern-day Joan of Arc? True story: Sometimes “Joan of Arcadia” speaks to me. Which amounts to a kind of Apostolic transmission, from God’s mouth to my ear through Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn).

As Adam Rove (Chris Marquette) would say, Cha.

Latest example: I had just finished a post about St. Thérèse of Lisieux and her calling (love) and my singing (bass). This had left questions rolling around in my brain about talents, as in mine, and how Christ, in a parable, asks us to use them. But what exactly are talents—in my case, in anyone’s case—and how should they be used? I hopped on a JetBlue flight for RDU with Katie to see our younger daughter, MRB, at UNC; fired up the DVD player to watch more tales of “Joan”; and what was the next CBS episode in prospect for this series of posts about a long-cancelled show that no one asked me to write? None other than “The Boat,” in which Joan discovers she has a talent she never knew she had and she’s not sure she needs and would like to trade in. Double cha. Did I heard God saying “Cha-cha-cha”?

I introduced Katie to Frank and Carrie Kwiatkowski at Mass last Sunday and said, “Honey, get a good look. That’s what I want us to be 25 years from now.” She understood.

Katie and I celebrate our 25th anniversary this fall, and when we hit our 50th (GW), I’ll be Frank’s age. I first met Frank at Saturday morning men’s group, about the time my dad was dying of melanoma. Frank and Dad were the same age, and this, plus Frank’s peppery defense of the Gospel and Catholic social teaching, attracted me to him immediately.

On Sundays and many weekdays, these 80-something lovebirds sit in the pew directly in front of me. Now, wait a minute, I can hear Carrie saying. I’m nowhere near 80! Which is the truth. I think she’s all of 76 or 77. And she always wears a hat. Often, it’s something old-timey and sweet, but sometimes she’s sporting headgear that even my fashion-savvy 21-year-old daughter, Marian, would covet.

Frank was a former Marine, a milkman, and something of “a wild Indian” by his own confession when he met the still-teenaged Carrie in upstate New York. After Carrie used a holy card of St. Therese of Lisieux to pray for a better job for him, Frank landed a position with Prudential Insurance and rose to regional sales manager. After retirement Frank was elected to five two-year terms as Amsterdam (NY) town supervisor; he also served as a county supervisor.

Nearly 60 years into their marriage, the Kwiatkowskis are the happiest couple in town. I sometimes pass them on one of my afternoon walks as they sit on a bench atop Independence Park, overlooking the Atlantic. They always, always wear these expressions of quiet, assured contentment and peace. Carrie often has a rosary in her hands, delicately passing beads, with her lips gently pursed. Frank might be reading about St. Faustina and Divine Mercy. The couple is active in the Carmel community nearby.

It’s funny what happens in a Catholic church like ours. You become deeply attached to people you might not even notice otherwise. When Frank was hospitalized with a chest ailment, I went to see him. Next time he was in, I went again with Ferde, and then again. I suppose I was reminded of my last visits to Dad in the hospital, of the tenderness I felt. But I would love Frank and Carrie even without the Dad connection. Their witness, their presence in our parish is a testament to the beauty of traditional marriage and lifelong adherence to the faith. Catholics like this with whom you worship regularly become closer to you in some ways than family.

Frank and Carrie have family to spare: five children and seventeen grandchildren, including a granddaughter who graduated from West Point and has served two and a half years in Iraq. It does the old Marine proud, I’m sure. But come to our church in Beverly some day and I’ll introduce you. Come 25 years from now, and I hope to show you another St. Mary’s couple just like this.