Catholic confessions

FIVE YEARS AGO this month, I became a Catholic. It wasn’t an easy or sudden decision. I had been grappling with the idea since I was in my late teens. Back then, I dreamed of becoming a theologian. I studied religion in college, philosophy mostly, as well as German and Latin, two important languages for Christian theological studies. After college and three years of work in New York, I was even accepted at a high-falutin’ East Coast divinity school.

This is not to say that I was a believer. Though I had been baptized, I was raised in an agnostic household by two independent-thinking parents, neither of whom felt a pressing need to give their children a traditional upbringing. My mother and father met at UCLA in the mid-1950s, two among a handful of Mexican American students on campus. Whatever ties they had to traditional religious folkways were lost on their way up the social ladder.

Other than having my grandmother cross and bless me each time I visited her, I had no sustained contact with religion as a child. When I was 7, the same grandmother taught me the Lord’s Prayer as a way to help me stop worrying about my parents while they were on vacation across the ocean. I don’t recall it working.

But in my sophomore year of college, I read St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” and it changed my life. His journey of self discovery made me realize that without a religion, I had no language with which to tackle the big questions of life and death. That was the semester I changed my major to religious studies.

I was not at all sold on the idea of becoming a member of an organized religion. For starters, there were so many to choose from.

A Mexican American priest once told me that, like it or not, I was a cultural Catholic. After all, the religion is inextricably entwined with Mexicaness. Perhaps just as important, my taste for the baroque, another cultural inheritance, made me predisposed to respond to all the bells, whistles and hocus pocus of the church.

For years, I told people that I was thinking of becoming a Catholic. Invariably, those friends who were raised in the church, and had suffered the stupidity and, sometimes, cruelty of this priest or that nun, accused me of romanticizing the institution.

I plead not guilty. By the time I joined, the molestation scandal was in full swing; I have no illusions about the sanctity of the Catholic Church. Yet I am also not convinced of my ability to lead a fulfilling spiritual life without a religious language, tradition and infrastructure.

As debased as it can be, the church to me is still an extraordinary institution whose liturgy has the ability to focus one’s attention on the fundamental questions of life. Like the art-nouveau lamp in the chapel on the final page of “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh’s fictional masterpiece, the church is the keeper of a “small red flame -- a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle.”

Most of my contemporaries couldn’t believe that I chose to “convert,” to go through catechism, to make my first communion in my 30s. “You actually believe that stuff?” one blurted out. Some believe that all religions are merely attempts to simplify life’s complexities. They found my decision unworthy of someone who practices rationality, who thinks and writes for a living. I explain that my faith doesn’t so much provide me with simple certainties as it gives me a space and a means to grapple with uncertainties. I ask them if they think Christ’s parables, the stories that form the core of his teaching, are simple to understand, simple to put to use.

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan makes a useful distinction between religious myths and parables. Myths, he writes, give believers the “final word” on reality, while parables “deliberately subvert final words” and challenge us to engage in the questions.

Today, hundreds of millions of Christians will celebrate the joyful and unexpected conclusion to the story of Christ’s betrayal, suffering and death. It is a story that, like a parable, is fundamentally unsettling. It points to what lies beyond the limits of reason and gives us hope that, one day, we too will rise above what burdens us.