For a space of time between September 2007 and May 2008, I was catechized into the Roman Catholic faith in a series of hour-long classes in basic theology taught on Sunday evenings to a group of three or four college-aged catechists. Also, angels were born, God made, bread and wine turned into the Body and Blood. I was baptized and confirmed.

I find in telling people about it that the recounting differs depending on the audience. I tell atheists or non-Christians something like, “It was the religion I saw in the movies,” or “I graduated and was unemployed for a period of time and wanted to give myself purpose.” These are true, but wholy insufficient. Christian audiences get something like this, emotive and experiential "testimonies." These latter examples are also wholly insufficient because they fail to capture both the friction, humor, and the controntationalism involved in my conversion.

Two years ago I would looked you in the eye and said, “Prove to me the soul exists,” the soul being like phlogiston. Fire burns and people love, but that proves neither the soul nor phlogiston. Among atheists, if you think an invisible entity exists you’ve gone quite mad. For a while when I was learning to pray in a small (kind of weird) praise and worship group, I felt I was babbling into the air, trapped in a room with a bunch of loons. I’m still not used to the waving hands in the air and ritualized glossalalia and the crying. I feel like I’ve deeply failed somehow in not dealing with reality.

I’ve disappointed a good number of people. I told a friend of mine, and she said, “What, Roman Catholic?” and I said, “No. Martian Catholic.” “But nobody converts in!” she replied.

My alternate response: “No, I’m taping your reaction for a modern art project.”
Response: “Oh, thank God!”

Other reactions:
Friend: “A Bible? I’ll piss on a Bible!”
Mom’s coworker: “Your daughter’s Catholic? I thought she was too smart for that.”
My mother: “Why did you become Catholic instead of Christian? It’s not that I’m disappointed in your choice of religion, just that you gave up your freedom.”

My mother’s Buddhist/atheist. She enjoys “subtly” passing me religious pamphlets on how to become Buddhist. Catholicism to her is the religion of White People. She grew up in Macau, a Portuguese colony, and then Hong Kong, a British colony, where her family survived on church handouts. There’s a level of patronization and humiliation to the whole affair that I on some level used to feel, a feeling of loathing and oiliness I used to feel regarding missionaries, who have now (partially) morphed in my mind to heroic explorers and social activists.

I’ve changed political and ethnic identities somewhat. Politically, I used to be “moderate,” but supporting contraceptive use (a stance taken by around 90% of my generation) has suddenly made me an “extremist,” for example. I suddenly feel weird for expressing formerly rather mundane opinions. But I also feel continuity with 2,000 years of history. I feel that Latin is my language, and Augustine and Aquinas are my thinkers. I feel that the Church and all the angels and all the saints are behind me there massed, an invisible winged army.

I feel on some level that this broken, wondrous and imperfect faith is mine.

My religious sentiments cycle now between apathetic and effusive, depending on the time of the ecclesiastical year. During Christmas and Easter I could not love any more, and then I fall into doldrums in the summer. In the depths of sorrow between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, come those agonizing words, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Those two words are probably the root of all antisemitism in the course of human history. This is an ideology that kills people. In the thousands, in the millions, so many bodies that if they were all in one place you wouldn’t have room to pile them and the smell would blister skin and boil lungs and peel paint from walls. This is an ideology that hoovers money and oppresses women and perverts human sexuality such that people feel driven in some blind animal way to molest small children.

O ye terrible arcane obtuse thing that’s in my head, get out! You ancient, ardent mystical frustrating beautiful incomprehensible glorious transcendent tyrant, get out! (Why do I love You?) Don’t say I never sacrificed anything for You! I’ve lost the ability to disbelieve, such that I can no longer even conceptualize the depth of what I’ve lost.

And yet... kissing the cool, dry wood at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, one forgets. One marvels at the greatness of such a gift given to one wholly undeserving. How we have wronged You, Lord. And the rest... for that time of tender sadness, awe and reverence, the rest is irrelevant.

What wondrous love is this, o my soul?

For a little bit I was thinking of being a Druid. For a long time, I thought it was a rather flakey hippie religion, until I was in Hong Kong over the winter, on Lantau island, an island in the South China Sea famous for having a giant bronze Buddha statue on top of a mountain. The Path of Wisdom makes a circuit shaped like the infinity symbol, rising steep and rocky up the scrubby mountainside. Zen proverbs have been charcoal-etched into massive pine columns erected by monks at intervals, striking in their power and simplicity. At the top of the path I look down at the mountain pine forest laid out below me, and across an awesome vista.

Across that unspanned chasm is Phoenix Mountain, a promontory of bare stone that glows when sunlight strikes. All the elements are in harmony. To my right, the mountain drops off into the sea, the sun blazing fire on its liquid surface wreathed in golden mist. Clouds of mist form and unform about the Phoenix peak, transient yet ever-present, undefined yet ever-flowing, against the immutable face of the eternal mountain.

For the first time I hear the voice of a mountain. It is not a voice like one "hears" because it is silent, but a voice one feels. It is not the voice of an individual, and the voice has no words, yet it speaks, and the not-words are. "I AM HERE."

Above and around me the Zen columns rise against a blue mountain sky, cold and pure. I can't read the Chinese characters. According to a broad English translation, they are about the nature of non-existance, and the impermanence of self. I have learned more by not-reading them. This is why they call it the Path of Wisdom.

At St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the priests was attending to a service. I was listening to the tranquil, melodious echo of his voice disembodied amid the stone vaults. From the dome there was a shaft of pure white light that was more than simply photons. I will not say that it was God in the Christian sense, but there was something else there, illumination of the soul and a preternatural stillness. It stirred a deep yearning in me, to be close to that something, that deep majesty and peace, and something quite unlike the raw natural power at Phoenix Peak.

I was with other people, Steve, an atheist, and Sandi, a Wiccan. Having not shared my experience with anyone, I heard Steve muse about the wasted resources, devotion, toil, and inspiration for what to him was ultimately a useless phantom superstition. I was startled and asked if anyone had felt what I felt. I pretty much got in response a resounding "no" - both of them had felt absolutely nothing, and Sandi was uncomfortable with the service to boot (which I guess is natural if you're a Wiccan listening to Christian prayer). All of which goes to show the complete subjectiveness of religious experience, but rather dismaying all the same. On the other hand, both of them waxed rapturously (perhaps not religiously) at Stonehenge and Oxford's Blackwell's (what?! why, Steve, why?? :P), while all I saw was a circle of falling rocks.

I prayed for the first time again in a long time. It was very awkward, and sort of like talking to a wall.

I pray better when I don't intend to pray. Sometimes I'm just lying down and thinking or hurting or crying and my thoughts go upwards and away from me.