I began my spiritual journey swaddled within the confines of the Southern Baptist Church. I was twelve. As the choir and congregation sang the altar call, some plaintive and beckoning hymn such as the venerable “Just As I Am,” I felt moved to leave the pew and walk down the aisle of the large church. Taking the hand of our preacher, Brother French, I whispered answers to his whispered questions: “Do you reject Satan?” Yes. “Do you believe in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?” Yes. “Do you seek baptism in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ?” Yes. After the hymn had concluded and no others had joined me in salvation that morning, Brother French publicly announced my guarantee into heaven to the entire congregation and had me stand beneath the imposing white pulpit, so that my fellow Christians could file by me, shake my hand, and congratulate me on my escape from hell.
On a Sunday night several months later, after enough converts had been accumulated to warrant a special baptismal service, I descended into the baptismal pool. An oversized ceramic-tiled tub recessed high in the focal wall of the church, the baptismal pool occupies in Southern Baptist churches the same location reserved for the crucifix in Catholic churches. The smell of bleach was prominent, for the baptismal pool was kept immaculate for the all-white congregation by Jo-El, the elderly black janitor. The waist-deep water was warm, just as the preacher had promised it would be, and my white robe floated around me like a jellyfish. “I baptize you,” Brother French announced as we looked out upon the beaming, upturned faces, “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” With one of his hands placed on mine, which were clasped against my chest, and with his other hand underneath my shoulder blades as a buoy, the preacher gently pushed me downward, until my head and entire body were surrounded and covered by the quiet warm of the living water. He resurrected me quickly so I could recognize the applause and shouts of “Amen!” gushing from the enthusiastic crowd of Christians below, of whom I was now assuredly and eternally a part.
This, the first serious step in my journey toward God, was in every way possible a real experience of him. It was made available to me through the community in which I was raised, and I was responding to God in the only way that I could ever have known how. As a Southern Baptist, if I was to find God, it could happen only through the saving waters of baptism in the name of Jesus Christ made available to me through the structures and traditions of the church of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Their knowledge and experience of God created the boundaries in which I would come to know and experience him. Even though I eventually stepped beyond those boundaries, it was there, enveloped in that community, a product of the generations before me, that I recognized God as they had.
I was faced recently with the question, “What does institutional religion offer a person who is on a spiritual journey?” My response: boundaries. Institutional religion offers the boundaries within which we recognize, experience, and communicate with God. My own life, both as an adolescent stepping into the adult expectations of his Baptist faith and now as a mature Christian abandoning himself to the embrace of God through the encompassing beauty of Catholicism, has helped me realize that it is within the very restrictions of those institutional religions that I have been offered the opportunity to recognize and respond to God in the most powerful and veracious ways.
I am not suggesting that God is restricted to any institutional form of religion. He is, after all, God. Emancipated from time and space, he transcends the boundaries that humanity has established to contain him. We, on the other hand, are locked into time and space and therefore crave the order, exactness, and control we can experience and exercise within the boundaries of our religion. To never have the benefit of those boundaries, or to step outside of them, means that we remain divorced from the plan of salvation already established by God, leading to experiences of him that are either unrecognizable as such or experiences of dubious spiritual virtue. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that we will recognize an experience of God unless we are already predisposed to do so. That predisposition must be shaped and focused by the boundaries of institutional religions that have been established by those who came before us.
Because we are human and are locked in time and space, our recognition of God must take place within the confines of the physical world of which we are a part. Because we exist in God’s creation, there is no way for us to recognize God except through our sensorial reactions to our surroundings and especially to others who surround us. This was made abundantly clear to me as I emerged from a spiritual wasteland in the years after abandoning my Baptist upbringing to realize that I was no longer able to recognize God. Trying, like so many college students, to find some pith in the banal transcendentalism of Thoreau or Whitman or, worse yet, attempting to embrace and extol the strident atheistic humanism of the Ayn Rand variety, which celebrated the progress of mankind yet offered no compelling reason for the progress of mankind, left me without a means for recognizing and responding to the revelation of God in my life. After crossing the threshold of faith by stepping into the worship of Catholicism, I realized that God had been expressing himself, and was inviting me to recognize him, through the revelation made known to us in Scripture and Tradition, through the mysterious experience of the sacraments, and through the works of charity which Christ himself mandated as part and parcel of the Christian life.
My participation in the Catholic Church made me realize that the boundaries of faith made available to us through the Church are both a manifestation of God’s grace and the living means by which we participate in that grace.
In addition to a means of recognizing God, my foray into Catholicism offered me the next step of a spiritual journey, the means of actually experiencing God. A particularly unique and appealing attribute of Catholicism is the sacramental nature of the Church. A sacrament, better described by the fourth-century Greek Fathers simply as a “mystery,” is the way in which Catholics participate in the saving activities of Christ, recreating and reliving the very moments in the life of Christ where creation and salvation are bound together by revelation, where we taste for just a moment a union between God and us that one day will be complete and everlasting.
When I was brought into Catholicism through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, I immediately sensed the reality of God through the sacraments. In baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist I sensed a wholeness, a real, living presence of the Word of God. The gospel that I had revered in the Baptist Church finally had come alive in a way that I previously could not have known existed. The sacraments, I discovered, are not simply signs of God’s grace in my life; they are God’s grace in my life. They represent the points in time when we spiritual sojourners are in closest proximity to our Creator and Redeemer. My confirmation at the Easter Vigil, therefore, became the Holy Spirit anointing me body and soul, preparing me for the spiritual and moral battles I would face in days to come. My first Eucharist was truly God as he came to me as the Body and Blood of Christ, nourishing me, cleansing me, healing me. Even my baptism, which was procured in the traditions of a Protestant sect that rejected any notions of sacramental efficacy, was now to be seen not only as a symbol of my rebirth in Christ but as the actual bath of regeneration that allowed me to share in the darkness of Christ’s tomb and the brilliance of his Resurrection.
The sacraments become for us the only ways in which we can know Christ in the same types of experiences that the apostles knew Christ. For this reason, the Church has wisely guarded the sacraments with great care and affection through the centuries. Handed down to us from the apostles through the guardianship of the great Church Fathers to the present day, we share in the sacraments in the same way that the apostles shared in the sacraments with Christ, even if the ritual and symbolism have changed to reflect modern needs. These sacraments are physical elements of our real world perpetuated, even in some instances determined by, our community of forefathers so that today, some 2,000 years beyond the apostles’ first-hand knowledge of God, we too can recognize and experience his very real presence in our lives.
It is here in the sacraments, where we rely on the elements of our physical world contained within the institutional confines of our Catholic Church, that we not only know the God who transcends those elements of our physical world but that we ourselves also become transcended beyond the physical, joining with Christ in the work of salvation as we prepare for the day when all creation will be in union with our Alpha and our Omega. How beautifully ironic it becomes, then, that the confined senses of the physical can become the gateways to the unconfinable senses of the divine; how ironic that the rigorous, strictly defined, perfectly punctuated boundaries of the sacraments can become the very means of our transcendence above and beyond boundaries to the place where nothing is rigorous, defined, or punctuated.
If it is through the sacraments that we are transcended to the place of God, then it is most certainly through our prayer that we are suspended there. As I was examining Catholicism more closely and determining that it was the next logical and right step on my spiritual journey, I was amazed to learn, contrary to everything I had heard from my Fundamentalist Protestant influences, that Catholics actually do pray. And pray we do. Prayer is, without equivocation, the primary purpose of the Church and the most important work those of us who inhabit the Church can undertake. I can think of no better reason why one should consider the institutional Catholic Church than to participate in the ceaseless work of prayer which issues from and sustains her.
Prayer most commonly is thought of as the way in which we communicate with God. This in and of itself is not a worthless occupation, but Catholic prayer offers an opportunity for a much more encompassing relationship with God than simply the opportunity to talk to him. In prayer, we are moved by the Holy Spirit to worship, praise, thank, and sometimes beg our Father and our Savior to walk with us on this journey. The special beauty of Catholic prayer is that it is just that—catholic. It is not a time of inward meditation when one focuses on one’s own energy. It is not simply a time when a community of like-minded people gather to pray for the things that matter only to us. Catholic prayer implies that we all are in this together, that the entire Church, both the living and dead, is united in constant and eternal prayer first to praise our God and second to ask that he guide us mind, body, heart, and soul in his service every minute of every day. If we are Catholics, we are part of a body that is praying all of the time. Either in the firmament or on the terra firma, somewhere, at all times, we can rest assured that Catholics are praying.
Whether it be the ancient symmetry of the Liturgy of the Hours, the lively Mass of a college campus, the perpetuating roundness of the rosary, or the life-consuming ora et labora of the monastery, our prayers are like the prayers of the heavenly creatures who cry out “Holy, holy, holy!” as they ceaselessly pray into the face of God. When our Church prays, we become one with those heavenly creatures. We are furthering our own spiritual journeys to God by preparing for the day when we, as one vast communion of saints, will stand before God and do nothing butpray, united eternally with Alpha and Omega, blissfully reflecting his brilliance forever.
I like to think of my Catholic prayer life as a way of extending myself through others as I travel toward God. Not only do I seek the prayerful boosts of the saints (Mary, Isidore the Farmer, Augustine being among the old regulars), I also try to incorporate the prayers of the saints and of the not-quite-saints into my own prayers. As I pray through them or through their words, I am praying with them. I am praying within the boundaries that they established for me long ago. Using their wisdom, accepting their love, emulating their holiness, I have the joy and assurance of knowing that I am becoming one with them. Allowing my soul to form a communion with their souls, I am lifted into the place of God and suspended there with them and him.
Recognizing God, experiencing God, communicating with God: These are all made available to the spiritual searcher within the boundaries of the institutional Church. But the journey does not end there. Indeed, these elements of faith, as valuable as they may be standing on their own merits, ultimately should be seen as steps along the journey of faith that lead the sojourner to the epitome of the spiritual life, which is to become like God. Please understand that I am not suggesting that any of us can become God. The only man ever to have the status of God was God before he was man. Jesus is God; we are not and never will be. But we can become like God by becoming like Christ, living the examples of pure charity and service that he offered us when he commanded that we first love God and then love our neighbor. By understanding and living these commandments, we are putting on the mind of God even as we walk on the earth.
Within Catholicism I have learned that this ability to put our love of God into action as the love of our neighbor is not simply an option that we may exercise as part of our faith. If we call ourselves Catholic, if we seek to best express our humanity by exposing the divine that is within us, we must allow the gospel to be made known through our daily lives. The orthodoxy of our catechisms, homilies, and prayers must be made manifest in the orthopraxy of our daily interactions with others as we work in concert with Christ to transform the world, preparing for the kingdom of God.
In moving toward that transformation, we Catholics live completely and joyfully within the boundaries of our Church. The boundaries, the moral exhortations of Christ and his Church, are not arbitrary restrictions designed to crush our personal liberties. Quite to the contrary, the boundaries liberate us, allowing us to see the world through the eyes of Christ, coloring everything we think, say, or do, ordering our lives within the framework of divine charity so that we live in the service of God and the service of our neighbors. To step outside of the boundaries is to live in a spiritual schizophrenia which robs us of our spiritual wholeness, robs our neighbors of our charity, and robs the kingdom of God of the riches of our souls. To live within the boundaries is to transcend them, to become like God by becoming like Christ, to live now in the kingdom of God by adopting both the holiness and the humanity of God.
For a Fundamentalist Protestant who was convinced that the only way to the heavenly eternity was through the one-time experience of “accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” the Catholic requirement that orthodoxy be made compatible with orthopraxy became a logical and unifying element of my faith life and a call to a radical transformation of the way I conducted my life. I realized that I must live the gospel every minute of every day, in work, in scholarship, in my personal relationships, in charitable service. I realized that to live within the boundaries of Catholicism and to transcend those boundaries, I must accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior over and over again every single day for the rest of my life. I am a Christian forever; I forever must strive to live as Christ lived.
My spiritual journey has been one contained within the boundaries of institutional religion, beginning in the salvific certitude of the Baptist Church and culminating in the beatific hope of the Catholic Church. When I stepped outside of those boundaries, my journey became wayward and without destination. Within Catholicism I have learned that those boundaries do not restrict me. They liberate me. The ancient, mysterious sacraments, the beautiful and thoroughly Catholic life of prayer, the insistence that my faith be manifested in the daily conduct of my life—these are all boundaries handed down to me by generations of believers before me as the means to recognize, to experience, and to communicate with God. It is an encompassing and engrossing knowledge of God that I can get nowhere else. Instead of being forced into a bondage, the boundaries of Catholicism force me out of my human and spiritual bondage by elevating me beyond all boundaries, so that one day I may be in union with God forever.