Taking a break from all your worries, Part I.

[Part II of the series is here.]

[Part III is here.]

Until about 4pm Wednesday, I would have described my faith as a weakened, flailing thing, a drag, a spiritual stockade. It was especially trying since I am juggling a lot of balls in in my family's life, right now, and it's not pleasant. Having my Catholicism wither just made it a horror show.

Late Wednesday afternoon? Viva Cristo Rey. He lives, indeed.

This post is, and is not, about the Pope. I think that many of you will not care for it, but I ask you to give it a listen anyway. It will take a couple-three parts to address, but I think an explanation of where I am coming from should start it off. This is going to be long, too--multi-parter! You've been warned.

I'm the son of two loving parents from rural central Michigan. My Dad is a retired fire chief and supervisor for the former GTE corporation. My Mom is a former guidance counselor and teacher who worked at an alternative school for high risk students. I'm the first member of my family to go to and graduate college right out of high school. I have a little brother who is taller than me now and carries a gun, working as a supervisory investigator for Customs and Border Protection. Public service runs in our family, as you can see. I'm the black sheep of the family, having decided to go to law school back when it was a merely uncertain career proposition, as opposed to an insane one. I went to the Jesuity Catholic one, the University of Detroit-Mercy, and graduated in 1996, passing the bar through some kind of divine favor. No, really--I don't know how I pulled it off.

I'm a husband, married to a delightful woman for fourteen years on October 23. Yep, in 1999, when I was pulling in non-L.A. Law bucks, and she was getting newbie public school teacher money. Starting in 2001, we began having children. Currently, six marvelous, astounding, confounding children, ranging from ages 12 to 2. I practice public interest law, which means I get a salary and if you win, I get bupkis. That's perfectly cool with me, as I used to have to chase clients down for money, but haven't had to for years. I can look into the mirror with confidence to shave, if you catch my meaning. My wife is a French and Spanish teacher, though she hasn't worked outside the home since shortly after our second child was born. She works like hell inside it, though.

It hasn't been all joy, but no family's road is. At one point, after the birth of our youngest daughter, we had seven of us crammed into a two bedroom, one bath, no basement nor garage ranch home. 880 square feet. I still don't know how we did that, frankly. Faced with growing necessity, we moved out of our home to purchase a new one, being told by a real estate professional that we would easily get approved for a short sale. That proved to be exceptionally *bad* advice. Malpractice bad.

We got foreclosed on instead. Still, we do have a roof over our heads, even if our credit rating has been nuked from orbit.

We have two vehicles, the newest of which is eleven years old, and both have more than 160,000 miles on them. As I mentioned in the book review post below, we now live a few blocks north of the famous Eight Mile Road. It's not a bad neighborhood--our car insurance actually went down by moving a mile closer to Detroit, if that means anything.

Last, for the purposes of the intro, but not life--we are Catholic. My wife is a cradle Catholic, with a father whose Catholicism shone deeply in his actions, even if he couldn't articulate why. Still, she got what all young Catholics got in the 1970s: proto-Groomeian glitterchesis, wherein she learned that God is love and glitter is sticky.

I received even less Catholic formation than she did, being baptized a Methodist as an infant and raised somewhat indifferently in that tradition. I always believed there was a God, and I had a religious impulse, however dulled, but I couldn't articulate what or why. I didn't like the hard sell approach of evangelicals, even if I had a sneaking admiration for their peace. It turned out that I liked even less the politicized creed of the Religious Left, seen through the prism of the regular Free Press (and later a shorter run at the Detroit News) columns of Episcopal priest Harry Cook. Cook's gospel was one of seething contempt for anyone to the right of Fidel Castro and his Jesus an ineffectual sidekick who played a reticent Ed McMahon to the perfections of the Rev. Cook. I might not have been well-trained in religion at the time, but I could sense a pseud and a fraud, and Cook was it. So when my future bride delicately broached religion, suggesting Episcopalianism as a meeting point, I apparently signaled my rejection with something between a spit and a snarl. I then said I would be more than willing to look at Catholicism first.

God can draw straight with the crookedest of lines, can't He? An ironic, but real, thanks to the gilded hackery of Harry Cook.

So, instead, I stumbled into RCIA and began the process of becoming a Catholic. To my shock, it hit me as very congenial. But more importantly, I began to seriously face up, for the first time, with the life and person of Jesus Christ. And I decided to follow Him. Oh, not always perfectly--much more often like a one-legged cat at a hockey rink. But limping and spinning, I try to follow.

And the cincher for me was that I believe He makes himself present at the Eucharist. I had an experience--not exactly mystical, but convincing on that point. The Eucharist, both the Person and the ritual, as related in the Gospels and by Paul, convinced me about Jesus: that He was Someone very, very different, on a divine mission, and that He knew what was coming and what He was doing. Most of the rest of the dominoes toppled after that. So turning away from the altar is not something I would do lightly.

So, as I said, most of the rest of the Church's teachings clicked into place.

Most being the operative word here.

End Part I.

Land ho!

It's gale-swept, rocky and rather cold, but Catholic.

[Photo credit.]

Yesterday at around 4pm or so, the spiritual dam burst. Thank you for your prayers, as I am certain they helped. A long-ish post is coming soon, but in the interim, the following question will give you a hint as to my thought process:

Is Catholicism a papal personality cult?

Just saying.

Berating the wounded before shooting them isn't a spiritual work of mercy.

A helpful motto for the spiritual life.

"If it doesn't look or smell like Shineola, don't apply it to your shoes."

Res ipsa loquitur.

Thanks to John Carriere for the find.

All at sea.

[Update: Important link added for context. Perhaps it will help you get my perspective. Maybe, maybe not. But still.]

I recognize that the blog has become painfully self-absorbed, and understand fully if you are sick and tired of it. I sympathize, really. I'd rather be posting about the Byzantine Empire myself. Or the latest Steve Stirling book.

Which I've finished, by the way, and is really well done. The flash-forward ending is a transitional classic, he says obliquely. Later, though.

Yeah, I'm sick and tired of me, and I have to imagine God is, too. Frankly, this has become my way of dealing with the worst case of spiritual chaos I've had since the revelations of the abuse crisis started hitting with wave-like repetition a few years back. Some days, I feel shoved halfway out the door. Today, it's three-quarters.

I think I have isolated the problem, and it involves certitudes. Not mine, obviously. I don't have much in the certainty department these days.

No, rather the problem is the certitude of those who genuinely love the Pope. That the Holy Spirit is clearly on the move. Deacon Greg Kandra posted this on his popular blog, without any framing commentary.

I guess this sort of thing is supposed to be good news now, in the sense of "there is no such thing as bad publicity." The Times is paying attention to us!

Note that the only person quoted is Seattle University's Jesuit president, happy that the more secularized locals think well of him now. Apparently, being one of the zeitgeist's collared batmen wasn't sufficient to win over the lefty locals. I guess his Stuart Smalley moment makes it all worthwhile.

No, I suppose the real reason the essay was posted was that it was, somehow, emblematic of the "Second Look at Catholicism" caused by the Pope.

Which would be fine if, in the essay, there was some evidence for it other than a Land O'Lakes apparatchik's self-esteem boost. Sadly, there is is not.

It is a remarkably nasty piece, so linking to it with silent approval left my jaw dropping. A bitter taste:

It’s long been known that most North American and European Catholics ignore church teachings on gays, contraception and abortion. These teachings range from absurd to unscientific to outright hateful. Without specifically changing the official line, Francis prompted millions of Catholics to give the church a second look when he criticized the hierarchy for being “obsessed” with those issues. Amen, said nearly 70 percent American Catholics who agreed with him in a Quinnipiac poll.

The anecdotal reaction is equally intriguing. “People come up to me all the time on the street or at a restaurant and say things like, ‘I just need to tell someone how much I like this pope of yours,’” said Father Stephen Sundborg, a Jesuit (like Francis) who is president of Seattle University, based in one of the most secular cities in the United States. “Suddenly, it seems O.K. to be a priest out there.”

All of this is by design. Francis is working two broad strategies. The first is aimed at lapsed Catholics, and those who are open to a spiritual life with an intellectual framework. Thus, he dismissed proselytizing as “solemn nonsense,” in a recent interview. “It makes no sense,” he said of the blunt harangues over whose God is better.

The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good reason.

This father of six thanks you for the gut punch. Which are my wife and I: absurd, unscientific or outright hateful? No, really--Get bent, you smug prick.

And, really--the Church had no intellectual framework in the bleak years Before Francis? Waiter, my essay has a Pseud in it--please take it back.

I'd point out the obvious, that Mr. Egan is obsessed with pelvic issues, but apparently this represents an Important Sign. And the home office has said ixnay on that strategy, so there you have it.

On one point, at least, the Era of Francis in America has one point of continuity with pre-Francis times: the desperate craving of American Catholics for validation from non-Catholics. Starting with Rev. Sundborg, but also, apparently, with more grounded members of the church, willing to post screeds like Egan's without a murmur of protest.

Proselytism may be solemn nonsense, but self-flagellation is in, baby.

If I am coming across as out of sorts, it is simply because I am. In the face of mounting personal stresses, the sense that I am one of the Pope’s redheaded stepsons is a burden I never imagined I’d encounter. Not having any money coming in assuredly plays into my mental state these days, but I've been out of kilter since the first faboo interview. Seeing Catholics cite sneering contempt as--I don't know, the Spirit in motion?-- is something I can't begin to process.

More encounters with the Spirit? Stay tuned!

I feel profoundly out of step with other Catholics, so much so that I haven’t taken communion in three weeks. Frankly, it would feel like a lie, even if I was otherwise disposed to receive. It's not getting better.

Regarding the "older brother" argument.

John Allen spends some time here examining the so-called "older brother" reaction to the Pope's barbs.

Well, the thing is, the analogy doesn't fit, at least not as far as the father's reaction is chronicled in the parable:

And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has received him safe and sound.’ 28 But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, 29 but he answered his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!’ 31 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’

The thing is, the cumulative effect of the Pope's words on the so-called "older brothers" is not "Son, all I have is yours--celebrate with me over the return of your brother!"

Instead, it comes across as "Well, pal, the thing is, I don't even like you. Do you want to know why? Tough--I'm going to tell you anyway. I have the list right here. Number 1..."

So, yeah, if all analogies limp, this one is a double amputee.

Elegy for a dream.

Charlie LeDuff's beautiful and haunting Detroit: An American Autopsy is marketed as a journalist's-eye-view of the tragic plight Detroit has descended into over the past decade. Indeed, it is that--but most readers may be missing the lede if they blip over the adjective in the title.

Because the Pulitzer Prize-winning LeDuff's larger point is that Detroit is not unique: it has simply arrived at its current, nightmarish state earlier than the rest of the country. Gawk at the trainwreck all you like--but the odds are, you're riding on a parallel track.

As he told Stephen Colbert in his interview, "Detroit is what happens when the money runs out."

I like to joke, channeling Tina Fey, that "I can see Detroit from my house!" That's actually true--from the second story, I can see a billboard on the Detroit side of the notorious Eight Mile Road, Motown's northern border, separating it from the suburbs of Oakland and Macomb counties. I graduated from the University of Detroit-Mercy Law School, work in Detroit proper, and have for more than a decade. Many of my neighbors are working class blacks who have decamped from the city as the spiral has worsened.

And has it ever worsened--please note that the book came out before the City filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history.

LeDuff's book is not a history of "how we got here." Rather, it is a chronicle of the city as it is, in its mortal hours, along with a sort of homecoming on the part of the author. LeDuff, who was raised on Joy Road in next-door Redford Township, engages in a personal and familial taking stock, with family dysfunction and tragedy mirroring that of the city itself.

It is a work that chronicles the acts of many villains: short-sighted, greedy politicians (including the recently sentenced corruption machine and former Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick); short-sighted, greedy bureaucrats; short-sighted, greedy corporate executives; short-sighted, greedy newspaper management covering for the sins of said executives and politicos; short-sighted, greedy criminal thugs and short-sighted, greedy regular folks like LeDuff and his family members.

That last may be the most haunting of them all, because LeDuff spares no one in his analysis--not even himself. He indicts his generation for mocking what made their fathers successful:

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright--our grandfather in the white socks--is the thing that ruined us....Instead of working, we figured we could be hustlers and salesmen and gamblers and partiers. Work was for suckers. If anybody had told us such a thing existed, we probably would have become New York bankers and stockbrokers. And I have no doubt we would have been good at it too. Work versus The Hustle. That was the internal conflict on Joy Road, USA.

It is a story with precious few (but genuine) heroes, and even fewer victories. The heroes are the honest folk: firemen in delapidated stations without toilet paper, police detectives who have to take the bus to homicide scenes, residents struggling to get blight removed, a brave mother who tries to find peace after the death of her daughter and, yes, even a freelance political consultant who cuts through the insanity to explain the realities on the ground.

 The victories in Detroit happen when the honest folk keep manning their stations and performing their duties despite the fact everything around them is crumbling. And because of that, occasionally justice is done. Very, very occasionally. But just staying at the station is usually the most you can hope for.

And if you think it can't happen anywhere else, I would simply ask you to consider the possibilities of a nation whose decks are awash with mounting debt, and whose social dysfunctions are not different in kind from those of the once-great Motor City. If it stays with you long after you have finished it, then you read it correctly.

Fun with the National Park Service as arm of the DNC.

Yes, the shutdown is a clarifying moment. Our compassionate chief executive is evicting the elderly from their homes, shuttering private businesses, trying to block access to scenery, along with a host of other petty, spiteful actions that give us the true measure of the small, brittle man in charge.

The latest is refusing to pay funded death benefits to military families.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Vicious little twerp, isn't he?

And our watchdog media is giving him ample cover. It's who they are,  and what they do--endless in-kind payments to one, and only one, political party, and relentless defense of the empty suit at the top.

Fortunately, there is an option to respond to some of it--civil disobedience. And here is a nice pictorial chronicle of civil disobedience in action.

Here's the thing: if you show that you're willing to eat a shit sandwich, then that's what you're going to get.

So stop eating.

A true company man in action!

I saw this before, but just to show you how the American episcopate is taking its cues, here's Archbishop Dolan, telling the world that Pope Benedict was soooo 2012.

So, I guess the 8 years of Papa B were the equivalent of tailpipe huffing? It seems so.

Set phasers for FUN, papal nerds.

I'll change the subject from my internal spiritual trainwreck to something more positive soon: a review of a book about contemporary Detroit.

Is this Catholicism?

Asks the very unnerved Elliot Bougis in this essay.

Yes, I have been linking a lot to him of late, but (1) he presents a lot of what I'm thinking, only much better, and (2) misery loves company.

What I'm learning about Catholicism is that how it is lived by those who genuinely love orthodoxy is rather at odds with how it is presented by the Church.

When push comes to shove:

• We will in effect defend as infallible, despite the clear limits of the charism, every statement that comes from the Pope's mouth. In some cases, we will argue that the statements are inerrant. On a par with Scripture. No, I've seen this--and felt gut-punched. Blessed Pius IX may have lost the battle at Vatican I, but the faithful have ensured that he won the war.
• Related: if we like the new Pope enough, we will always have been at war with Eastasia.
• Even (especially?) if that Pope preaches eloquently against the evils of clericalism. Pardon the relevant aside:

• In the name of charity, we berate those who honestly disagree with us.
• In the name of a big, welcoming Church, we shoot the wounded.
• We deride as Pharisees those who fail to agree with us on every particular.

But--please--dismiss my views as those of the jealous older brother, a hateful Pharisee who longs for a Church that the size of phone booth. With mirrors on the inside.

I'm getting used to it.

It has become increasingly obvious to me that my problem isn't so much the contents of the Pope's statements (though the content is sometimes deeply problematic), but rather how it is being defended by the Faithful. And that's the most disorienting and dismaying part of it all.