When Mountains and Rivers Are Once Again Mountains and Rivers

A lot of people say Catholics place too much emphasis on Mary. I plead guilty, for my part. But it’s not all my fault.

She’s the one who keeps pulling me back.

Allow me to rewind to the early 1970s. The Catholic church had, virtually overnight, jettisoned centuries of Latin tradition in favor of a modernist ecumenical spirit. Priests now faced the people and had a conversation with them, in the local language. Gregorian chant and pipe organs gave way to contemporary praise songs played on acoustic guitars. Inspiring statuary and architecture yielded to tacky felt banners while Mary statues were unceremoniously shoved into closets, lest anyone upset our non-Catholic brethren.

This was the church I was born into. And as was the experience for so many people my age, my catechesis was poor. Practically nonexistent. Nobody seemed willing to want to teach us kids what it actually meant to be Catholic. Even worse, no one ever told me why I should be Catholic as opposed to any other denomination or religion — or any religion at all, for that matter.  

Making matters worse for me was that I got a lot of mixed messages on religion at home. I was adopted and raised by my maternal grandparents. They were Catholic converts from Protestantism. Dad (as I knew him) seemed like a pretty well-formed Catholic, although he and my godfather somehow ended up knee-deep in the budding Charismatic Catholic movement. The weekly prayer meetings in the church basement looked and sounded a lot like a Pentecostal gathering, with arms waving in the air, people speaking in tongues, and the meeting leaders laying hands on the sick.

Mom, meanwhile, came from a vaguely evangelical background. She never talked much about it, but in hindsight it was pretty obvious. Every day at home, the TV was tuned to the local religious channel, which was actually something that existed in our neck of the woods. All the televangelists had their programs on that channel. Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ernest Angley, Jack Van Impe, Rod Parsley, Kenneth Copeland, Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn. I saw them all. Repeatedly. Lots of them promoted the same faith-healing philosophy that the Charismatic Catholics did. But a lot of them were also outspokenly anti-Catholic. So why did Mom convert to Catholicism when she watched this stuff all day?

I was confused. All the more so when I met my first serious girlfriend at age 19. Her parents were Pentecostal ministers, and her mom in particular despised Catholicism. She grilled me about my faith every time I showed up at their house. And since I’d been so poorly catechized, I couldn’t defend myself.

On top of that, I had all these people in my life who believed in the power of the Holy Spirit to heal people of their illnesses. I grew up with a lot of vague ailments, both physical and mental, that made my life a living hell at times. More than once I had Dad, my godfather, and other Charismatic Catholics laying hands on me. More than once I also tearfully reduced myself to praying along with the televangelists who told the viewers to put their hands against theirs on the screen and pray for the healing that would come to us through faith.

Nothing ever happened. I continued to suffer into adulthood. I’ve spent most of my life not feeling very well. But no amount of faith ever healed me.

I got angry at God. I drifted away from faith altogether for a time. I went to Mass once in a while, mostly for nostalgia’s sake or because Mom and Dad wanted to go and had no one to drive them. But my heart wasn’t in it. By the time I met my wife-to-be, I was exploring Buddhism. She reckoned herself a Taoist, and as I had already become enamored of the Tao Te Ching, her philosophical dedication to the Way encouraged me to examine yet another spiritual avenue. I ultimately embarked on a yearslong journey around the world of faith and belief. Even though I’d lost my faith in Christianity, I still yearned to understand where we came from, what our purpose was, and where we were going.

Eventually I found my way to the Quaker tradition. The Quakers are deeply mystical Christians. Having just come out of several years of immersion in Buddhism, I felt drawn to the Quakers’ emphasis on simplicity, silence, and contemplation. Their meetinghouses were basic and unadorned. There were no creeds to recite or dogmas to adhere to. There weren’t even any pastors. People generally sat in a circle of chairs for about an hour, in silent reflection. Sometimes, a person would feel moved by the Spirit to stand and address the congregation on some matter of faith, after which he’d sit down and the meeting would fall back into silence and everyone would reflect on what was spoken. No debates. No disagreements.

I liked that. I liked it a lot. Not only did the experience help me understand that something from above could still speak through us, as it did through the prophets of old, but it also led me to appreciate the power of contemplative spirituality and the value of silence, where the “still, small voice” can be heard if you go inward and listen closely enough. Noisy prayer meetings? Raucous evangelical church services, with a praise band playing at full volume and a preacher roaring scripture from the stage? Not my thing. I’m with Rumi, the Sufi mystic who said that silence is the language of God — all else is poor translation. In a world that never shuts up, this was revelatory to me. It wasn’t like Buddhist meditation, for which the goal is to empty your mind. Instead, this was about active listening. And although I never rose to address a meeting in my time with the Quakers, that experience helped me shift my entire spiritual perspective. The shift took time, but it started there in earnest.

It also led me back to the Catholic church.

When we lived in Seattle, there was a Catholic parish that regularly offered what it called a Mercy Night service. Actually, “service” isn’t the right word. It was more that the church created a contemplative space for what it called “weary pilgrims.” The church was illuminated only by candlelight, while a pianist and violinist played soft, soothing music throughout the evening. People lit their own candles and sat them in front of the altar with their prayer intentions. There were prayer groups available for people who needed to talk. Priests were on hand to hear confessions. Some people came up to the ambo to tell stories of their often difficult journeys back to the faith, and the ways their return to the faith had rewarded and enriched them. Lots of people simply sat in the pews and contemplated. I remember one person lying prostrate on the floor before the altar. It was all a deeply moving experience, and it helped me take a step toward reclaiming the faith I was born into, one that had always left me feeling guilty for asking questions and unloved when it felt as if my prayers were being ignored.

I was nowhere near ready to jump back on the wagon at that point, but something profound did happen at the first Mercy Night I attended. As I sat in the relaxing glow of the beautiful church, I found my eyes continually drawn to the Mary statue off to the right of the altar. I couldn’t tell you why in words, but something inside me said that she wanted me to come over and talk to her. So I did. And she didn’t tell me so much that she wanted me to come back, but she did make it clear to me that she loved me and had always been concerned for my well-being, no matter how far I’d strayed from the church. Like a good mother, she just wanted the best for me, even if the things I did probably drove her to madness.

If it hadn’t been for the practice I’d acquired with the Quakers in honing my skills of quieting down and actively listening, I may never have heard Mary calling me that night. Or maybe I would have, because being there in her presence that night made me realize that she truly had always been there for me. Even in an often tumultuous childhood, I found I could always lose myself in her loving maternal gaze at Mass. Fortunately, our home church was not one of the many that had hidden their statuary away in those early post-Vatican II years.

I didn’t know quite what to do with this Mercy Night conversation I’d had with the Blessed Mother. I certainly wasn’t ready to come back to the church. So I just kept the lines of communication open. I let her talk to me over the following weeks and months. And eventually, she made me feel comfortable enough that I could cautiously dip my toe back into Catholicism. I still had lots of unanswered questions, and my journey back was not an easy one. I overcorrected in the direction of putting rules before relationship. I found myself confronting the same questions that had been nagging at me my whole life. I left. I came back. I drifted into Eastern Orthodoxy for a few years. Mary was there too. Maybe I could stay in the East, I thought. But no. She wanted me back with Rome. Sometimes it was just a gentle tug on my sleeve. Other times she was practically dragging me by my ear. But it was clear where she wanted me to be.

And now, in midlife, here I am, right back where I began in the 1970s. And yet it’s not the same. I’m probably never going to be a religious literalist, and I’m at peace with that now. I’ve leaned into the Problem of Evil, the tense paradox between free will and divine omniscience, the scriptural contradictions, the seeming absurdities. And they just don’t bother me anymore. Maybe that’s because I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that there are no satisfactory answers to my questions, and that that’s OK.

Along my spiritual journey, I came across a saying that has stuck with me: 

At first, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. Then I saw the mountains were not actually mountains and rivers were not actually rivers. Now I finally see that mountains are indeed mountains and rivers are indeed rivers.

Now, in its original Zen context, that speaks to a particularly Buddhist way of thinking about the universe — one that’s not relevant to this discussion. But I think the saying can be applied in almost any situation in which you started out seeing something in a crudely literal way, deconstructed it, and were eventually able to return to it with a new perspective. Lots of people never get past the second part and walk away for good. Others can take the lessons they’ve learned and apply them in a way that allows them to embrace anew the things they once turned away from. I like to think that’s where I am these days.

The point is, I probably don’t share the same faith mindset with the vast majority of the people in the pews. Plato and Jung ultimately brought me back to church as much as the Blessed Mother did. I’m not the same kind of Catholic I was as a kid, or even when I was a young man trying in vain to find some other path to follow. My fruitless attempt to embrace literalism and certain theological claims had to give way to philosophy, psychology, symbol, and metaphor — to what J.R.R. Tolkien called the “true myth.” It eventually occurred to me that something doesn’t have to be literally true to still be true, or even to have value. That realization has allowed me to feel a sense of comfort, groundedness, and belonging when I’m at Mass. That has to be enough. And for now, it is.

Plus, for whatever reason, it’s obviously where Mary wants me to be.       

We all need a philosophy of life to center our lives on. Without it we risk becoming unmoored, “like a wave out at sea, driven to and fro by the wind,” in the words of James 1:6. Blaise Pascal in his time, and social scientist Jonathan Haidt in our own, both speak of the God-shaped hole that exists in everyone’s heart. The human need for meaning and purpose dictates that we’ll always fill the hole with something. As the influence of religion declines in the West, I see that happening with my own eyes. And most days, I don’t like what I see.

That is, admittedly, part of the reason I came back to the church. I need something to ground me amid the growing turmoil in my own life and the ever-increasing chaos in our society. Catholicism has become, for me, a way of thinking about life and death. It’s a way of making sense of our very existence. It’s a philosophy and an organizational principle. It gives me the space to explore and contemplate the principles of goodness, truth, and beauty. It holds the power to transform lives and make the world a better place. And, maybe most importantly, it reminds me that I’m not the main character in the universe. Yeah, I never got the answers I wanted to my prayers, but so what? Many, many others can say the same. And they still show up faithfully to Mass.

Me, I lack the gift of faith. Always have. But I also spent years thinking I could be clever and mix and match my own religious beliefs to tailor something to my own likes. And the cleverness got me nowhere. It left me feeling unfulfilled and anxious. So I reached a point where I realized that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t smarter than the billions of human beings who have found fulfillment in this imperfect but revered two-thousand-year-old institution. And not just that, but it occurred to me somewhere along the way that to stand with the church is to stand with Western civilization. And Western civilization needs all the help it can get these days.

It doesn’t hurt that a lot of my favorite people are, or were, Catholic. Just to name a few: Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Teresa of Avila, Joan of Arc. More recently, Peter Kreeft, Richard Rohr, Fr. Mike Schmitz, Bishop Robert Barron, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II. There were even the Catholic YouTubers that I always kept coming back to, like Brian Holdsworth, Matt Fradd, and Trent Horn. More recently, I’ve also taken a shine to Kennedy Hall and Dr. Taylor Marshall. A recent delightful discovery has been the roundtable discussions that Katherine Bennett, Gavin Ashenden, and Mark Lambert put on at Catholic Unscripted. All these people somehow just feel like my tribe. They speak my language. And we all want a tribe to belong to.

Admittedly, I don’t know that I could have come back if the Latin Mass didn’t exist. One of the things that drew me to Eastern Orthodoxy was that its Divine Liturgy was ancient, mysterious, reverent, and deeply holy. That was something I never found in the Mass I grew up with. It felt very banal in comparison with the riches I found in the East. It was just a back-and-forth conversation with the priest. Over the years I also attended Episcopalian and Lutheran services, and there was really no difference between them and the modern Catholic Mass. So I often went back to the question I had as a kid: Why should I be Catholic and not one of these other denominations? It didn’t seem to make any difference. I had to teach myself the difference, and the difference didn’t fully come to light until well after the first time I attended a Latin Mass.

I didn’t like the first Latin Mass I attended. In hindsight, I realize that was mostly because I was completely lost. Why couldn’t I hear the priest? Why wasn’t he turned to face the congregation? Am I supposed to respond to anything? How do I know when to stand, sit, or kneel? Eventually it dawned on me that the Latin Mass wasn’t the problem. It was that the Catholic Mass had radically changed in my youth into something indistinguishable from liturgical Protestantism. There wasn’t anything unique about it. It wasn’t inspiring. And it certainly never bolstered my faith. Otherwise, I would have found a reason to stay and never leave.

The Latin Mass, in contrast, is a unique expression of the Catholic faith. It’s reverent and beautiful. It elevates my spirit, takes me out of myself, transcends me in a way the modern Mass never did. Yeah, I’ve been to a few very well done Novus Ordo Masses, but they’ve been the exception rather than the rule. And for me, I think the Latin language itself actually helps me pay attention to the sacrifice of the Mass. I don’t get distracted thinking about what’s being said. I know me. I’d get stuck on something and stew over it for the rest of the service. And it’s not so much that I’m looking for anything to criticize. I just need to be able to shut off my critical mind.

I was able to do that very successfully when I attended a Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy once. Most of the Orthodox services I’d been to up till that point had been in English. This one was in Old Church Slavonic. I didn’t understand a single word of what was being sung, and it didn’t matter: It was by far the most beautiful and transcendent church service of any kind that I’d ever been to. I suppose that made me realize that I don’t need, or even want, to have an hourlong conversation with the priest. I just want him to do his thing at the altar while I observe and contemplate. I don’t think I’m quite ready to actively pray yet, but maybe that will come with time.

Membership in the church is my birthright, and it’s a gift I’m grateful I was given. I think I appreciate the gift all the more now that I’ve come back to it on my own terms, with a fresh perspective borne of a lot of years of questioning and contemplating. It’s been a long, hard struggle to come back home. And I owe it mostly to my heavenly mom, whose caring tenacity won out in the end.

Thanks for not giving up on me, Mama Mary. 

[Photo: Nils R, Pexels.]