139/365 Pentecost

There’s a lot of Christianity out there that insists that faith is all about a conviction you have in your head, a decision you make in your mind—that God exists or that Jesus saved us. It’s all theoretical and rational—a faith for intellectuals. But Pentecost shows us that Christian belief and spirituality happen to your whole body. Your mind follows your feet. Decisions come after something happens to your life. A new consciousness comes when you have to figure out what to do with the mess of people all around you and the concrete responsibilities of mutual care: feeding people, praying for needs, sticking around when some folks start getting annoying, or sticking around when the excitement wears off and life gets boring, mundane, ordinary.

--Isaac Villegas

I've had two moments of conversion: one happened after a long period of spiritual crisis and the other happened after I couldn't help myself anymore. I was confirmed in my parish, and that wasn't my conversion. That was my, "yeah sure whatever" moment of learning that I really should be confirmed if I'm going to teach religion in a Catholic school. Then confirm me. I'm catechized, trust me. No, it was after that, when I started to drift away from the church and from the parish. I kept telling myself that I couldn't stay just because I played softball with Colleen O'Toole. There had to be more than that.

So I prayed.

I prayed a lot. I talked to myself a lot. My friend Mary would say I started telling myself a different story. I thought I should leave...my daughter's godmother suggested the Quakers. She did both: Catholic mass and Friends' meetings. But here in town they happened at the same time on a Sunday morning. I couldn't just try it out. I had to make a decision. I read Thomas R. Kelly and prayed.

The archbishop decided to close our parish. It seemed like a pretty big sign. And then he changed his mind (or, rather, the committee recommended something else), and that seemed like just as big a sign. I kept praying. I went on retreat. I tried again. That fall, 7 people nominated me for parish council--Caroline told me I had more nominations than anyone else on the list.

I decided I was done looking for signs. If I was going to believe in the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, here it was. Here I was. I was Catholic and this was my parish and holy crap. Here I am.

Then, starting at that moment and tumbling forward, perhaps I shouldn't even separate them into two events, odd things started happening to me. I'd pick up a book with no real intent to read it and find myself sucked in. I'd hear words falling from my daughter's mouth that had to be at least casually inspired. I'd wind up at websites in the middle of the night without really meaning to. And suddenly it was right there in front of me. From the first time I heard the name Hildegard--the medieval abbess, not the pastoral associate--all the way to St. Bede's monastery and knowing I was so close but not there and searching and staying up thinking too much and worrying about it working out and knowing in my heart that I'd been a Benedictine at least since 6th grade, I was falling into a conversion I could not stop.

Because I didn't want to. My hands and heart and spirit were taking me someplace that had been created for me. I was the youngest oblate candidate at Clyde in 15 years; Sr. Jean said in front of the gathering of oblates that she'd never read a candidate's writing that got so close to the heart of Benedictine thought so fast. I blushed, I remember, but when I got home I wrote this:

Something about that place makes my brain reorder itself. Like physically. I can feel the change.

It was my Pentecost. Something changed and here I am.