In this week’s episode, we continue a multi-part series about my off-again, on-again relationship with God and the Catholic Church. This episode is about the 9 years I spent away from the Catholic Church and what led me back again. We will continue this series on faith for a few more weeks and then go back to disability-related topics as I review my history in special education.

Hello, this is Chris Young, and welcome to episode #11 of “Contemplating Life”.

This week we are going to continue our multi-part series on my off-again, on-again relationship with God and the Catholic Church.

Let me reiterate my usual disclaimer when I discuss religion here. I’m not specifically trying to evangelize or proselytize anyone. I’m just sharing my views and experiences about faith. I hope that it is entertaining and informative. If by chance, you find it sparks something in your own faith journey that’s fine also.

When we left off before the Oscar break, I was 19 years old and I had just decided to leave the Catholic Church. My passion for science, intense skepticism, and the failure of the church to engage me in meaningful ways led me to quit going to Mass.

I had no ill will toward the Church. I wasn’t mad at God, at least not now.

There was one occasion a few years earlier when I was mad at God. One of my best friends in high school, Terry Johnson who was two years older than me died of complications of his Muscular Dystrophy just six months after graduating from high school. He had earned eight consecutive semesters of straight A grades and was awarded an academic letter sweater. However, after graduation, he did nothing with his life. He never attempted to enter college or find employment. Like some people whose lives end when they retire from a lifetime of hard work, after high school he had no future and apparently gave up on life.

It seemed to me that all of the hard work he put into getting perfect grades was a total waste. After his death, I was determined not to let high school graduation be a death sentence for me. I already had college plans and plans for a career as a computer programmer. His senseless passing made me more determined to make it to college but less determined to achieve academic perfection. I would rather have a good time while I lived, goof off, and earn Bs and Cs than work my ass off getting As and end up dying young.

I wasn’t so much angry that he died. I lost lots of friends from complications of their disability at an early age. It was never easy to lose friends but somehow I took this one personally. I concluded somewhere along the way at the only purpose or meaning I could find from his death was that it might motivate me to be different. Somehow that made me feel responsible for his death as if God killed him just to teach me a lesson.

I can’t really say that that argument with God was part of why I left the church. You can’t be angry with someone whom you are not certain even exists.

While I seriously doubted the existence of God, I didn’t describe myself as an atheist. In my opinion, atheists are absolutely certain that there was no God. Good scientists are never absolutely certain about anything. You always have to be open to new evidence. I described myself as having an open mind about God and religion yet I didn’t do anything to try to fill that opening.

If you pinned me down I would probably identify with the label “agnostic”. Somehow that word felt like it described someone who couldn’t make up their mind.

So, if agnostics were considered wishy-washy and atheists radically anti-religion I needed a different rebel. In the early 1970s, they invented a label that seemed to fit my beliefs best– secular humanist. It seemed to me that the phrase was invented in response to the accusation of religious people that atheists were immoral because they didn’t have God in their lives. Calling yourself a secular humanist was a way of saying, “I have morality and values that are not significantly different from mainstream religion. I just don’t believe it’s necessary to connect that sense of morality to belief in a deity.”

One of the values that my mother instilled in me was a strong sense of volunteerism.

As I was growing up in the early 60s, it was not that common for housewives to work outside the home. That gave her lots of free time, especially during the school year. It began with her involvement in the PTA at the special education school I attended. She served as “room mother” which meant that she hosted Christmas and Valentine’s Day parties, as well as a thank-you party after our annual fundraising cookie sale. I recall she was elected treasurer and eventually the president.

This led to involvement in the PTA at the city and state-wide levels. From there she became involved in education and disability advocacy with a grassroots coalition known as the Council Of Volunteers and Organizations for the Handicapped or COVOH. That organization helped secure the passage of the Indiana Mandatory Special Education Act which required all Indiana school districts to develop special education programs a few years before a federal mandate required the same nationwide. For once, Indiana was ahead of the curve.

During the summer of my college years and then later after college and after I had to quit work because of my worsening disability, I accompanied her to the Indiana Statehouse to lobby the General Assembly for disability issues. We attended several monthly meetings of the Indiana State Building Commission as they were revising building codes which included accessibility requirements. In a future episode, I will tell some stories about those efforts.

She also served on the Indianapolis Mayor’s Advisory Council on the Handicapped and on the Indiana Special Education Advisory Council and I attended many of those meetings with her.
She also did significant volunteer work for a United Way agency called the Marion County Muscular Dystrophy Foundation which is now known as the Indiana Muscular Dystrophy Family Foundation. I will detail her work for them in another episode. She served their board of directors for several years.

I followed in her footsteps joining the board of MCMDF immediately after she left. I also was invited to serve on the Board of Directors of another United Way agency called Central Indiana Radio Reading. This organization used a subcarrier frequency of the Butler University radio station to broadcast people reading articles from the daily newspaper and some magazines for people who were described as “print handicapped”. This included blind and visually impaired people as well as physically handicapped people who could not easily handle a newspaper or magazine.

There will be future episodes about my involvement in all of these activities. I only mention them here because it describes what I was doing while I was away from the church and as you will see, my involvement in these activities gradually indirectly led me back to the church.

As I mentioned, I had no brief with the Catholic Church. I admired and respected my mother’s faith and her involvement in the Church. Somewhere along the way, mom transitioned her time from doing disability advocacy to becoming more involved in parish activities. She served on the Parish Council and was involved in a variety of activities in the church.

Along the way, she heard about a software package developed by a priest and one of his parishioners called Parish Data System. It was a database that would keep track of your membership. It not only kept track of names, addresses, and phone numbers. It also allowed you to record sacrament records such as if your kids had received First Communion or Confirmation. It would also allow you to tag members with keywords such as “maintenance committee”, “school family”, “Eucharistic minister”, or “usher/greeter”. It would also keep financial contribution records and print charitable tax donation records at the end of the year. Because she had become skilled at using my personal computers for her volunteer activities, she knew how important a computer could be for church administration. She worked to get us a personal computer for the parish. I was happy to volunteer to get the program up and running and to advise them on how to best use it.
Before we were able to obtain a computer for the parish, I allowed their volunteer bookkeeper to use my computer and spreadsheet software to prepare monthly financial statements and annual reports.

Although I didn’t attend Mass on a regular basis if someone in the family was having a Baptism or First Communion I had no problem attending to show my support for their own spiritual journey. I might have also tagged along on occasional Christmas or Easter or at least I wasn’t opposed to the idea of going to church for some special occasions.

Through my involvement with the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation, I was invited to attend a special volunteer recognition Mass at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral the seat of the Archbishop of Indianapolis. The invitation went out to a variety of voluntary organizations which included United Way Agencies.

I had always admired Archbishop Edward T. O’Meara. Each year the Catholic Archbishop is invited to give the invocation at the Indianapolis 500. Rather than pray “in Jesus’ name” as your typical NASCAR chaplain might do, he always gave a very ecumenical prayer to “our common God” and would give a blessing to the drivers in their variety of native languages.

The Cathedral had just completed a major renovation and my dad had worked on part of it refinishing huge bronze doors at the front of the building. The opportunity to hear the Archbishop speak on a topic such as volunteerism and to see my dad’s handiwork seems like it was a reasonable excuse to go to Mass on a weekday afternoon. I got to visit the Blessed Sacrament Chapel attached to the Cathedral which was the location of my parents’ wedding. The renovations of the building did not do much in the way of accessibility. I had to go up and down a very steep ramp that definitely was not according to disability access standards.

The Archbishop had just returned from a meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in which they ratified a document expressing the immorality of the nuclear arms race. While the church agrees that there are instances where going to war can be justified where all else fails, the document declared that nuclear war which indiscriminately kills innocent civilians and threatens the entire human race to possible extinction could not be justified under any circumstances.

In his homily, he was quite enthusiastic about this new teaching document and was looking forward to finding ways to have it proclaimed and understood at the parish level. The theme of the Mass however was volunteerism. As previously stated, that was a word with which I strongly identified so he was speaking to me and my kind. He talked about the nobility and the necessity to serve our fellow human beings.

Everything he was saying both about war and volunteerism resonated strongly with me. He was a very likable, intelligent, and charismatic speaker. Somehow, he tied it all to serving God. “Whatsoever you do to even the least of my brethren, you do unto me.” according to the parable in Matthew’s Gospel.

When we returned home, mom asked me what I thought of the experience. I told her how much I enjoyed it and how that Archbishop’s resonated with me. He seemed so enthusiastic about the Church’s statement against nuclear war and naturally I appreciated his recognition of volunteers like the two of us. I don’t particularly agree that that has anything to do with God but he is still a pretty cool guy.

“Do you think he’s stupid?”, she asked.

“Of course not. On the contrary, he seems like a very intelligent man.”

“Then if he is so right about the immorality of nuclear war and he is so right about the importance of volunteerism, what makes you think he is so wrong about everything he said about God?”
That was a good question. I didn’t have a good answer for it.

When I was attending Mass on a regular basis, Saint Gabriel Church was a bit cold and unfriendly. Naturally, there were cliques of people who volunteered for the church and were friendly with one another. Overall most people came to Mass, fulfilled their obligation, left, and that was it.

That began to change when the Parish Council decided they needed to do something to spark more involvement. They kickstarted a program called Christ Renews His Parish. It was abbreviated CRHP but often pronounced “chirp” as if the “H” and “R” were reversed. A group of parishioners consisting mostly of Parish Council members including my mother spent a weekend at a religious retreat presented by a parish in Fort Wayne Indiana. Men and women attended the retreat separately.

The program was presented not by professionals but by ordinary Catholic parishioners who had been through the process themselves. Over the two-day experience, the team presented a program in which they would tell personal stories or give what they called “witness talks” about their own faith journey and what God had done for them. While giving testimony is quite common in Protestant nominations, Catholics are not typically accustomed to telling their personal stories or talking about their relationship with God.

Once our parishioners had been through the process at the parish in Fort Wayne, they came home and spend six months in formation preparing to present the same program to a group of our people. The process would then repeat every six months. Each group of people who attended the program would then form a team to present it to the next group 6 months later.

My mother had been heavily involved in the parish prior to this process but after returning from the retreat, her involvement, dedication, and enjoyment of church activities multiplied significantly. Although our disability advocacy work had been waning for some time, now all of her volunteer efforts were dedicated to our parish.

Prior to attending CHRP, it seemed like she was friendly and collegial with the people she worked with at church. After CRHP she developed a strong bond of friendship with the people at church.

The most significant new relationship that came out of her involvement in the Parish Council and subsequent involvement in CRHP was her friendship with Judy Chapman. Judy also later became a significant person in my life as you will learn in future episodes.

Judy’s husband Paul was not Catholic but together they attended a year-long program at Saint Gabriel called RCIA. That acronym stands for Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. It involves attending weekly classes in the Catholic faith, participating in various preparatory rites and rituals, and culminating with an initiation ceremony at the Easter Vigil service the night before Easter.

According to Jewish tradition and subsequently Catholic Christian tradition, each day ends and a new day begins at sundown. Therefore, attending Mass on Saturday evening counts for Sunday. The initiation ceremony consists of the Sacrament of Baptism for those who have not already been baptized in another Christian tradition, the Sacrament of First Communion (also known as First Eucharist), and the Sacrament of Confirmation which we’ve previously discussed.

Judy didn’t have a large family to attend the ceremony for her husband so she invited my mother and me. I already mentioned that I had no objection to supporting people by attending sacraments and that Easter and Christmas were not off the table. This Easter Vigil service counted as Easter Mass and would involve the celebration of three sacraments at once. It was 4 for one! Despite the fact that it would last from about 8 PM until nearly midnight I agreed to tag along.

April 21, 1984, at the invitation of Judy Chapman, I attended the Easter Vigil Mass at Saint Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church to support her and see her husband Paul initiated into the Catholic Church. What occurred that night was a challenge to my belief or rather unbelief that set me on a journey back to the Catholic Church – a relationship that continues to this day.
Next week I will talk about that evening and the events that followed as we continue to explore my faith journey. We will continue on this topic for another couple of weeks and then take a break and go back to talking about disability issues. I am planning a multi-part series chronicling my history in special education.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. It’s not that I’m desperate for money, but a little extra income sure could help.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.