In this episode, we continue the story of my faith journey. I attended the Easter Vigil in 1984 which had a profound effect on me. It was the start of my journey back to the Catholic Church. We will wrap up this section of my faith journey next week and the following week will return to disability topics.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 12 of Contemplating Life.

This week we are going to continue the story of my faith journey. Usual disclaimer, I’m not trying to evangelize anyone. I’m just telling my story. I hope you find it interesting and if it does anything for your own faith journey then that’s okay too.

When we last left off, I had been away from the Catholic Church for about nine years. I had immersed myself in secular volunteer activities but occasionally would help out by using my computer skills to help out Saint Gabriel Church because my mother was still very active there. In recent months, she had been even more active than usual because of a new program called Christ Renews His Parish abbreviated as CRHP pronounced “chirp”.

It’s the night before Easter 1984 and our friend Judy Chapman has invited us to the Easter Vigil service where her husband Paul would be initiated into the Catholic Church. It was the final step in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults or RCIA. Paul and a half-dozen others had been attending weekly classes in the Catholic faith since September and were now ready for the sacraments of initiation: Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation.

The ceremony begins outdoors around a fire known as “the new fire”. In our case, it’s an ordinary charcoal grill. Instead of charcoal, it is piled about a foot high with sticks and small branches. A parishioner who is an Eagle Scout leader prepares this mini campfire each year for the ceremony.

The priest has a large candle about 3 feet tall and perhaps 4 inches in diameter decorated with various religious symbols. This Easter candle, also known as the Paschal candle, is described in the prayers as representing the light of Christ. The congregation gathers around the fire and the ceremony begins. He offers prayers and places four wax nails into holes on a cross on the candle. Each parishioner carries a small candle that they light from the Easter candle.

Usually, the entire congregation gathers around this fire and enters the church in a procession. But I believe on this particular occasion it was raining. Most of the congregation, myself included, sat in the church which was totally dark. I was sitting in the aisle about the second row back from the front. The priest carried the candle in the door at the back of the church and as he slowly processed up the center aisle, he would repeatedly chant, “Light of Christ” to which the people would respond, “Thanks be to God”. As he entered, everyone would light their small candle off of the Easter candle. The person on the end of the row would pass the light down the pew.

I had my back to all of this as I was sitting in the front. All that I could see was that the church was gradually being illuminated brighter and brighter by these candles. It was a very effective symbol that the darkness was being swallowed by the light of God.

Then by candlelight, the priest, in this case, the associate pastor Father Conrad, chants a long prayer called the “Exsultet”. It recounts some of salvation history including how God saved the Chosen People from slavery in Egypt. How He led them by a pillar of fire to escape through the Red Sea. It talks about how Christ conquered death. Naturally, this being a celebration of the Resurrection, this was a major theme throughout the service.

For me, the most interesting part of the prayer was the idea that it was a good thing that Adam had sinned because if human beings had not sinned, we wouldn’t have needed redemption. It says, “O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The phrase “happy fault” in Latin is “felix culpa” where felix could be translated not only as “happy” but as “lucky” or “blessed”. Happy fault. Lucky fault. A blessed fault that we had fallen from grace.

The idea that the human flaw of sin turned out to be a good thing because we were eventually redeemed seemed pretty bizarre to me. Then again, looking at my own life, I had discovered that there were positive things about having a lifelong disability. So maybe it isn’t that crazy after all. Perhaps my disability is a felix culpa. A happy, lucky, blessed fault.

After this lengthy prayer, we eventually turn on the lights and extinguish our candles. The ceremony then proceeds with the Liturgy of the Word. This is the first portion of the traditional rite of the Catholic mass. On a usual Sunday, it consists of an Old Testament reading (or sometimes reading from one of the New Testament letters), a psalm in which the congregation repeats the refrain, and then a gospel reading followed by the priest’s homily. A homily is a kind of sermon that is a reflection on the Scripture readings we have just heard. Because the Easter vigil is such a big deal, there can be as many as seven Old Testament readings, each followed by a responsorial Psalm. This is followed by a reading from the Letter to the Romans. Then the gospel which was followed by the homily.

Fortunately, St. Gabriel chooses to only do about five of the seven Old Testament readings. It begins with Genesis, “In the beginning…” and recounts the entire seven days of creation. It always includes the Exodus story of the parting of the Red Sea. There is a parallel to be made that in the same way that God rescued the Chosen People from the slavery of Egypt by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, we too are saved from the slavery of sin by passing through the waters of Baptism.

When it came time for the reading from Romans, a woman named Barbara Dean walked up to the pulpit. Barbara was one of the women who had attended the CRHP weekend retreat with my mother and Judy along with other women of the parish. Barbara was struggling with the effects of lupus and had spent the past few months in the hospital. Although people with lupus experience serious bouts with possibly long periods of remission in between, many people were very worried about her. She had been going through a very bad spell. She had been released so that she could attend the service. Her husband Leonard was among those to be baptized and initiated into the church. She read Romans 6:3-11 which reads in part…

The reading goes on to talk more about death, resurrection, and new life in Christ.

I was totally weirded out by the experience. Here was this woman who had one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel. Yet you would never know it by looking at her. She looked like a million bucks. She stood up there in front of everybody and talked about death as if it was no big deal.

What I haven’t told you is that during that point in my life, I was scared to death of death. I would frequently have panic attacks where I would think about nothing except my pending demise. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would want to just scream. The only relief I could get was to keep my mind occupied with other thoughts so I wouldn’t be able to think about death. In previous episodes, I already told about losing a good friend to his disability. There are other stories about losing friends and an early age that I will tell later. I mentioned that my parents rushed me through the early sacraments of the church because they didn’t think I would live long enough to get through them. I was facing mortality at an age much younger than people typically worry about such things.

I couldn’t understand how she could stand up there and talk so calmly about something that would often freeze me in terror. The fact that she was there at all was amazing given her condition but then again, I imagine wild horses couldn’t have kept her from seeing her husband initiated into the church. But that still didn’t explain how she could read that reading without breaking down and crying.

There are other parts of the Easter vigil service that I grew to greatly enjoy in the many times I attended after that but I won’t bother to detail them here because they aren’t part of this particular story.

In addition to Paul Chapman and Leonard Dean, there were probably five other adults being initiated that night. One of them was a young man named Tom something who was about my age. While one might cynically suppose that Paul and Leonard were doing this at the encouragement or for the benefit of their wives, Tom was single. He had no excuse or reason to do this except that he wanted to. And after I got to know Paul, I was confident that he was there of his own choice, and presumably so was Leonard. But I had no way of knowing that at the time.

Here were reasonably intelligent, adult human beings, standing up in front of God and everybody saying, “I want to be part of this.” This was in contrast to my feelings that I’d been tricked into a life of faith when I was a little kid and didn’t know any better. All of this was a challenge to my assumptions that there was nothing here for me.

I’ve always enjoyed the pomp and circumstance, the smells and bells of Catholic liturgy. At the Easter vigil, they pull out all the stops. The ceremony was moving and inspiring. The example set by the catechumens and candidates joining the church challenged my beliefs. The music from the choir was awesome.

When the service was finally over, I began to realize the changes that had happened to the congregation since the introduction of the CRHP renewal program. It was a much warmer and friendlier place than it had been when I had last attended.

People hugged one another.

I’m not just talking about the people who were happy that their family members had joined the church. The whole place had changed.

Among the highlights was I also got to meet Judy’s stepdaughter Deborah who was in her early 20s and her daughter Anne about age 7-8 both of who would later become good friends to me.
This was a case where my natural curiosity actually drew me toward the church. There was a mystery to be solved. I had a lot to think about.

The next Sunday, I decided to tag along with mom not only to go to Mass but to attend her Sunday morning Bible study class. As we previously explained, Catholics are not known for their interest in or knowledge of Scripture the way the Protestants are. We were not raised memorizing Bible verses rather we were memorizing questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism.
One of the reforms of Vatican II was a renewed emphasis on Scripture. Also, the CRHP program was designed to instill a deeper appreciation of Scripture.

There was a group of about a dozen people who would gather in the cafeteria Sunday morning before Mass to read the Scripture readings that would be used that day. They had a small booklet that would have discussion questions based on those readings. You would talk about what that particular passage meant to you or how you might apply it to your personal life.

The gospel reading on the first Sunday after Easter is always from the Gospel of John 20:19-31. It describes the post-resurrection encounter that the apostles had with Jesus when he appeared in their midst while they were locked in the upper room. Thomas was not with them at the time and when he was later told about the incident, he said that unless he saw Jesus with his own eyes and can probe the nail marks in his hands or the wound in his side he would not believe it. The next time Jesus appeared, Tom was on hand and having seen, professed his faith.

The Scripture says, “Jesus said to him, ‘Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.’”

The supplemental material provided an explanation I had heard before. The name Thomas means “twin” with the implication being that we are Thomas’ twin when we doubt. This is the origin of the phrase “a doubting Thomas.”

At an appropriate point in the discussion, I spoke up and said that this was true. I strongly identified with Thomas. My curious, scientific mind often demanded proof, and just because Jesus said it’s better to believe without proof that didn’t cut it for me. I said to them, “There’s a lot about the church that I admire and respect and could say that I believe in. But I got to be honest with you people. A lot of this stuff (I resisted the urge to say crap) I just don’t believe. And I don’t know that I ever will believe it.”

I fully expected them to say something like, “Then what the hell are you doing here? Get your heathen ass out the door.” or something more polite like, “Well maybe then the church isn’t for you.”, or some sort of argument about how wrong I was to reject the gospel message.

That’s not what I got.

Instead, they said, “That’s okay. We all have our doubts at times. You just can’t let those doubts drag you down. Focus on the things you do believe and don’t get bogged down in your doubts.”

Wow. Just wow.

Without being critical of me or trying to “change my mind” they had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion of how to proceed. The most powerful part of the argument was that it was a strategy that I had been employing my entire life in regard to my disability. I had seen too many people who sat around and felt sorry for themselves and became consumed by their disabilities. By focusing on the things that they could not do, they ended up being a basket case. I believed that it had contributed to the death of my friend Terry Johnson.

The way I was able to cope with my lifelong disability was to focus on the things that I could do and not get bogged down by the things I couldn’t do. Perhaps I could find some relevance in Christianity and the Catholic Church by applying the same strategy. Don’t let your disbelief stand in the way of expressing things you do believe, among people who believe in the same things.
That wasn’t sufficient to say, “Yes I’m fully back. Count me all in on this Catholic thing.” I still had a lot of issues to deal with but it was the first step back.

While my mother was naturally pleased to see me exploring the church, she didn’t overdo it by jumping for joy at least that I could see. She had realized somewhere along the way that this was something I had to do on my own. With the exception of occasionally asking some tough questions like the things she asked me about the Archbishop last episode, I never felt at all pressured by her. Or let me say any pressure was pretty subtle.

Prior to all this, one time I was pretty sick in bed. She asked our pastor, Father Paul Landwerlen to stop by and pray for me. He visited me at my sickbed at home. He invited me to pray with him and I politely declined but said he could pray if he wanted to. I eventually recovered and he took some gentle opportunities to evangelize me.

He brought me a cassette tape of a lecture he heard one time. The speech had the clever title, “What on earth is God doing for heaven’s sake?” He had it all queued up to a part of the speech he thought would be particularly useful or inspiring or whatever. I listened to it out of curiosity. It didn’t do anything for me. I rewound it to the beginning. No. Nothing here to see. Move on.

I don’t remember the exact sequence of events but somewhere along the way, sometime after the Easter vigil, went back to the tape that Father Paul had given me. I turned the tape over and listened to the other half. It blew me away.

Let me pause a minute to give you an explanation of a bit of theology known as the “Mystical Body of Christ”. It comes from Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians chapter 12. Many of Paul’s letters were written to settle some dispute or misunderstanding. Apparently, in Corinth, they had been arguing over who was a better Christian based on which spiritual gifts they expressed. He begins by describing various spiritual gifts. He explains that all of the gifts come from the same spirit even though our spirituality is manifested in different ways.

Then he talks about the analogy of the human body. About how all the parts must work together. The foot cannot say because it is not a hand it does not belong to the body. The ear belongs even though it’s not an eye. “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” It reminded me of the old joke, “My dog has no nose.”

“Then how does it smell?”

“Terrible!”

[Sound FX: rimshot]

Anyway… all jokes aside. He concludes by saying in verse 27 “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it.” Together we make Christ present here on earth. We are his mystical body doing his work It ties into the other Scripture that says, “Whenever two or three of you are gathered in my name, I’m there in your midst.”

On the other side of the tape, the lecturer told a story which I will now paraphrase.

He had been to a conference and the speaker was a paralyzed woman. Some accident had resulted in a spinal cord injury leaving her quadriplegic. He said she was rolled on the stage lying prone on a gurney. She said, “In my mind’s eye, I can imagine my body doing all sorts of wonderful things. Playing sports, hugging my children, and loving my husband. It’s not a lack of willpower. My will is plenty strong. But there is a disconnect between my mind and my body. I’m trapped in a body that is unresponsive to my will. And so it is the same for the Body of Christ. God has imagined wonderful things for us. It is his will that we enjoy these marvelous things. Yet when we fail to communicate with him and to act according to his will, we handicap the Body of Christ.”

Holy shit.

That freaked me out.

That made the connection between volunteerism and religion. We are all part of a body. We all have a job to do. We were put on this earth for a reason. And when we fail to do our part, we handicap the body that we are part of.

I could extend the analogy further to other types of disability. Look at my friend Christopher Lee who had such severe spasms from cerebral palsy that he would keep his wrists strapped down to the armrest of his wheelchair. Unlike the paralyzed woman, his body had no lack of movement. Yet his body was unresponsive to his will. Often we are out there flailing about thinking we are doing something but we are no more effective than the spastic limbs of someone with cerebral palsy. Or look at my own body. All of my parts work. But because my muscles are weak, like a person with weak faith, my muscles do not work effectively to achieve my will. I too am trapped in a body that is unresponsive to my will.

I survive my disability reasonably well. But I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. But when I don’t work together with the members of the Body, I handicap that body. And I can’t do that.
Whether God exists or not, the Church was a body that I could connect to. I could play my part and not handicap the body by my absence.

I still had to decide if God even existed. The journey back had a long way to go. Next week we will tackle that problem which will wrap up this series on my faith journey. We will come back to the topic in future episodes but after next week we will return to disability issues as I recount the story of my journey through the special education system.

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