Category: Personal Narrative

I say this in pub­lic because I’ve done this in pub­lic. A few years back Dave Arm­strong and I, who were friends (he and his wife even came to my wed­ding), had a huge pub­lic fight. The mer­its of that fight, who was right and wrong on the sub­stance, don’t mat­ter. No one cares. In anger I said intem­per­ate things. In anger I said things I didn’t even mean. I don’t agree with Dave about every­thing, but so what? He real­ly is one of the best Catholic apol­o­gists around. And I was unfair to him. I apol­o­gize.

Eleven years ago today, my daugh­ter was still­born. That day, in the hos­pi­tal, a nurse who pro­vid­ed grief sup­port to par­ents who’d expe­ri­enced peri­na­tal loss vis­it­ed with me. (Kim, who had eclamp­sia and had had a seizure the pri­or morn­ing, was still spend­ing a large part of the day asleep and half-aware of what was going on.) Dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, the nurse sug­gest­ed to me that I write some­thing for my daugh­ter and have it buried with her, in order to mit­i­gate a sense I had that I wouldn’t be able to do or say all that I want­ed to.

This East­er Vig­il will mark five years since I entered the Catholic Church. It is one of those events that you treat as a kind of birth­day, and you keep track of the num­ber of years that have passed since. Becom­ing Catholic is the best thing I ever did. The year I was in RCIA, and the cou­ple of years that fol­lowed, I lived at high pitch; and I have seen that same high pitch in oth­er con­verts who came into the Church after me. I know the emo­tion they feel. But for all I learned and absorbed in RCIA, there were three things I could not have been taught.

This is a mem­oir about loss and grief, but please under­stand how dif­fi­cult it is to write. It is not mere­ly that the sub­ject is so dif­fi­cult. But it is that by tem­pera­ment I am a per­son who buries emo­tion under a sto­ic exte­ri­or. That’s my dad in me. I think of myself as an intel­lec­tu­al, rea­soned and calm in his analy­sis of things. I often joke with friends: “I don’t do emo­tion.” Being, there­fore, the very ratio­nal per­son I am, I did the ratio­nal thing and mar­ried some­one com­plete­ly the oppo­site. Once she said to me, “You think with your head and I think with my heart.”

When Christ comes to us, he does not come for the sake of pun­ish­ment; he comes to per­fect us in love. It is we who cry out, “You are hurt­ing me.” We can be so com­fort­able in our fear. But what I detect, in both the blind man of Jerusalem — at least, in the begin­ning — and in the hypo­thet­i­cal pris­on­ers in Plato’s cave, is fear also of truth. We can be so com­fort­able in our igno­rance. We can become com­fort­able with lies — includ­ing, and per­haps espe­cial­ly, the lies we tell our­selves. Christ wants to throw that all away. He wants our per­fec­tion.

Oth­ers besides myself have described the jour­ney from Protes­tantism to Catholi­cism as a “par­a­digm shift” [1]. It always dis­tress­es me when I describe some­thing to myself in what I think is a unique way, only to find that some­one else has used that very same descrip­tion. I pre­fer to think I’m orig­i­nal, but occa­sion­al­ly need the reminder that oth­er peo­ple have been there before; orig­i­nal­i­ty is an attribute of God alone. As far as par­a­digm shifts go, I don’t find very many con­verts describ­ing what the expe­ri­ence of one feels like. Some do.

I am not scared of much in the way of ill­ness and death but I am scared of demen­tia and blind­ness. These are an intellectual’s fears: being unable to think and unable to read. There’s braille, yes, but that’s dif­fer­ent from being able to see words and let­ters; it’s dif­fer­ent, that is, to some­one for whom read­ing has always been a form of see­ing rather than feel­ing. I sup­pose that’s also an intellectual’s dis­tinc­tion; pos­si­bly a curmudgeon’s too. Main­ly the fear has to do with adjust­ing to a world that is less. “Some­thing in the sight / Adjusts itself to mid­night,” Emi­ly Dick­in­son writes.