10/2/2011 - by Chuck Monan, Preaching Minister

Kris Kristofferson’s brilliant song “Sunday Morning Coming Down” paints an unforgettable picture of a lost soul who has veered from his spiritual moorings into a life similar to the Prodigal Son’s upon leaving home.  Hung over and feeling worthless, he sinks even lower realizing it is Sunday morning, a day that brings into stark contrast the dissolute life he’s leading vs. the way he was raised.  The post-worship smell of someone frying chicken “took me back to something that I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.”

There is no telling how many millions of Americans would understand this sentiment.  As church attendance declines, the number of people drifting away from God increases.

But sometimes that feeling that something valuable has been lost stirs us to action.

Recently a college professor and lapsed Catholic named Jerry DeNuccio wrote a post on Salon.com that dealt with the call he felt to reintroduce himself to a faith he left more than forty years ago.  It will strike a chord with many.

“Call” is likely an inaccurate word.  I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot.  No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence.  I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.

Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.  Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my presence for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the  mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia.  Perhaps it is the pageantry, the    reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. 

Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgments will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward.  Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.

It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds.

Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supersedes it.  And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.

Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its initials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown?  Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge?  Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret?  So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave.  It would seem that, for, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.