Blessed Are the Freaks

Siblings in Christ, today a miracle is happening. I am joining the Catholic church. For some of you, if you're anything like I was about a year ago, that may sound like the opposite of a miracle. It certainly did to me when my wife first confessed interest in RCIA classes (that's basically Confirmation for adults) around September of 2016. I thought today might be a good time to reflect on how I got here. If you've read my older posts, you might be able to see some of my journey on them. My earlier themes of submission and communion in retrospect seem like obvious seeds in the soil of my heart, but at the time I wrote them I was in a very different place. I grew up in a Lutheran household, which probably tells you all you need to know about the stance towards Catholicism that I was raised around. For some reason it is always the differences closest to us that we lash out the most strongly against. Still, I have always believed that all Christians who profess the b...

I wanted to post something for Easter, but I've struggling to come up with something relevant to say other than, like, "Easter is cool" and "welcome back to life, Jesus! Sorry we killed you and everything." So I thought I'd talk about something that's pretty damn related, but kind of tangential: Communion. There's a lot of different ideas about communion, and what it represents, and what it does. I'm certainly no authority on it, and even if I were I'm not interested in dumping a theological argument at you, but I can talk about my own experience. I've participated in communion with a lot of different groups: Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopal, Reformed, Lutheran, non-denominational. I've had a lot of different thoughts about what it is and why we do it. But the one thing I find most poignant about the Lord's Supper, at least right now, in a divided world -- as I confront my own prejudices, as God forces me to come face to ...