Your response to Faith in Reverse has been great. Thank you. I’m continuing the series for paying subscribers, and if you’re new to the series, you can catch up on all the parts by starting with this link.
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Oh hey… so, I might have lost sight of the primary questions: Why still Christian? and Why Catholic? This is what happens when I write, when I follow one bread crumb to another, then another, then another. Particularly when I eat those breadcrumbs along the way.
Why Christian? It’s a question that begs an answer but one that assumes a predicate, too. The predicate: Why God at all? There’s no sufficient answer for this apart from in the beginning.
In the beginning, there was dust. And the dust strained and stretched across the great swath of the north Texan plains dappled and dotted with scrub brush, mesquite trees, and white sheets flagging on the clothesline. In the silver morning, the mist rose from the grass, greeting the fathers on their way to the freight docks and factories, comforting the mothers and their dreams of equal work and equal pay, cocooning the children as they devoured bowl after bowl of Cheerios on the back porch. In the beginning, the mist rose against my own naked knees, my five-year-old cheeks, my closed eyelids, my ravenous hunger. These are my first memories of the beginning.
In the beginning, there were songs of bobwhites and long-tailed birds and the occasional coyote. Find me as a shoeless child, running running through those Texas fields, feet laced with grass burs. See me stopping to pick out those burs as choirs of songbirds sing from their risers on the telephone line. Hear the timpani, the low hum of thunder moving in from the west.
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