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.
***
As I said in the last piece of this series, I picked up the Catechism of the Catholic Church by accident, or at least, that’s how it felt. How does one accidentally pick up the Catechism? It went something like this.
I carted my son across town to a basketball tryout where the coaches locked the fathers out because what coach wants fathers hanging over the rail yelling at their sons during a tryout? What coach wants dear-old-dad reliving their glory days through a child who barely has peach fuzz over his upper lip? So, I made my way down the street to the bookstore, not the local Independent joint, but the big-box mega-bookseller in the center of town. There, I imagined myself killing an entire evening leafing through the pages of great literature or garbage poetry or photography magazines. But that’s not what went down.
I made my way to the back, where I found the “Faith & Spirituality” section, which contained a subsection labeled “Christianity.” As a writer who edits and occasionally co-writes for many of the authors on that shelf, I perused the spines, saying hello to both clients and friends. Working my way down the aisle, some sort of transition happened, and the names on the spine turned foreign. I didn’t recognize a single one. I looked at the label on the shelf—a subsection of the subsection. “Catholic spirituality.” Right in the middle of that subsection of the subsection were three smallish books with white spines—The Catechism of the Catholic Church. And not to get all Augustinian, but those spines seemed to whisper, “take up and read; take up and read.”
This is where my very specific belief about magic and books and the confluence of the two comes in. It’s a belief I hold as almost creedal: We don’t choose the most impactful books; they choose us. So, because the book whispered, I followed its lead. I took it up and I read it, and in those pages I found my language, which is to say the language of humanity and spirituality and faith and doubt and recovery.
***
We’ll get more to the recovery bit in a piece or two, but for now, know this: I have always loved Charles Bukowski. This is an odd segue because Buk was neither religious (as best as I can tell) nor did he have a hand in the Catechism. In fact, I’ve read it was Buk who said we needed to “unlearn the teachings of the church.” The segue is made more odd by the fact that old Chuck was a helpless addict. Still, Bukowski had a way for telling it like it was, and in one of those poems—“This”—he wrote:
self-congratulatory nonsense as the
famous gather to applaud their seeming
greatness
you
wonder where
the real ones are
what
giant cave
hides them
Bukowski was looking for a specific thing—the real ones. Who were the real ones? They were the people animated by principle, by something so outside of themselves that it transcended the self-congratulatory nonsense of industry art, accolades, or money. He searched for those who knew what it meant to be on a quest for the authentic, the thing that doesn’t pass away. Even if he was an ego monster, an alcoholic, an absolute wretch by most accounts, he knew the power of the real, and I believe it motivated him and animated his art.
The Real—I’ve always been drawn to it. Maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for Bukowski. It’s absolutely why I fell in love with Amber.
This is how I remember falling in love.
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