For this 100th CatholicCatholic, as so often, thinking of a topic isn’t easy, so I’ll take the opportunity to revisit the original concept.

I apologize for the name. Years ago, in a light-hearted, San Francisco moment, Aimee and I thought we could write a travel column, but for who? Maybe if we had information about local churches, we could run it in a Catholic publication, for observant Catholics who, like us, are interested in everything, Catholics with a universalistic world view who are not sheltered, fearful, insecure.

At the time, a trend was fully afoot for bands to give themselves a double name, i.e., Speaker Speaker. My distaste for that concept notwithstanding, we named our idea “CatholicCatholic.”

A brother of mine and I often discuss religious matters, and he said I should write a blog, so I started this. As always, I had no thought for publicity, so out goes the blog, and nobody knows about it except Aimee and my brother. Have to put it on Facebook, I guessed, so I did that with the lukewarm enthusiasm of a most reluctant evangelist.

Am I the guy to turn people’s hearts toward God, and faith in Jesus? I sympathize with Kierkegaard, who used pseudonyms because he thought no one would take his writing seriously if they knew he wrote it.

Religious faith is a touchy, touchy thing. The idea that this one ancient book is true, and all it says is true, is so far-fetched. I remember someone said, first people believe in communism, then they read Marx. Christianity is like that, I think. Some people have that inclination, and the Bible is compatible with their intuition and sensitivities.

If The Bible is true, and God exists, and Jesus is just like the Bible tells it, I thought, doesn’t that have to be the be-all and end-all of life? What is more important than making sure this tiny grain of sand of a life winds up on the right eternal beach? That should be the entire focus of one’s life. I should totally be a monk.

As a great admirer of Archbishop Hunthausen, I tried out for the local priesthood instead, because of the great need for local priests. I took the tests, and failed them. Didn’t get much of a an explanation; didn’t find out which questions I didn’t answer well. Just a short letter in the mail. Ever since, I wonder, how common is it to flunk that test?

A local Dominican priest said I should be a Dominican. Even knowing my dreary personal history, he said that, and flattery gets you everywhere with me, so I bit, and interviewed with their people, but that dreary personal history condemned me. The vocations director did write me a really nice letter, saying their rejection of me probably said more about them than about me. Thank you! It is so true that why can’t people just tell a nice little fib sometimes and spare a guy’s feelings, especially when nobody is really fooled, but the gesture will really make the guy feel a lot less worse than he could be made to feel?

“I’m just telling the truth,” people say. I hate those people.

I wanted to be a monk anyway– the more quiet, the more secluded, the better. Someone gave me “The Seven-Storey Mountain,” and I was off to see the Snowmass, Colorado Cistercians for three one-week visits. A fabulous place! So beautiful to be in their candle-lit church at 4am, listening to the men recite and chant, looking outside at the stars and trees in the snow.

As part of that process, I visited Cistercians in Utah and California for a week each too– the quonset huts of the Utah monastery; the grapefruit trees and 100-degree heat of Sacramento. Either place, I would have signed off on for the rest of my life in a heartbeat, although Snowmass was my first choice.

Driving back to the airport at the end of my final one-week visit to Snowmass, the monk said they had a vote the day before: 7 yes, 7 no. The abbot cast the tiebreaker: no. After I’d mowed the lawn of their guest house the day before, steep slopes, an old lawnmower, a hot day, thinking, they wouldn’t ask me to do this if they weren’t having me back.

To be told that on the drive to the airport– that hurt with the kind of pain that takes a long time to register. One sees one’s spirit being crushed as if it’s happening to someone else, because the heart and soul are too sensitive to be fully present to that kind of emphatic rejection.

All these things that happen in life, all these misadventures and distractions– an odd fact of life is that I am the same physical height I was in high school. It’s impossible to think that when I was a miserable, hypersensitive, neurotic, depressed, suicidal teenager, I was the same size I am now, the same person I am now. I was thrilled to listen to music that still thrills me today. I laughed. I had friends. I told jokes and had good times anyway, just like today, the same 5’6″, the same person, and I still think, if that book is true, then that has the secrets of the be-all and end-all.

Despite all the weird and sick baggage He’s been saddled with by this church and that church, Jesus abides in my heart as the one who speaks the truth, and I can no more walk away from that than I can walk away from myself.

With that reassurance, I can go anywhere in the world, because this is all my world, as it belongs to every one of us. That is the idea behind CatholicCatholic.

Thanks for reading!

Finding a plumber and getting the kitchen sink fixed; getting a new computer; raising a 3-year-old boy and a newborn boy: “togetherness projects,” Aimee and I call them.

That was July. August is our month, at Aimee’s instigation, to do a “Whole 30:” a 30-day dietary regimen that focuses on the elimination of processed foods and grains. One can imagine the complications subsequent upon such guidelines.

What about…. Beer? Rice? Jelly beans? Ice cream? Coke? Lemonade? Bourbon?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Do you even have to ask? No. Do you know the answer already? Yes. But should whoever’s idea this was have to come right out and tell you that you can’t have those things because that person should have to concretely reckon with the woeful face of the one corralled into this? Yes, that person should have to look you right in the eye and say, “No, you cannot have that cold soda pop on a 95-degree day after you’ve been working outside for two hours.” That person then has the opportunity to say, “Instead, have this delicious cold lime water in a glass filled with ice cubes!”

Thirty days is all. On the 31st day, one can have a nice bowl of ramen with a few slices of bread and a cold soda and think, “I miss the days when I was exalted by that higher mission.”

A sense of mission is a glorious thing.

A diet is such a mission, as is training for a marathon and undergoing a spiritual trial such as Lent and Ramadan. After the Seattle Marathon of Thanksgiving weekend, December arrives with its absence of training runs and its laments over quickly falling out of shape.

How to recapture that sense of mission? What to do next?

A mission requires commitment, sacrifice, effort, a deadline, and a concrete result. One cannot say, “Live your life as well as you can,” because there’s no deadline.

A New Year’s resolution can work, because it is limited by that one year.

A poetry project works because a commitment is there to write the poetry on a schedule.

The Whole 30 involves the sacrifice of abstaining from the ice cream one suddenly remembers is still buried in the freezer.

Marathon training includes the effort to always run that final lap around the track, although one knows one can do it. One still has to follow through and run that last, most important lap.

Afterward, one has the memory of the exaltation of that sense of mission, and motivation to seek out new challenges.