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!