RUAH Beloved

From “Diet” Catholic to “Die Hard” Catholic

It was Palm Sunday, 1991. I was nine-years-old and fatally bored at church. My neighborhood best friend was sitting in the pew directly behind me. I kept trying to get her attention during the very long gospel reading of Jesus’ Passion, when the lector and the priest and deacon read the parts like a play. During the consecration, I was trying to nudge her knee with my foot under the pew. At the end of mass, my dad placed one firm hand on my shoulder, gave me that scary, stern look of his, and told me I was to go straight upstairs when we got home. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. I had been quiet through mass. My friend hadn’t budged or given into my attempts to distract her. No harm, no foul, I reasoned.

When we got home, my dad took out the huge family Bible from the ancient wooden book holder and flipped to the reading in Bible when the arrest of Jesus began. I honestly couldn’t tell you which one of the gospels we were reading from now, even though this day is seared into my memory. But he said it as a stabbing command: “Read.” Through a hard knot in my throat, and blurry tears, I read the entire Passion of Christ, stumbling over words and wiping my nose every few seconds. For years, I couldn’t understand my dad’s cruelty; why I was being singled out and forced to read this grisly story about Jesus dying. It was an hour and twenty minute mass. Any kid would have had a hard time focusing! After I finished reading, my dad explained that this part of Jesus’s life, his death, is the most important part of our faith. I kind of got it, but I kind of didn’t. I remember I didn’t mess around in church after that, but I really didn’t know why he was being so strict.

For years, into the better part of my thirties, my “faith” would wax and wane. Some seasons, I would be disciplined about going to mass. Sometimes we had a relatable priest and I could glean the meaning of the gospel and how it related to my life two-thousand years later because of his explanations, but much of the time, especially after I moved out of my parents’ home I would find other things took precedence, like sleeping in.

I grew up during a time, the late 80’s and 90’s that I like to call, “Diet Catholic.” We went “just for the taste of it,” or maybe because we knew for some reason it was what we were supposed to do, but we really didn’t know why. The biggest reason for me was because my dad had said, “Because I said so.” So we did. I used to believe, if I went to mass on Sunday, an array of sins would be absolved. Isn’t that what Jesus said? He came for the sinners, not the saints, right? The problem was, like many people my age, we were given a foundation of faith without context. My parents were from a generation when going to mass was socially acceptable. In fact, in the neighborhoods they grew up in in the suburbs of Detroit, most of the families were Catholic if they were Christian. There weren’t hundreds of different denominations. They were also a moderately abused generation when fear of the wrath of parents was a strong motivator. 

My parents were stricter than most, but soft in their understanding of the Catholic faith. So my “faith” was rooted in a desire not to disappoint them, not because I had a real relationship with Jesus. Prayer was a simple recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be. And if you really wanted to knock yourself out, you’d pray a rosary once or twice a year for good measure. I didn’t have a relationship with God. He was more like a genie to me that sometimes would grant my wishes and sometimes I wondered if He existed at all. Had I understood how my actions over the subsequent years would break his heart, I might not have gotten so miserably lost by the time I hit my thirties. But we all have a different journey…and I find that elements of my story resonate strongly with others from my generation of Diet Catholicism.

It was through this lack of understanding, blazing my own trail of “religion” which detoured into elements of astrology during college, reincarnation in my late twenties, and finally, basically being agnostic for a while. My husband Scott and I married in the Catholic Church in 2006 at the ripe age of twenty-four. We understood so little about our faith, I remember asking the pianist to play an instrumental version of the Beatles song “Imagine” as our bridal party came into the church. I cringe a little now as the lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” float into my head. But it was all about aesthetics for me. I wanted a cool wedding. I was being pressured to have it in a church, but it would be on my terms.

Scott and I attempted joining the parish but struggled to connect with other young couples who understood the version of Catholicism we wanted to practice. We needed to get more out of mass. So we church-shopped and looked for priests who would help us understand the gospel on our terms. We didn’t understand anything about the mass or how it really isn’t about us or what we get out of it. Out of frustration of the church not meeting our ideals, we stopped prioritizing it all together. We went when my family would pressure us, but it meant almost nothing to us. Our faith had become a smoldering ember and had all but gone out. 

I find that many of my fallen-away Catholic peers are right about here with their faith. Tired of the rules, bored of the stand-up-sit-down-recited-prayers. Not sure why we are doing this at all. Old me would have said, “Keep going your own way!  Keep looking for a form of religion that meets your needs!” Because this is what I did. And eventually I realized, I was trying to make God far too small to fit inside what I considered to be “truth.” The thing about God is, He is so big and so good, He cannot fit into anyone’s ideals. And when we try to make Him, He blasts your beliefs wide open, proving we could never see things as He does.

God took me in the messy version of “faith” I’d created, struggling to believe in anything at all and the mess I’d made of my marriage and restored me as His. He chose me when I’d burned every bridge I had built that lead to nowhere. 

God burst through in my life the most unexpected way and began a deep transformative work in my heart and my husband’s heart which then became a raging flame of faith between both of us. Now we encourage each other in faith. We love the Catholic sacraments. We believe fully in the Church the way Jesus created it. And by working in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, our marriage is stronger than ever and we are raising our family completely differently from how we started.

We have gone from being “Diet Catholic” to “Die-Hard Catholic,” or so we hope. Every day in this culture brings us new challenges and it is only through the grace of God that we have been able to stand firm in those struggles. But the Church gives us so many tools to strengthen us and weapons against the enemy. We simply have to learn how to use them! It was like my parents had given me this toolbox of “stuff” as a kid, but didn’t really show me how any of it worked. So I shoved it in an old corner of my brain and forgot about it. But then God swooped in, dug it out and showed me how that “stuff” is so much cooler than lightsabers or invisibility cloaks. It’s the prayers of living Saints. It’s the erasing of my ugliest sins. It’s the gift of the Eucharist at every mass. It’s the heart of his Son chasing after me with reckless abandon. It’s being best friends with Jesus and seeing him in every person I encounter. And He calls me to help others learn how to use their “stuff.”

So this is how RUAH came to be. The Holy Spirit is described in Hebrew as “ruah” in scripture. The word is used in the Creation story in Genesis when God separated the waters above from the waters below. It’s also the word used to describe the Holy Spirit landing on the apostles in the upper room after Jesus ascended into heaven. Ruah is the breath of God breathing life into us. It’s how he created us and restores us- Restores. Us. As. His. We don’t just believe in God; we BELONG to God. And He belongs to us. We just have to learn how to work with Him instead of against Him. 

This is a space for you to learn how to use the tools of your Catholic faith, no matter how far you are off the beaten path. This is a space for those who know you are being called to something greater than what you’ve created on your own. This is a space for those who have come to the end of themselves and are ready to begin again with Jesus. Welcome home.