I gotta say

I’m a little disappointed nobody responded to my “makeshift monk” post.

That said, I will be out of town Saturday, and unlikely to post. I’ll be visiting my mom with my sister, and hopefully discussing some Italian citizenship issues that need to be hammered out.

Total Request #2: Judaism

Bekah, in my combox, asked me about my relationship with Judaism, which is something I’ve been reluctant to blog about. To be honest, in St. Blog’s, a reputation for orthodoxy and orthopraxy goes a long way, and this is really my big heteropraxy. It will be difficult to explain at best.

I couldn’t have seen it coming.

I converted to Catholicism in 2001, when I was 16. My religious life before then had been a grab-bag of traditional Christianity, that weird cult my dad was in, Wicca and secular humanism. My dad was a very religious man, a disgruntled ex-Catholic who left the Church in his teens in the wake of the post-V2 confusion, and my mom was intensely spiritual but intensely experimental, with a foot in tarot and witchcraft and another in prophecy and a hand  in spiritualism. I hold none of that against her — she taught me, through that, that struggling to understand your place before God was of the utmost importance.

I eventually abandoned religion in general, still fascinated by it as a topic, but not personally religious, until I had, one evening, a very unexpected six-hour conversation with God, and I emerged from it convinced of Catholicism, even if I didn’t know its specifics. This is important to understand, because much of what I have to do with Judaism relates.

Four years later, an animated musical launched me on a spiritual journey. It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been that long. In mid-2005, I happened to catch The Prince of Egypt with some friends of mine. I hadn’t seen it since it first came out, and I have to say, it really is one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. Really just outstanding. But somewhat unexpectedly, it got me thinking about judaism. Well, specifically, I thought about the Exodus and the relationship between the Passover and the Eucharist. I started reading Exodus and the Psalms, all the slave narratives of the Bible, everything I could find (which wasn’t much, because I’m seriously ill-trained in the Scriptures) on the deliverance of Israel. Of course, as a Catholic I read all of this through the lens of Christ-as-deliverer, Christ-as-passover. But I was looking into the ancient faith, and it raised questions I hadn’t asked before.

Of course we all acknowledge that Christ was a Jew, a practicing Jew, an itinerant rabbi, but I started to question what that meant. What does it mean for the savior of all mankind to be a Jew? What does it mean for the Church to have emerged from Judaism? What does it mean for us, now, who are not Jews? I couldn’t make sense of it, not easily. I knew the answers, but they weren’t satisfying me. It seemed so counterintuitive to me, that Christ came to save the people of Israel, the lost sheep of Israel, and that they were virtually absent within the Church, that there were essentially no major Hebrew Christian gatherings, no substantial Jewish coterie whatsoever. And it baffled me.

It didn’t help that I had become immensely attracted to Judaism — its culture, its identity and heritage, but above all, its deliberateness before God. I’ve read Paul. I know what he has to say about the Law, and I know what we believe about the Law. But I — I couldn’t look at the Torah like that anymore. I’ve spent my whole life hear about how the Law was oppressive, for no good but teaching about sin, that its precepts were overwhelming, and no one could be saved by it. I’ve heard nothing by complaint about it from people who’ve never actually lived under it. But the more I read about it — especially in The Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner, a short little book by an Orthodox Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity — the better it sounded.

The Torah looks beautiful to me. It makes demands on you, takes a piece of you, and dedicates that to God and to God always. It’s not a subtle thing; to follow the Law, you have to been keenly aware of God, that God is aware of you and is pleased by your efforts. In that struggle, in the difficulty, in the sheer action of doing it, you keep God in your mind. You are obedient for him, not because the Law is for some specific goal, but because he gave it. It’s not about getting to heaven, but about doing God’s will because it’s God’s will, and finding God’s presence even in his apparent absence.

So, of course, being a Catholic because God told me to be a Catholic, I have not jumped headlong into Judaism. I have tried to discern what God has wanted from me, but my mind is unclear, and I’ve reached so many different conclusions, all of which center ultimately on me being super-duper special and awesome. So I’ve chosen to ignore those. Pride is my worst sin.

Humility, though, can be found there, too. In the Torah is ultimately a code for submission to God and to God’s will and to God’s action, and so I’ve tried, without much success, to integrate some Jewish practices into my Catholicism, to adapt some of the Law, not under any sense of it saving me or being a universal practice for everyone, but as a discipline to bring my heart, my nous under control, by submitting myself to God through very deliberate actions. I have been unsuccessful because I honestly don’t know where to begin. I am a baal teshuva without a rabbi to teach me.

At my worst, though, I’ve let this get to me to the point where I start doubting Christ, where the Jewish arguments against his messiahship start making sense to me. I am not there now, though, thank God, but there have been times when I was certain I would end up abandoning Catholicism. So this has not been all roses and challah bread.

Ultimately, I’m trying to go wherever Christ wants me to go. I ask your prayers and your advice, Christian or Jewish, that I’ll know God’s idea here, see where he’s going with this, and follow him there.