One Scary Post

I'm oddly nervous about penning this post. I never wanted to be labeled as one of "those people." "Those people" who talked openly about their faith, who were obvious in wearing it, in being over-bearing with it.

I was raised Catholic in a very non-Catholic area of the county. Most of my friends were Baptist, occasionally Methodist, and once I got to high school, I met someone who was Episcopalian. My very small parish was also an older parish: there were only 4-5 other families with children our ages, and few of them stayed as long as we did.

I didn't talk much about my faith. For one thing, it didn't come up all that often in school. Weighty subjects like God, heaven and hell didn't come up all that often over junior high lunch. For another, there were — and probably still are — some pretty anti-Catholic elements in my hometown. Mostly just ignorant tirades sent to the local newspaper, but words and ignorance can hurt just as much, especially if you're an overly-sensitive adolescent girl.

So I put distance between myself and my faith. In fact, I put just about as much distance between myself and my Catholic roots as I could manage: Buddhism, Hinduism and even paganism were all paths I flirted with, desperate to find my home. I'm pretty sure my mom thought I was going straight to hell. I think I figured if I was going to be weird, well, I was going to own my weird.

But all my wanderings kept leading me back to the place I started: the faith I grew up in, the rituals that feel like home, and the traditions can help make sense of our crazy, chaotic and constantly changing world. It took a lot of false starts, some hard knocks, some moments of pure grace, but I'm getting there, where I feel at home in my own skin.

And the more I get used to my own faith, the more I want to learn about it. I'm reading "Rediscover Catholicism" by Matthew Kelly right now, and something he wrote is really resonating with me: "We become the stories we listen to."

Without putting it so eloquently, I've spent the past few years looking at the story of my life and realizing I didn't like it. Not that my life was terrible and evil and wrong. Just empty. And the media I was using to fill it — TV, movies, music — I realized I didn't want to expose my son to it, and gradually, I didn't want to expose myself to it.

So I became one of "those" people: I started listening to Christian radio, I got rid of my TV (honest truth, though, that was primarily an economic decision), and I started trying to become a whole person. I want to tell my own story, not one cooked up by a lyricist or a soap opera writer. I want my life to tell my story, and I want the soundtrack to be the laughter and joy of living in the here God meant me to inhabit.