From Beige to Weird Catholicism (Part 1)

My Personal Journey Back to Faith (incl. Screwtape and Harry Dresden)

I wanted to write down my journey to and from the different iterations of Catholicism I’ve experienced throughout my life. As of this date, I am only 30 years old (31 in June). However, I think my life likely reflects what a lot of Catholics my age have experienced growing up in the 1990’s and 2000’s. In short, I grew up in a nominally Catholic and reluctantly Lutheran household, fell away from Christianity altogether, then returned in full-force in my early/mid-twenties. I was helped along the way by my (now) wife and her family, C. S. Lewis and, oddly enough, Jim Butcher, author of The Dresden Files. 

My mom came from a Lutheran family and my dad grew up Irish Catholic. There were ample opportunities for religious strife in my family and it ended up souring me somewhat to Christianity for a while. I attended both churches fairly regularly and I have both frustrating and fond memories of each. 

I attended a Catholic school from kindergarten to eighth grade. In general, the education was far superior to the public schools in that I actually learned how to read, write coherent sentences, and basic mathematics. The catechetical instruction was basic, largely orthodox, but boring. Boring and beige. I think we learned who Mary’s parents were every year (Sts. Anne and Joachim!!). That’s what stuck with me at the end of eighth grade. 

We had Mass every Wednesday in the gymnasium because the new, extremely ugly church was across town. When we got older, we actually got to sit in a chair (metal and folding) instead of the floor. Because we went to Mass during the week, I stubbornly fought my parents on going to Mass on Sundays. “You guys need to go, but I already went this week!” I fought them so much on this, that my parents finally relented and we stopped going to Mass altogether. I blame my own stubbornness, pride, and immaturity (being in middle school). 

I stopped practicing my faith after eighth grade, but truthfully, I stopped caring long before that. To me, it was a chore with bad music, an ugly atmosphere, and boring sermons. The song, Walking By Faith, must have been a favorite of the liturgist because we sang it nearly every week. I still know it. Oh, our school also had liturgical dance (shudder) as well, and my wife participated (video evidence available for $1000 per viewing). She dressed up as both a muffin and a pumpkin. Yes, this definitely has to do with liturgy! She has told me that she is horrified by her former self and no longer thinks liturgical dance is acceptable. Thankfully, a new priest came in and put a stop to that abomination! 

I never quite stopped believing in God and I still occasionally prayed before exams or if I was scared. Maybe that too, preserved me enough to help bring me back to the Church. These sporadic prayers remind me of a story I heard once of a young man in Amsterdam who stopped practicing the faith except for three Hail Mary’s he prayed every night before bed. This small devotion to Our Lady was enough to merit him a warning and a second chance after his friend was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. Both were leading lives of debauchery and he was visited by the damned soul of his friend who warned him that he too, would end up in Hell if he didn’t repent. Our Lady took pity on him and wanted to give him a chance to change. Nothing this dramatic happened to me, but I think my paltry devotions kept a lifeline connected to me. 

During college, before I returned to the Church, I was handed a book by a guy named Clive Staples Lewis. This book was called The Screwtape Letters. The girl who loaned the book to me  (a good friend at the time), said that this was one of the most unsettling things she has ever read. A bit skeptical, I began reading and burned through the book quite quickly. By the end, I was unsettled as well. 

The book is a collection of letters from Uncle Screwtape, a demon in Hell, to his nephew, Wormwood. Screwtape gives the less experienced Wormwood advice on leading his target down the road to Hell. Often darkly humorous, Screwtape at one point turns into a giant centipede in a fit of rage like something out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Screwtape also gives piercing insights into human psychology and how demons might actually tempt humans. There was one passage that struck me in particular:

“I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.”

Basically, keep the target from actually enjoying anything for its own sake; even something as innocuous as collecting stamps. Keep the targets distracted and reading “important books”, not books they enjoy. We all know people like this; high school literature classes may as well have been designed by Screwtape himself. 

Subtlety is the name of Screwtape’s game. Here is another example:

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Lewis shifted my mental furniture around without my complete awareness. He got me thinking about the reality of demons, which I did not wholly abandon even in my agnostic teenage years. Any sin, no matter how small, is an edging away from God and a gradual approach to perdition. What scared me was that I’ve had the thoughts (or similar ones) that Screwtape proposes as good ideas to Wormwood. I began to suspect that some of “my” thoughts might not be mine but might be from creatures who mean me harm. I didn’t consciously connect, at that time, that angelic beings might do the same thing. 

The seed was planted and had begun to germinate. 

End of Part 1

Coming up next, Jim Butcher: Catholic Apologist? From Normie to Trad to Weird Catholicism