Chapter 21

So every Thursday we became more deeply convinced we were doing the right thing. One evening, after a class about Christ's presence in the Eucharist, my husband said something I thought was really profound.

"Jesus said 'I am with you always' , always....that's Him in the Eucharist"

And it just made all the sense in the world. It was the big turning point for him, and, indeed his spiritual life has changed dramatically. I was deeply affected by the changes I saw in him, as well.

But the reality of actually going through with it is altogether different. There came a time when we were "welcomed" as catechumens, to the parish. This involved a ceremony where we were to knock on the door, and say "we seek Truth", and Fr. Hickey responded "We have Truth". From there, our sponsors would pray over our eyes, our hands, our hearts, our feet, and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us. We were then all given crucifixes. It was a very nice ceremony, but it was also weird.......... I took a deep breath and thought to myself, "okay....just get through this".
My dear sponsor remarked afterwords that she really felt God's presence during this thing, and I'll have to take her word for it. I just felt scared.

There also is a really great thing about this parish. The priest made himself so available to everyone. We were encouraged to schedule appointments with him so we could just hash things out. This was especially important for me, as I was forever finding strange antisemites hiding in good Catholic sites all over the place. Once, I followed a link from A Saintly Salmagundi, Fr Bryce Sibley's sorely missed Blog, to something about relics, which then led to a site about St Gemma Galgani........and I discovered it was hosted from a cesspool. I had found my way to a stench filled pit of the most vile antisemitism. So I did the right thing, and alerted all the sites who had linked to it. I got platitudes back in my emails. I mean........please, I know a thing or two about this stuff.

At one point, I had an open house at my studio, and the director of the RCIA program came. It was alot of fun and a friendly conversation stared when a fellow parishioner showed up. He informed us that he'd had 12 years of Catholic education, and that he loved the movie "The Passion of The Christ". Especially, he said, because it showed who REALLY killed Christ, 'if ya know whadimean' (wink wink nudge nudge)............

So I said, "yeah, you mean the Jews, right?", and turned to the RCIA director and asked how it was possible that he got through 12 years of Catholic school, and never learned Christ died as a result of everyone's sin? After she pulled her jaw off the floor, she responded that it was a damned good question. To which I responded, "Welcome to the life of every Jew in the whole world".