I was looking for summer clothes in the nether regions of our house when I came across a journal from 1984.
Man, oh man but it was like a retreived memory! Names that would otherwise be completely unrecoverable were resurrected thanks to the persistence of paper and ink.
Naturally, I went directly to the internet, do-not-pass-go, to super-sleuth these folks. Mostly I came up empty, although the UCC pastor at my best friend's church (oddly, my close friends have always been Protestants & Jews) is pastoring way out in the rural Pennsylvania near the Appalachian trail. He always did love the natural world.
The journal has an extremely high "cringe" factor, as in "I can't believe I wrote that". Earnest if trite, some of the frankness in the area of sexuality makes it feel like I am carrying radioactive material around. I really need to burn this. Not that I was that bad but it sounds like it. It's embarrassing on nearly every level imaginable and I'd druther my wife not read the poetry directed at other women. So I could: a) type it into a password-protected Word doc (which would take forever)or b) get it rid of it now or c) save it and hope that I don't die suddenly and thus have time to destroy it before my death.
But the memories are something else.
I worked that summer with a guy named Bob who was a man-of-the-world 24 year old who'd graduated from college and taught school for a couple years before working at the local restaurant enroute to the military (I found only that he lives in Birmingham, AL now). Seems I was impressed with him, or perhaps impressed by the fact that he was impressed with me. A snippet:
"Knowing someone like Bob makes me realize how little I've really experienced of life. He has more stories than one would think was possible. Wild stories of travel, of skinny-dipping, of spying on the girls locker room. He seems to me to be an extremely interesting man and complex one - a person not easily categorized as "good" or "bad". He's a churchgoer who loves baseball, collects baseball cards and takes pictures with his expensive camera. He can seem a child, and as innocent. And yet he's done things he can't even mention."
In hindsight, Bob wasn't exactly the picture-postcard role model, to put it mildly.
~~~
Then too there was the uber-kind Protestant pastor. My best friend's parents were always so smart, always so ahead of the curve. That they were United Church of Christ members back in the 1970s doesn't surprise me - they were non-denominational before non-denominational was cool. Was the UCC the first denomination to end all denominations? But instead of coming home to Rome they went to the newly formed UCC: "the UCC was founded in 1957 as the union of several different Christian traditions: from the beginning of our history, we were a church that affirmed the ideal that Christians did not always have to agree to live together in communion" says the UCC website. I'm not saying I would've done any different if I were in their shoes. It's understandable if someone doesn’t see the truths of Catholicism if they were raised in another tradition. Flannery O'Connor wrote that
"all voluntary baptisms are a miracle to me and stop my mouth as much as if I had just seen Lazarus walk out of the tomb. I suppose it's because I know that it had to be given me before the age of reason, or I wouldn't have used any reason to find it."It's also understandable for an uncatechized Catholic to convert, of which there are legion. It's the fully catechized Catholic who converts which is a puzzlement - but for free will and the "diamond hardness of the human heart" as Steven Riddle put it.
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