Saturday, April 23, 2022

From Feminist to Traditionalist

 From The Post-Gazette:

For a girl who grew up with no stronger anchor for my identity than sharing a love of 90s cartoons with my peers, this was revolutionary. Here was a tradition of faith and reason and living with roots deeper than I could ever know. Here was something, at once deeply human and beautifully transcendent, that existed for millennia before me and will exist long after I am gone, something that can give shape and structure and meaning to my life in a way nothing else could.

It was irresistible.

When I was baptized, many friends and family assumed it was because of a boy. While it was strange for self-described feminists to deny my agency like that, it wasn’t completely wrong. I had been on this journey for years when I met the man who would become my husband, a cradle Catholic who wasn’t terribly devout, but felt similarly unmoored on the tides of mainstream culture. We became, and still are, excellent travelling partners — not through distant lands, but through the faith tradition, ever ancient, ever new, in which we feel so beautifully at home.

I was aware, as the priest poured water over my head 15 years ago, that I was making a conscious choice to belong to something — to Someone — beyond myself. A baptism is a rebirth, and as with any new beginnings, you can never tell where they’re going to lead.

Even so, I would never have believed that in 2022 I would be expecting my sixth child, that my family is one of the “very religious” ones that prays grace before every meal and a rosary every day. I change the linens at our home altar to correspond to the color of the liturgical season. My children know the saints they are named for, and with delight pick a dessert to honor their feast days. They excitedly learn the prayers of generations past in both English and Latin.

They also have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe. There are, after all, different kinds of rootedness: Going deeper into the ancient doesn’t have to exclude a healthy love of the here and now.

But it can’t end there. That, at least, is what I have learned from my own life, marked for so long by confusion and insecurity and aimlessness. I have found peace — a peace I hope to pass down to my children — in contemplating the unending depths of divine beauty, goodness and truth. (Read more.)

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