Chapter 11 – Peanut Butter Eucharist

The wedding day has finally come.  The bride has spent months planning her special day, from place cards to her vows, and everything is going exactly as planned.  The event is perfect, the minister says, “Husband and wife”, and the happy couple takes off on their honeymoon.  But the next morning…the next morning the bride wakes up, the biggest event in her life now over, she rolls over to see her snoring husband with bad morning breath and thinks, “What have I done, and what the hell do I do now?”

Which is exactly how I felt immediately following our confirmation.  Holy Week had been full of wonderful experiences – getting my feet washed, kissing the Cross, all those “little gifts” I’d received from God.  And while confirmation was extraordinarily long (3 hours long), it still felt like a happy wedding day of sorts – kind of our marriage to the Church, so to speak.  We got to see our friends get baptized (we’d already been baptized as kids, and any baptism done “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” is considered valid), we were anointed with oil and prayed over, and then the biggest moment of all came: we got to receive the Eucharist for the first time.

I had really struggled with the idea of the Eucharist being THE body and blood of Christ (an issue I’ll address at some point), but I did eventually come to hope and believe in it.  But hoping in something doesn’t mean you automatically connect with it.  I was hoping that I would find some sense of connection in receiving the Eucharist – some sort of internal, defining moment that brought these last four years to their ultimate climax, something that FINALLY made me FEEL Catholic for real.

But then that little wafer of Christ’s body got stuck on the roof of my mouth, and as I approached the blood, I felt like a dog that had just been given a slice of bread with peanut butter smeared on it.  There’s nothing more pitiable than a dog with a slice of peanut butter bread stuck to the roof of it’s mouth – well, except maybe a girl who’s got Christ’s body causing her to choke so that she has to try to gracefully gulp down a big enough swig of the blood to wash it down.  So the closest sense of connection I got to the Eucharist that night was the near-need for the heimlich maneuver.  The experience was disappointingly underwhelming.

Confirmation and after-photos went until about midnight on Easter vigil, so on Sunday morning, I was still fast asleep when Easter Mass began at 10 am.  But I couldn’t imagine not going to church at all on Easter, so I rushed over to a later service at our old church – my beloved, Protestant, former church home.  I saw all my old friends, they played some great songs…and there I was, like a day-old bride, wondering what on earth I’d done.  I missed this place!

I sank low the following week.  I didn’t go to Mass the next Sunday either.  I’ve spent the last 11 days wondering what I’ve gotten myself into, and if my relationship with God will ever be the same again.  Thankfully, our RCIA group is still meeting on Tuesday nights (yep, I’m now blogging in real-time people), and I decided to talk with our director afterwards.

I explained to him how I’ve struggled with my recent decision, how I still wasn’t connecting, how I didn’t know if I could really be Catholic.  We talked for a few moments, but the thing that hit me in talking with him was that he didn’t feel the need to fix me, or try to figure out what the problem was, and he wasn’t unnerved by my newfound doubts.  Catholics aren’t unsettled by struggle.  I have a feeling that this is a thing I’m going to have to learn over and over again in order to rid myself of my Protestant mindset:  embrace the struggle.

What I think is one of the greatest strengths of Protestants over Catholics is that they’re never satisfied.  They want MORE of Jesus, they want MORE outpouring of the Holy Spirit, they want to reach MORE souls – Protestants are spiritually ambitious, whereas Catholics are a lot more laid-back.  This laid-back spirituality has unnerved me and left me frustrated in joining the Church.  How could people NOT want to experience more of the Holy Spirit, and miracles, and people coming to Jesus?  How could Catholics be so passive?  And yet, this strength of Protestants is also their weakness, because when “more” isn’t happening, Protestants tend to interpret that there’s something wrong, there’s somewhere where they’re missing God.  If one is truly walking with the Lord, then there should be nearly constant growth in one’s life, and that person should be hearing from God each day.  If not, then prayer and fasting and a thorough purging of sin and all distractions must take place.  At least, that’s been my experience.

So here I am, a fresh-pressed Catholic with still an ambitious Protestant mindset, getting extremely discouraged and depressed that perhaps I took a wrong turn in my faith because I got peanut butter bread instead of a blissful honeymoon moment with Christ.  Embrace the struggle?  What does that even MEAN?!

I’ll tell you what it means.  It means a whole heck of a lotta peace.  It means one foot in front of the other towards a lifetime  of holiness over a daily marathon in pursuit of either signs and wonders…or severe disappointment.  It means “letting grace have its perfect work so that you may be perfect and complete, not lacking in any good thing.”  It means not trying to coerce God into constantly having to speak and move and offer little gifts, and learning to enjoy the comfort that can be in the silence.  Lord, I never want to become a passive Catholic!….but maybe I can learn to be a less needy and demanding one?  Maybe I can learn to embrace the struggle.  I mean, a dog always struggles with peanut butter bread, but have you ever seen one turn it down because it’s too difficult?  I didn’t think so.

This entry was posted in Thriving Spirits. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *