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This is part of a post I wrote ten years ago.

Today I am thankful that I can be thankful.

On the Easter Vigil where I came into Holy Mother Church I reflected on the fact that I had literally spent forty years in the wilderness. I had been chasing after false gods and idols and was totally oblivious to the miracles that God had created around me. I would have fit in easily with the hardheaded Israelites, ignoring every blessing and focusing on even the most trite inconvenience. I was suffering from spiritual autism, locked into only the material world and undiscerning of the spiritual world around me. I did not realize that I was afflicted with this eternal life threatening illness, nor did those around me inform me of my malady. After reading Franks Sheed’s awesome book Theology and Sanity I came to see my insanity for what it was. As an atheist the concept of thanksgiving was alien to me, I knew I should be thankful but to whom was I to be thankful to? It is difficult to give thanks to random eddies of atoms coalescencing into a cell. Oh chaos I thank you for we are wonderfully made just doesn’t sound right. How can you be thankful for your flukeness, your undesigned accidental existence. Luckily, as most atheists I did not dwell too much on the actual meaning of these unbeliefs. Thank you God for bringing me into the promised land of your Church.

Via Leah Libresco

Over in the Atheist channel, Bob Seidensticker of Cross Examined is experimenting with prayer.  He’s signed up for an experiment run by Justin Brierley of the Unbelievable radio show (which you may remember from the time Hemant and I tangled on air).  The program is asking for atheists to try praying for at least two to three minutes a day for God to reveal Himself to them (if he exists).  After 40 days, the atheists are going to share their experiences and, if applicable, conversions.

Bob’s a Patheos blogger, and he’s been blogging about his approach.  It’s hard going, which doesn’t surprise me.  When I was an atheist, I didn’t find suggestions to pray particularly helpful (though the results of experimentation were sometimes farcical).  I was curious what Bob would do with such an intractable problem, but I was given pause by this comment of his:

Okay—I’m in. I don’t expect that I’ll be able to be all that earnest—frankly, I don’t have much expectation of anything supernatural happening or even much desire for God to exist—but I’ll have a go. To any Christian who says that I’m not approaching this with much sincerity, you’re right. As I read it, none is required—as it should be. Sincerity comes after the fact; sincerity is earned.

As she notes:

It’s hard to get much out of something you can’t approach with sincerity.   It’s not helpful to pretend you believe something you don’t believe, but it’s also not that helpful to just go through the motions of a religious ritual if you’re heart’s not in it.  So I started trying to think about what, if anything, Bob or anyone else could do honestly.  And I think the key is curiosity.

You can talk about trying to put God to the test or how Jesus related why he did not perform miracles for those who lacked faith. Herod certainly wanted some demonstration as a curiosity possibly inspired by his own interest in John the Baptist. In contrast I would note that Jesus also said “I have stood at the door, and I knock;” and so initiates the conversation waiting for a reply. God’s love for us even allows less than serious attempts of prayer as an opening to that door.

As an atheist coming to faith oddly I never even thought of praying as a way for God to reveal himself to me. Prayer was just so alien for me since I had never prayed even as a child and even the idea of prayer rather scared me like a supernatural invocation.

But this type of atheist prayer reminds me of this part of SF author John C. Wrights’ conversion story.

Being a philosopher and not a poseur, I put the matter to an empirical test.

For the first time in my life, I prayed, and said. “Dear God. There is no logical way you could possibly exist, and even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination. So I can think of no possible way, no matter what the evidence and no matter how clear it was, that you could prove your existence to me. But the Christians claim you are benevolent, and that my failure to believe in you inevitably will damn me. If, as they claim, you care whether or not I am damned, and if, as they claim, you are all wise and all powerful, you can prove to me that you exist even though I am confident such a thing is logically impossible. Thanking you in advance for your cooperation in this matter, John C. Wright.” — and then my mind was at rest. I had done all I needed to do honestly to maintain my stature as someone, not who claimed to be logical, objective and openminded, but who was logical, objective, and openminded.

Three days later, with no warning, I had a heart attack, and was lying on the floor, screaming and dying.

Father Gerald O’Reilly, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago prayed the rosary among several homosexual activists who were picketing a Chick-fil-A restaurant.  This  video shows their level of tolerance.

Matt C. Abbott asked Father Richard Perozich of the Diocese of San Diego to comment on what transpired with Father O’Reilly.

Tolerance for a Christian is an expression of love that holds a person to one’s heart when that person is doing evil, praying that love will conquer and free the doer from the evil that dominates him.

Tolerance according to current practice is a stepping stone begged by a minority of the majority that the latter accept the people where they are in their behavior, and not to call it evil. The second step is acceptance of the evil behavior. Step three is celebration of the evil behavior as good and normal, and even superior to what a Christian knows to be good. Step four is domination and oppression of all who disagree with the behavior.

For us Christians, prayer to the Trinity is necessary to expel any evil from a person. After that, evil must be explicitly called what it in fact is: evil. The Christian who prophecies in the name of Jesus can expect then to suffer hate and loss of freedom, power, possessions, and prestige for the opposition to evil, sometimes even to the loss of the Christian’s life in order to save himself and those who are overcome by evil.

RIMINI, ITALY, August 22 (CNA/EWTN News) .- Rock ‘n’ roll is innately religious and expresses a desire for the infinite, according to one of Ireland’s leading music journalists.

“This music is generated in the heart of man and is therefore fundamentally of the religious need, which is the fundamental original need of man; to know who made him, who he is, where he is bound,” said John Waters in an Aug. 21 interview with CNA.

Waters is the creator of a new exhibition entitled “Three chords and a longing for the truth; rock ‘n’ roll as a seeking for the infinite.” The display is proving to be hugely popular at the 33rd Rimini Meeting, an international gathering organized by the lay Catholic movement Communion and Liberation.

“The media always present rock ‘n’ roll simply as some kind of extravaganza of sensation and noise and stardom and narcissism and ego mania. But we are saying that within this shell of superficiality there is a hard core of fundamental content which is really the cry of man expressed in a modern idiom.”

Beyond the 800,000 visitors to this year’s Rimini Meeting, Waters wanted to offer his hi-tech, interactive exhibition to one person in particular – Pope Benedict XVI.

“When he was elected in 2005, all the hostile journalists dug back through all of his articles and speeches and tried to find things that would discredit him,” Waters said, recalling how the media finally unearthed a 1996 article in which Cardinal Ratzinger had opined, in the words of Waters, that “rock ‘n’ roll only appeals to the lower emotions of man and was therefore dangerous.”

Waters believes that Pope Benedict “is right in a certain sense,” that our modern culture only wants rock ‘n’ roll to be about “exaggerated sexuality, self-indulgence and narcissism.”

But he also wanted to show the pontiff a deeper reality.

“I wanted in a way to take the Pope by the elbow and lead him into this music and say, ‘come, there’s more, look at these artists, look at Bob Dylan, listen to what he is saying, listen to Leonard Cohen, listen to U2, see the sincerity of these people with the great questions that face man. And don’t be taken in by the exterior, by the noise, by the sensation, by the headlines.'” [Source]

Even as a headbanger myself you really have to do a pretty selective cherry-pick to say “Rock ‘n’ roll is innately religious and expresses a desire for the infinite.” More accurately this is true of the human person and it sees it’s expression in music as in other activities.

The recent 35th anniversary of Elvis’ death reminded me of another 35th anniversary.  I was in boot camp in San Diego when Elvis died, but I was really not any kind of Elvis fan then.  It was a couple days later while still in boot camp that I saw the newspaper headline that Groucho Marx had died on August 19th 1977.  That hit me much harder. Unfortunately the Navy wouldn’t let me apply a grease paint mustache on myself in memorial.

I simply loved the Marx Brothers, but it was Groucho who was always my favorite and when given the  opportunity I would dress up like him on occasions such as a Thespian party in High School.  I would scour the TV Guide so as to know when a Marx Brothers movie was on.  In the days of broadcast TV and also pre-VCR is was a real treat to find when one of their movies was one.  It was certainly a rare treat and I was certainly an aficionado of the movie comedy starts of the past.  W.C. Fields was my first great favorite and I quickly impersonated his voice and mannerisms and also played him on stage.  My first experience of a Marx Brothers movie is lost in memory to me, but the effect of it wasn’t.

In high school I read all the biographies of the Marx Brothers I could get my hands on and their are just so many interesting and often funny stories related to their life growing up poor and trying to make due.  The talents of all the brothers is really quite amazing and even true to some extent for Zeppo and Gummo who would play the straight man to them.

Julius Henry Marx a.k.a Groucho had perfect comedic timing which was constantly crafted among the brothers in their time from Vaudeville to Broadway and to the movies.  In laters years when Groucho hosted “You Bet Your Life” his wit was especially on display.  His repartee with the guests on this game show was often over the head of the contestants, but it certainly made for some of the funniest moments on television.   Starting out as boy singers on the Vaudeville circuit his musical talent was developed leading to the hilarious delivery in-character of the songs in their movies.  Especially notable in “Duck Soup”.

Unfortunately he did not exactly lead a happy life going through three marriages.  But he was ever the jokester once having written “smuggler” as his occupation when going through customs.

Once when attending “Jesus Christ Superstar” with Elton John he asked “Does it have a happy ending?”, well here is to happy endings and may the light of Christ have shined on Groucho.

After more than a decade I still really enjoy stories of conversion to the Catholic Church.  It is not motivated by a “yeah team” mentality, but I find the differences in paths of conversion quite fascinating  for each individual.  There are certainly some commonalities, but often very different starting points.  I’ve watched pretty much every episode of the The Journey Home program and still enjoy it.

Here are some recent conversion stories that crossed my path.

One of my favorite blogs I picked up last year was Edward Feser’s blog.  He recently wrote a post “The road from atheism” which explores the beginnings of his conversion from atheism to the Catholic Church.  His journey has a very interesting starting point in his years as a graduate student as an Analytic Philosopher and atheist.  This is a fairly long post as he started from the idea as mental processes being purely just brain activity as is the materialist understanding.  It was partly his interest in this subject and some serious reading on the subject that allowed him to see some of the flaws in this understanding and looking for answers while remaining a materialist.  He discusses Aquinas and how he addressed the Five Ways.

The immediate effect was that I found a way to teach the Five Ways without seeming like I was putting fish in a barrel for the students to shoot at.  I still didn’t agree with the arguments, but at least teaching them was getting interesting.  I recall one class period when, having done my best to try to defend some argument (the First Way, I think) against various objections, I finally stated whatever it was I thought at the time was a difficulty that hadn’t been satisfactorily answered.  One of my smartest students expressed relief: She had been worried for a moment that there might be a good argument for God’s existence after all!  (Anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people is fooling himself.)

One of the things I admire about St. Thomas Aquinas in his arguments is that he always worked to put forward the best arguments for a position he would write against. Understanding is not necessarily agreement, but it is intellectual honesty to try to understand an argument instead of setting up straw men. Further along in his understanding he details.

I don’t know exactly when everything clicked. There was no single event, but a gradual transformation. As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.” Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!” By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying to argue my wife’s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe.

Another story regards Englishwoman Sally Read a rising star in the world of poetry.

“As I was writing this book, I became very aware that I didn’t know where the soul was and I didn’t know if the soul existed. And it was really driving me crazy.” Her frustration led her into discussion, and often heated debate, with a Canadian priest who was based in the coastal resort town.

“So, while I was talking to this priest about, well, is there a God and all of that kind of stuff, I kind of had this feeling as a poet that God was the ultimate poet and the ultimate Creator, and I was simply being used as an instrument,” she recalled.

It was at that point that she phoned the priest to say, “I don’t think I’m an atheist after all.” But she refused to make the intellectual leap to Christianity, insisting to her priest friend that he would never convert her.

“He was very patient and very good.” He said, ‘Christ will convert you, I’m not going to convert you … .”

Later:

“I realized that there was only one Church and the way to be closest to Christ was to be a Catholic, because it’s the Eucharist and taking Communion.”

Since then she has faced opposition from family members and shock from a socially-liberal artistic establishment. And, yet, “I’m still happier than I’ve ever been,” she said with a broad grin on her face.

Lastly, the Archdiocese of Boston’s podcast “The Good Catholic Life” replayed an interview with Chuck Hall who is currently training for the Deaconate. His journey passed from the life of a Hippy, through various forms of Protestantism, and into the Catholic Church. Another person where G.K. Chesterton played a part.

The path to conversion is met with many stepping stones and looking back you can identify some of these stones as means of grace. Today I am thinking of the first milestone I can identify in my conversion from atheism to Catholicism.

In the early nineties was stationed in Patuxent River, Md I started listening to G. Gordon Liddy on the local Washington D.C. station when he first started broadcasting. One day while driving on the beltway an atheist caller called in challenging him and Mr. Liddy replied by going through the five ways of knowing God’s existence as formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. I must admit this rather stunned me the idea of Christians using reason to defend faith in God. I had really figured that theists could only apply to authority or “holy” books. This event marked the first chink in my atheist armor that opened my up to hear more. This was a small chink though and it would be several years more until I started to seriously look at faith and reason not as foes in some battle being forever separated. Regardless I look at this event as that first step into thinking that just possibly I had it all wrong.

I bring this up because today G. Gordon Liddy is retiring at the age of 82 from talk radio. The fact that he played some role in my conversion is very surprising to me having been in High School during the Watergate scandal and an uber-liberal. Even as I came to later admire Mr. Liddy, I never did admire his involvement in this scandal and the justifications I have heard him use regarding it. Still listening to him off and on over the years I have learned much from him in his wealth of knowledge and his example as a family man. I always appreciated the way he talked about his wife, who died last year and his life-long Catholicism certainly played a role in his life beyond just a cultural thing.

So thank you Mr. Liddy for the role you played in my life and being an illustration of the tools that God can use.

Ten years ago today I entered into the blogosphere with my first post.

Warning ahead: Self-reflective ego post on ten years of blogging.

I first became aware of Catholic blogging via the National Catholic Register which did an article on Catholic bloggers. I found Mark Shea’s blog that way and have been hooked ever since. In those early days of Catholic blogging you could read every Catholic blog over lunchtime. No RSS feeds back then so I would just click on all my bookmarks.

It was interacting in the comment sections on Catholic blogs that first got me to think about starting my own blog. As I noted in my first post is was my vanity that wanted to bring my comments out of the comment section and into full view. Embarrassingly my first blog post contained the extremely pretentious “This blog is my comment section on life.” My blog was the first to reference Chesterton’s “if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”, but it certainly was not the last to do so in an opening post. This quote is often taken out of context as Chesterton actually used in a defense of hobbies – which blogging certainly is for me.

My first blog was on blogspot and was called “Atheist to A Theist.” After six months I moved to my own domain with Movable Type and started The Curt Jester. Of that handful of Catholic bloggers ten years ago some of them are still blogging. Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, Tom at Disputations, Domenico Bettinelli, TS at Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor.   Victor Lams was also one of those early pioneering Catholic bloggers and his creativity and humor really sparked me into blogging.  The first Catholic blogger though was  Kathy Shaidle  of Relapsed Catholic which started in 2000. I’ve also seen many blogs come and go and among those many that are sorely missed.  There have also been some interesting rises and falls.  One very popular  blog that went all wobbly  and then closed, ironically it was called “The Cafeteria is Closed”.  Another early Catholic blogger went back to being a Seven Day Adventist.  Though my favorite exit from St. Blogs was a former atheist who blogged on his new found faith and later became a Monk in an Eastern Catholic Church.  Nicely in the early days of St. Blogs there weren’t really any liberal Catholic blogs.  An article in Commonweal despaired of this lack and even took some potshots at me and other so-called conservative bloggers.   Due to a suggestion from Kathy Shaidle I started a parody blog called Thoroughly Modern Mary where I blogged as an extremely liberal religious sister to give Commonweal what they asked for   Though that blog is several changes behind in Blogger templates and so now only has the text of my posts.

So ten years and some 7,556 posts later I am still rather surprised to be still writing. Writing was never something I really aspired towards.  It was the joy of conversion and a way of expressing it that lead me in this direction.  In real life I am one of those quiet class clowns that will sit in the back of the room waiting for an opportunity for a quip while also being rather shy and bookish. So I don’t naturally find many opportunities to express my faith. I remember when my blog was getting five to ten hits a day how wondrous it was for me that five to ten people were paying attention to what I was saying.  That was a 500 to 1000 percent increase for me.  This blog has kind of taken of life of it’s own since it went down channels I never expected.  The funny thing is that I never originally intended a humor related blog – how little I knew myself.  My first humor post is still one of my fondest “A Night at the the Jesus Seminar” a mashup between the Marx Brothers movie and a conversation with an adherent of the Jesus Seminar.  Another thing I never expected was becoming a book reviewer.  As my blog started to get popular enough I started to get offers from publishers to review their books.  The idea of getting books for free certainly appealed to me as way too much of my disposable income goes to them.  Having to write a review in exchange seemed like a pretty good deal, though I don’t find book reviewing particularly easy.

What I like the most about St. Blogs though is how much I have continued to learn about the faith as there are so many quite excellent Catholic writers that range from the amateurs to the professionals.  There is so much expertise out there on so many topics that it can really help you from having a narrow view of the faith.  The long tail of St. Blogs creates a lot of great writing even if these bloggers will never get awards or are hardly noticed.  Not to diminish those more well-known Catholic writers who became bloggers, but one thing I always liked about the blogosphere is that you didn’t have to have a pre-built audience and that you could create one from scratch.  There is something very Catholic about the blogosphere in a very “here comes everybody” way.  There is a very small bar to do so and I remember another sadly missed Catholic blogger who blogged from the library computer.  The other thing I so like about St. Blogs is that you seem to have a personal connection to these writers.  Writers with a byline seem to be off in the distance, but members of St. Blogs I seem to have grown up with as they get married, have children, etc.

Over these ten years I have also had some 50,000 comments.  Though I think 49,000 of them were from my atheist commenter Salvage.

Now to close out this overly long post I leave you with a story of my naiveté.

Before I started blogging I noticed that often Mark Shea would announce some new blog.  So after I started my blog I kept waiting for Mark to announce mine.  For some reason I must have thought he was omniblogospheric and notice every new Catholic blog that came on the scene.  I am not the self-promoter enough to realize these new bloggers simply wrote Mark announcing their blogs.  Though Mark Shea did ironically link to my Litany of Blog Humility

The Litany of Blog Humility

From the desire of my blog being read
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the desire of my blog being praised
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the fear of my blog being despised
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the fear of my blog being forgotten
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the fear of no page views
Deliver me dear Jesus
That other blogs may be loved more than mine
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That Nihil Obstat may find all my grammatical and spelling errors
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That Google may never list my blog
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That comments always be negative and abusive
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That my commenting system always say “commenting temporarily unavailable”
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That Mark Shea may notice every blog but mine
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That others may be pithier than I, provided that I may become as pithy as I should
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it

* Nihil Obstat  was another early Catholic blogger who corrected the grammatical mistakes on Catholic blogs until his anonymity was accidentally compromised by Barbara Nicolosi. There really needs to be a history of Catholic blogging full of these stories.

* Ten Years After is a nod to the group by the same name. Alvin Lee named the group referencing ten years after Elvis, though I did write a post about the amazing coincidences between Elvis and Pope John XXIII.

Archbishop Chaput’s Homily for the Closing Mass of the Fortnight for Freedom.

Archbishop Chaput has bookended the start and end of the Fortnight for Freedom with exceptional speeches that call for the protection of religious freedom along with more importantly the call to holiness of inner conversion and repentance.

I say this for two reasons. Here’s the first reason. Real freedom isn’t something Caesar can give or take away. He can interfere with it; but when he does, he steals from his own legitimacy.

Here’s the second reason. The purpose of religious liberty is to create the context for true freedom. Religious liberty is a foundational right. It’s necessary for a good society. But it can never be sufficient for human happiness. It’s not an end in itself. In the end, we defend religious liberty in order to live the deeper freedom that is discipleship in Jesus Christ. What good is religious freedom, consecrated in the law, if we don’t then use that freedom to seek God with our whole mind and soul and strength?