"You Have No Legitimate Cover..."

Stumbled over this nearly two year old post by Joe Hoover last night and was rather mesmorized by it:

It is mid-Lent and you stumble into a church, not because it is Lent or you have a habit of churchgoing but because you need a bathroom. You try to look like you belong there, bowing your head, making yourself a bit tense. They are just about to begin a service.

Something about the candles, the kid in the white gown holding the taper, the marble, the death, everywhere death and gloom and a lack of irony. This you want. Though you did not know it until now. Suddenly you can’t make yourself leave.

You will stay for the entire mass. And you will return, again and again.

One day you will sidle up to an usher in a green corduroy sport coat who frankly will be no help – who will not exactly fall all over himself to point you in the right direction to start becoming Catholic.

Which will only make you trust this place all the more.

You will go to a weekly class and they will tell you to find a “sponsor” (what is this, AA?) and every Sunday you will have to parade with your little group mid-service out of the church in front of the whole crowd, like a row of prisoners whose time in the activity yard is up.

Then one Saturday night you will put on a white “alb” which the harried woman whose smile you never believe and who is in charge of the whole thing has told you many many times “is your baptismal right to wear”.

And the embarrassing and surreal totality of water. They drench you. Water as you have never used it before. Water without utility. You are not swimming, nor drinking, nor cleaning, nor cooking nor washing. You are doing what? “Symbolizing”? Is that a thing one does?

You just know the feeling, the way it is on your skin. As if no argument can be made against this, if someone would ever want to. If a charitable friend might tell you, for instance, that your baptism is not really a thing that is happening to you – that it is a thing leveraged or constructed or something. But, no, it did happen to me. The water was really there. Damp towels to prove it. Why would I put myself through this bizarre pointless soaking if it wasn’t real?

Your logic actually doesn’t work that well, but for you it suffices.

And, truth be told, arguments are made against you, by people who know you, though they are never spoken out loud. You wish they would be! You want to hear them. Because really, you know better than this. You have no legitimate cover for taking such grievous measures with your life. There was no Catholic girlfriend, no pending wedding to become spiritually aligned for. There has been no vision, no astounding conversion story, no miracle of the internal organs. No bible passage randomly flipped to, revealing the foul depths of your nonetheless sacred heart.

And so people will just think you are not that smart anymore. Or maybe you never really were that smart. And once they realize this, that you went off the mental rails somewhere – or never were on those rails – they can then consign you to a part of their brains that understands this quaint, even touching turn to old-time religion.

As for you, while you could cite doctrines, beliefs and a bone-deep feeling, really it’s this: you are in the game. That’s all you really know. You’re on the field, and you want to stay there.

There's much more and it's provocatively called "You will become Catholic"... read the whole thing.

Good stuff.