From feminist to traditionalist

[Denise]

Finding peace and confidence in an ancient faith

SILICA MCMEANS

APR 2, 2022 11:00 PM

My first child was born on April 12, 2011. The questions that I had considered only in the abstract now became as real as the cooing and crying baby I held in my exhausted arms.

How could my husband and I help a child best to feel rooted, connected and secure in the world? Was it through the constant pursuit of financial success, which no longer seemed a given, since we had graduated during the Great Recession of 2008? Was it through desperately asserting that we alone were the creators of our own meaning, as I had been taught by my family, college and culture — and as a consequence felt the constant loom of existential dread? Or maybe we needed to let go of modern pride and acknowledge the wisdom of generations past, embracing what British writer G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”?

My own journey had begun only a few years earlier, in 2007. I was 20 and a junior at Allegheny College, where I was a dutiful student of English and Women’s Studies and a member of various liberal and feminist student organizations.

That same year, to the bafflement of many, including an earlier version of myself, I was baptized into the Catholic Church.

Apart from one session of Vacation Bible School at a Methodist church in kindergarten, I was completely unchurched. It was uncouth to discuss and, as far as I could tell, to have sincere religious convictions. I got the impression from the world around me that religious people were probably a little addled, and certainly to be pitied for not being as intellectual or ambitious as they could be.

I didn’t meet a Catholic, knowingly at least, until fourth grade. It astonished me that her family went to church every single Sunday, and for some holidays besides. Then in middle and high school, I sat through Mass with a few friends after Saturday sleepovers.

I had no idea what I was experiencing there, but the unity of the congregation and the rhythm of liturgy — a concept I didn’t yet understand — made a deep impression. Everyone knew what to say and when to sit, stand or kneel. They said the same things every time, in the same order. The readings were set ahead of time, and in fact all over the world everybody heard the same readings and said the same prayers. And soon I came to understand that this liturgy had been celebrated in much the same way, with developments here and there, for nearly two thousand years.

Drawn in part by this sense of rootedness in something beyond myself, sometime in high school I began attempting to pray. I intuitively grasped that if every effect has a cause, and the universe is governed by orderly rules, that some Intelligence beyond the cosmos had to be the First Cause. (Only later did I realize I had stumbled into one of St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence.) If that Intelligence was uninterested in anything I had to say, the worst that could happen would be that I had embarrassed myself — but no one but God would know.

My first fumbling attempts at prayer were rather pathetic. I treated God like I would any earthly authority figure I was desperate to impress. I felt I had to come up with wholly original, instantaneously beautiful thoughts, and only these would be worthy of God’s attention. It was so intimidating that I never went more than a few weeks before giving up.

Then I noticed something curious about grace before dinner at friends’ houses: The prayer always used the same words, asking God to bless the people present and the food and acknowledging the meal as a gift. Grace, and all other Catholic prayers, began and ended with an invocation of the Holy Trinity. There was no need to reinvent the wheel, only to memorize and internalize the message already written, and to offer it sincerely.

Today, memorization is widely considered to be a lower form of knowledge compared to “critical thinking,” but it’s lower only in the way a foundation is: It supports and gives structure to everything above it. And that became my experience.

As I groped around for new ways to enter into this tradition, I found a treasure trove of prayers composed by saints over the centuries — well known meditative devotions like the rosary, liturgical prayers like the Divine Office centered on the Psalms, and simpler practices like reciting the Angelus at noon and 6 p.m., hours marked in times past by church bells just like the five-times-a-day adhan is announced by mosques today.

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.

Silica McMeans lives with her husband and five children in Mt. Lebanon.

[MarieT]

the good shepherd calling his stray sheep back
bless