Dragons and Paper Clips

For the handful of people that read our blog: yes, we’re still breathing. Between the new baby (who is slightly needy), a sort-of potty training 3 year old, homeschooling one of our 3 school aged kids (why do I only homeschool one, you ask? Because I like to make life as difficult as possible for myself), working on high school applications with our 8^th grader, and paying attention to the other poor kid I didn’t get around to mentioning, blogging has been at the bottom of my to-do list.

And really, it’s been nice to just live for a while and not be constantly dissecting everything I read and hear in order to blog it. I want blogging to be more of an organic thing and less of a “have to keep crafting posts out of every life experience” kind of thing. Probably won’t win me acclaim anytime soon with that kind of approach but that’s fine.

So while I’ve had all sorts of post ideas knocking around in the small space of my brain that is left for *thinking* and is not reserved for grocery lists or keeping my house from falling down, I’ve also been pondering the lifecycle of a Catholic convert. There are so many convert blogs out there, and I think each of us is trying, for our own particular audience, to explain why we did what we did. It seems to me that converts feel a great responsibility to those we know on a personal level, and to those we later meet through the blogosphere, to tell them about the amazing journey that has led to the amazing Other, the Catholic Church.

But I’ve started wondering if in some ways, the task is somewhat futile, since the Other is so…other… that it’s really hard to explain. Thinking back to some of my older posts, I wonder if my attempts at pointing out the truth of the Catholic Church have been viewed as comparison shopping. As if it was a “Nanny, nanny, boo-boo, mine is better,” sort of proposition. The further out I get from our entrance into the Church, the more it strikes me that it is not that sort of thing at all. Not that I ever thought that it was a matter of preference, or choosing what seemed better, quantitatively speaking, but that I just didn’t do an adequate job of explaining it that way.

When it comes down to it, I don’t think a comparison can be made. I suppose one _could_ do a side by side comparison of Catholic vs. Protestant practices, beliefs, theologies, etc. and find a lot of similarities and a lot of differences, but ultimately, I don’t know what the purpose would be. For me, it’s like comparing dragons and paper clips…or puppies and boats…or umbrellas and shoes. You can’t do it. All I feel like I can do at this point, in my own feeble way, is say, “Hey, here’s what I found. Please go look at it, too.” Or at the very least, find out the truth of what it claims before you reject it out of hand.

From where I stand now, the past seems so very murky; it’s as if I can’t fully remember or believe where I came from, and now I can’t believe this is not the place I have always been. It’s sort of like a reverse-Narnia. You know at the end of the movie version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Narnia, where the Pevensie kids fall out of the wardrobe and they’re all, “Hey, I think I remember this place.” (OK, a very bad synopsis. I’m not a C.S. Lewis nerd, ok? I know, criminal offense.) Well, that’s kind of how it is now; realizing that as a Catholic, I experience a shadow, not a distortion of a shadow of Heaven.