For those who asked

For Gonzo, who asked for this years ago. For Jason, who learned parts of this when we were in law school together. For the crew of commenters at Boxing Alcibiades who were the most recent folks to request the following. I give you part 1. I have no idea how many installments this will take.

Several people have asked me over the years for the following. Encouraged by eowyn in comments at Boxing Alcibiades, I now provide, in most abbreviated fashion, some overview of what is colloquially known as my faith journey (or witness, for you Evangie-Protties out there).

I was born in the twilight of the papacy of Paul VI. I grew up a fairly serious and observant Catholic child. But I was inquisitive. Not the typical child's questions, but serious theological questions voiced in the idiom of a child. My family told me that there were no answers. That we just had to accept that our faith was a "mystery." Upon reflection I understand that they didn't know the answers, but instead of admitting ignorance to a child, well-meaning family members told me a lie.

Among other afflictions, I was a scrupulous child in an age whose confessors rarely believed in sin. I was catechized that Jesus was my buddy, and that he loved me. I made my first Holy Communion at an appropriate age, prayed my rosary incessantly, and read what books on the Faith I could get my young mind on. Tracts were better than the pabulum in my religion book.

I remember the crushing blow I felt when I found out that one of our parish priest's smoked. My well-meaning religion teachers had taught me that smoking was a sin. I remember a nagging sense of doubt about everything, and my childhood was filled with rage. I was brought to Charismatic Renewal services by relatives, but I was made uneasy by the rampant emotionalism of the experience: people speaking in tongues, people levitating, allegedly miraculous cures, men and women weeping for reasons that I, at 7 and 8, could not begin to fathom.

I was a product of Catholic schools, which meant that I knew nothing about my faith. And that ignorance was joined to the conviction that I knew everything about my faith. That is a very dangerous form of ignorance to take into adolescence.

I stopped believing somewhere around age 9. My questions were too many and too great, the claims of the faith were too incredible, and there was, I was assured by all whom I spoke with clergy and laity, no answers to these questions of mine.

It took me a few more years to declare my apostasy, to the horror of my family. No one could understand where this had come from. No one had any clue why. I went through the motions to keep my mother happy, but there was no sense that what I was doing had any meaning beyond that immediate end.

I was a hellion. I cut my teeth, philosophically, by age 12 on Nietzsche and Machiavelli. I embraced and studied Oriental mysticisms and philosophies, atheist systems, Dispensationalist evangelical Christianity (which to this day makes no sense to me), and neo-paganism. My pole star was hedonism and the unbridled expression of my whim upon the world around me.

I maintained friendships with priests, but never asked the questions I had buried so deeply that I had forgotten. I was too convinced that I knew where the answers WOULDN'T and COULDN'T be found.

Living "la vida loca", as they said a few years ago, led to the twin slaveries of booze and sex. And what slavery they were. But I claimed I was happy, even as I routinely contemplated suicide. Psychiatric professionals were of no help. They never could diagnose for anything, since I was bright enough to throw their tests. It was simply more proof that I was the Ubermensch.

I navigated my way to high school, an erstwhile student of medieval thought and military practice, a Latinist, and an actor. Never addressing the questions that nagged at me, I periodically resumed the exterior practice of the Faith, but I possessed an uncircumcised heart that remained willfully deaf to the gospel.

High school bled into college and, in spite of my loathing of the moral teachings of the Church, I found myself at UD. I strenuously objected to any old celibate man in a dress telling me how to live my life. I was, after all, better than that. I didn't need an authority to tell me what to think or how to live. I knew it, and better than most. But UD had an interesting looking program committed to the quest for truth, a semester in Rome, and offered me a decent scholarship. It also wasn't a state school.