Why am I a Black Catholic? My faith has been the channel through which I have come to understand myself; from it, I was made acutely aware of my aversion to labels. If Christianity or Catholicism, and I make a distinction only for form sake, is by nature a family, I have found that only by moving outside of my inherent denomination-centric vision of it would I truly come to know what being a Christian brother in its fullest, or the closest I could get to that fullness, really meant. The goal was not to stack one expression of Chrstianity against another, sure there were matters of taste and sense to reckon with, the goal was to become a better, and perhaps, bigger Christian by not stomaching only the division but to know experientally the sweetness of its singular fruit. In a real sense I felt I could not really get on the other side of bias and ignorance until I had made a sincere effort to overcome these with love, and love of the sort that daily lives and worships within the various shades of the one Christian hue. Simply, I wanted to fundamentally be inside Christianity in all its forms its wrinkles. I wanted to say of one thing in my life, and that of the most important thing, that I was not simply a product of labels. I wanted to forge ahead where I had always been told to fear. Sure, there were structural considerations for my decision as well. To begin, the liturgy. It’s emphasis is on silence instead of sound and fury, the weekly if not daily communion, the acknowledgement that the lives of past saints do have immediate import upon us in the present, these and others all spoke incontestably and irreplaceably to my soul each in their own way. My time in Protestant circles had yielded much fruit, however there were reasons for concern. My soul, I had found, was charred by it’s legalism, minimalism and theological abstractness, and—who can forget—it’s racism. My faith was becoming disembodied. It was as friend said during my time in seminary, the Eucharist, the supposed body of Christ itself, was the seal and very proof that all the goings on within Christianity were not simply a by-product of human imagination or ingenuity; and more importantly, neither the sum of our errors. Indeed, while holding this small piece of unleavened bread a message was borne anew within, namely, that all we believe in Christianity is real—this, and not my belief to make it so. Christianity is true whether I believed it or not and this Christ I hold in my hand is the tangible proof. I needed this confirmation more than on a semi-annual basis, I needed to be soaked in it weekly, if not daily, to so be inundated with it that on all sides I would be incessantly confronted by its singular truth. But there was one more reason, and it did not present itself until much later in my journey. And it was this: I grew to cherish the fact of being Black in a church where Black skin is scarce, this especially so since I was in the South. In my own body, in my very skin I would be saying that Christianity flowers, like a rose in concrete, in the most unusual of places. Catholicism, the thing I had been told to fear was the very thing that taught me to love. My skin, once the subject of another kind of fear, that of naked and covert racism, then, as a result would undergo a conversion from simply a by-product of nature to a signal of the very nature of things, and even perhaps of things to come. Thus I would be able to bear this cross as my glory, even as it continues to be to many, my abiding shame.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 06:55:54 +0000
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