Three Things I Wish I Knew
Peasant Times-Dispatch Issue 33
My celebration of three years on substack continues! Enjoy 20% off a paid subscription forever, with this coupon valid until June 30th! Paid subscribers get access to my paid posts where I’m organizing an essay collection about the Peasant life.
Welcome!
This post is a little different from the quote reflections that I’ve been doing as part of “Season Three”—I was recently invited to give a talk at a Catholic Parish to close out their Mystagogy program. This was my first time doing any kind of public speaking related to the Peasantly ideal you can find here at the Peasant Times-Dispatch, and I had a lot of fun giving the talk and it seemed like the talk was well received1.
At the end of the talk I plugged my substack! A few of you signed up, so if this is the first email you are receiving from me, THANK YOU for listening to this talk, thank you for signing up. I hope you’ll find much more here that’s worth your time.
Three Things I Wish I Knew
Hi, my name is [Scoot] and I have been given about thirty minutes to give you a pep talk in anticipation of a lifetime of being catholic. No pressure or anything, right?
Let me tell you quickly about myself. I’m an accountant […], I’m a Catholic blogger and I maintain a newsletter for Catholic things on a website called Substack2. But more than that, [my friend] invited me to talk to you all today, so if this goes well it’s because it was [my friend’s] idea and if it goes badly then that’s my bad.
Mystagogy—this word refers to the period of religious education after one has been confirmed into the Church. You all were confirmed about a month and a half ago, and I understand this is your last meeting—congratulations to all of you on taking your first steps in the world as Catholics. I was confirmed about seven years ago, Easter Vigil 2018. Easter Sunday that year was April first, what I’ve started calling “Holy Fools day” in the spirit of St. Francis’ “Sancte Stulte”.
Because we’re talking about mystagogy, it behooves me to give you my conversion story in brief, so you have some context for the rest of what I’m going tell you.
The story of my conversion began 9 years before I converted, when I started college and I met my friend and future conversion sponsor […]. I was nominally raised Anglican, he was a cradle catholic. We both were not really practicing anything, but we both had some strange sense that faith was important and we needed to take the time to figure out how to get it right.
I was disaffected for a variety of reasons. My religious upbringing was more of an intellectual exercise than authentic spiritual instruction. I went to church because my parents made me go to church, and they went to church because their parents made them go to church. It was a kind of cultural instruction, a passing on of experiences which they felt were formative. I remember driving home from one Anglican service and my parents asking “what do you think about this?”—not because there was a right or wrong answer, but because religion was a thing that existed and they wanted us to be able to think critically and not just accept anything dogmatically. Spirituality didn’t enter the picture—to my parents, it didn’t exist and wasn’t important.
So when life trouble found my family, we all fell away. My parents had marriage trouble. My older sister was estranged from the family for a period that ended up being about 15 years, when she took a turn into evangelical/charismatic/non-denominational Christianity which offended our hyper-intellectual, a-spiritual, rational sensibilities. (sidebar—later on, this sister3 and I would re-establish contact and started talking about how our spiritual beliefs had evolved since we were teens. She was received into the Catholic Church in 2023.) Through all this, I never went so far as to call myself an atheist, but my rules were two, at this stage of my life: First, God exists and that’s all I can say for certain; second, that faith is important and one day I ought to figure it out.
So we return to my friend, in college. We agreed to read CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity together, and CS Lewis’ logical reasoning dragged me kicking and screaming from “God exists” to “I owe God some measure of worship”. Great. I consented to this idea around 2012, 6 years before I officially converted. My friend, being a cradle Catholic, arrived at these conclusions, and acted on them quickly: he married in 2013, his wife was a good catholic and a profoundly good influence on him, he dove back into the church with confidence, and gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudged me to follow him. It wasn’t until I had a moment of crisis that I finally made the leap. I was in a bad living situation, working a bad job, I was depressed and feeling hopeless. I quit the job in a huff in 2016, and I had two months to get my life together before the money ran out and I had to run home. I was down to about three weeks left and another interview failed to materialize a job, and I got down on my knees and prayed for what felt like the first time. I promised God I would give Him what I owed him in terms of worship if he only helped me out of this bind. 15 minutes later I got a phone call to interview for a job. A month later I would start that job—the job I still have today. In order to make good on my promise to God I reached out to catholic communities, got involved, started RCIA, and the rest is history.
Because of my upbringing, I had a very intellectual/rational approach to Catholicism, and so I took to the project of RCIA like a fish to water. Classes, books, reading, study. This was my spiritual language. I was so laser-focused on making it to that first Easter that I totally lost sight of the entire life of catholic living that would come after. On April 2nd, 2018, that was it—I had no mystagogy, it was “See you at Mass with all the other Catholics!”
Consequently I deeply struggled with solidifying the habit of going to Mass, with the practice of prayer, with really doing the interior work I needed to do to amend my life and sin no more. I’ve come a long way in 7 years but—my hope in talking to you is to save you all some of that time.
So I was asked, what are three things I wish someone told me in the time after I became a Catholic? I answered with these three things: How to grow in Christian Charity; how to grow in prayer and penance; how to think about the Church hierarchy especially when there’s stuff happening in the news. That’s the outline, so let’s dig in.
Christian Charity
When I first came into the Church, I thought I was done. I’ve found the Church, I get it, I’m in! Well, I hate to break it to you but the work is never done.
I celebrated my Catholicism by becoming insufferable to everyone around me. It was “my dad can beat up your dad” energy, but white-knighting for the Catholic Church. Because I had this intellectualist faith in my early years, I thought what the world needed was more argumentation, with emphasis on argument. I turned this on my non-catholic friends, I turned this on unsuspecting strangers on the internet. I turned this on my non-catholic family. How many souls do you think I won for Christ using this method? Exactly zero.
My dad especially chafed at my conversion. He would offer little barbs at family gatherings and I would foolishly take the bait, and we would get into it. I could never convince him of anything, and he wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say, no matter how logical and well structured my arguments were. He once told me he was “fully informed about catholicism” and I fired back something like “I know that’s not true because if you understood it you’d be catholic”. All this did was lead to bitterness all around. After one particularly intense argument, I resolved to stop arguing, I was slowly realizing I was doing more harm than good.
This is why I wish I had been told this after I became Catholic—I wish I understood that I accomplish more by prayer than argumentation.
This is the heart of Christian Charity: Every soul you ever meet, and ever will meet, and every soul you never meet has a path to heaven. You should want all of these people to go to heaven, you should pray daily that more and more souls are brought to Christ so you can be with them in Heaven. You should pray also that you stay close to Christ so you can be in Heaven too.
This is why praying for people is the height of Christian charity. (I should note—it’s the height, but not the only act of Christian Charity. Ask your priest about the works of mercy.) Don’t complain about someone before you’ve prayed for them. Don’t evangelize before you’ve prayed for them. Don’t argue before you’ve prayed for them. Someone once told me “proceed with prayer”. Send prayer out ahead of you to level the path you wish to travel. Send your guardian angel out to befriend the soul you wish to bring to Christ. And let’s be open to the possibility that this person God has put in our lives is there to remind us how much we still need from Christ. Our work is never done— “Lord I believe, help my unbelief”.
Christian Charity means desiring to be in heaven, desiring other people are in heaven, and desiring to walk with them towards heaven. I’m making it sound simple, but it’s not. In the moment, this will be hard to remember. When something offends you, when something strikes you as wrong. When other catholics say things that you disagree with. Try to find the path—for them and for you—that leads everyone to heaven. St Josemaria Escriva said, Contempt and persecution are blessed signs of divine predilection, but there is no proof and sign of predilection more beautiful than this: to pass unnoticed. When it comes to winning souls, sometimes that path involves speaking up, but often it’s best to pass unnoticed.
I have not yet succeeded in converting my parents. But I stopped perceiving this as a personal failure, and started simply praying for them. I pray for them daily and hope that this path does lead them to heaven. I will never stop hoping we will meet in heaven, and that inoculates me against bitterness. This hope for heaven is charity when we can conjure it up when someone offends us, when someone disgusts us, when someone is wrong and we want to tell them. Their story isn’t over! Remember how long your story took, my own story took 9 years at least from introduction to confirmation. Look at it as a chance to be a productive part of their story.
Let’s talk about prayer and penance. When I was becoming Catholic, I made the mistake of mentioning to a room full of catholics that I was interested in “a little reading”, and learning about the devotions of the church. I was bombarded by recommendations. In my first exposure to good faithful catholics, that was something they all had in common, so I thought that was something I needed to emulate. Reading spiritual books fed my overdeveloped intellectual faith, all prayers were new to me and so I wanted to take them all. In those early days, I had no way of filtering this data—and obviously, I did not succeed at this project, and was rapidly overwhelmed. My response to this was to think that I was evidently a bad catholic.
Logically, I know this: I know If I actually went and bought every book I was recommended, I would never have any money. I know if I tried to pray every devotion I was recommended, I wouldn’t have any time in my day. The Church is infinitely wide and infinitely deep—you can’t give equal attention to all the saints, all the feasts, all the prayers. I mean, you can try—and if that appeals to you, have you considered monasticism? But for MOST people, you can’t. So by sheer fact of reason, we need to do some kind of triage.
There’s a quote by Seneca the Younger about reading many books, he said this:
When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction.
Seneca affirms this idea about going deep on a few books, and I extend that to going deep on a few devotions. In this spirit, I thought I would tell you how my understanding of a few devotions has evolved.
The Rosary. You, no doubt, already know about the Rosary. You have no doubt heard people tell you about how important and beautiful it is. And they are right. But here’s something that I didn’t know when I became Catholic—The Rosary is a hard devotion. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—it takes dedication. I still struggle with the Rosary. When I first became Catholic I thought this struggle was a sign that I was a bad Catholic, and maybe I am, but not for that reason. The fact just is, the Rosary is hard.
I’ve made some daily devotions out of other prayers, and I can do a halfway decent job keeping those. You can and should find prayers that speak to your soul and find a way to make a routine out of them. But also—work towards going deep on the Rosary. There’s no rule that says a Catholic must pray the rosary, it’s totally optional. But I don’t worry about any catholic going astray if they are devoted to the Rosary. In the tool chest of prayers available to Catholics, the Rosary is one, and the Rosary is good. Try, really try, to make it an important part of your faith life. It took me a long time to make peace with that, but once I accepted that it was hard, I accepted that I needed to find my own way to it. That it wasn’t necessarily a reflection on me, just that I was on a different path. Everyone is right to recommend the rosary, but remember that it’s not going to be as simple as “just” praying a daily rosary. It will take some work.
Here’s another thought for prayer. Talk to God. Talk to God like you would talk to a person. Kneel, sit, stand in front of a Crucifix and tell God “I don’t know what to do, this is really hard.” Tell God “Thank you for the blessings you gave me today.” Tell God “I’m sorry for that thing I did.” Tell God “I love you”. When I first became Catholic I didn’t realize this was an option. I didn’t know how to do it, it felt uncomfortable and foreign. I thought speaking to God without all the “thee’s” and “thou’s” reflected badly on me. Because of my hyper-intellectual approach to faith, I wanted to systematize God. Say specific words, get specific results—and that’s not how it works. The spiritual lung of my faith didn’t begin to grow until I started tackling this.
God loves you. The essence of the spiritual life of faith is right there, in plain words. Our intellects, our fact-brains, get in the way of understanding that, but it’s plain and simple. God loves you. And because God loves you sometimes he will defy logic and reason. Any of you who are married or in relationships or have children or interact with human beings in any way know how confounding this can be—this other human being refuses to behave rationally and sometimes the thing they need most isn’t logic, sometimes they need a hug. God cannot be reduced to mere logic in the same way. And let me tell you, that really confounded me for a long time. I had no model for this kind of relationship. My parents weren’t feelings people, I wasn’t raised as a feelings person—they were logic people. So here was God who refused to be contained by logic. Talking to God helped shake things loose for me. He wants to listen, and sometimes just by trying to talk I would find the words to articulate some problem I was having. Talking to God is not at all like talking to a brick wall—it’s a conversation. You maybe can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but you feel it, sometimes you won’t notice it for a week or a month, but it’s there. Talk to God. He’s waiting for you.
Speaking of God waiting for you, let’s talk briefly about the Eucharist. St. Josemaria Escriva again, he said “When you approach the tabernacle, remember that He has been awaiting you for twenty centuries”. Unlike the Rosary, the Eucharist is a requirement of our faith—it is a sacrament. I had some friends review this talk and originally I hadn’t mentioned the Eucharist. My friend4 suggested I should, and I almost made an excuse for it—he and his wife take turns going to adoration regularly. I haven’t been able to go to adoration in a while, so I wanted to leave it out as a devotion I couldn’t exactly speak to. But I realized I was wrong. I go to adoration every Sunday. And that’s when I realized I needed to include this. The Eucharist is God. If talking to God is hard, try going to adoration and talking to Him there—it’s a striking, jarring experience to behold the monstrance and not just know in your mind but know in your heart that God is enthroned on the altar there. So when you approach the Altar during Mass, and you not only behold God but receive Him into your person—I hope you understand how incredible that is, what a privilege it is, how beautiful it is. That Christ on the Cross had you in mind, and has been waiting through all time in tabernacles around the world to meet you. If you are starting your life as a Catholic and wondering which devotions to go deep on, following the advice of Seneca—maybe start here. The rest will follow.
One last devotional practice. Penance. Penance is a kind of prayer. I didn’t understand this when I first became Catholic. I was deeply ashamed every time I went to confession because I was worried that confession was for bad catholics. That’s not even remotely true. And over 7 years eventually I learned that confession is necessary because we are human. This was brought home to me one time when I was particularly struggling under the weight of my sins, they felt heavy, I was ashamed—I went to the confessional, expecting the priest to rebuke me, to say “how could you do that?” and—he didn’t. He said to say three Hail Mary’s, now give the act of contrition—like it was nothing. Every human needs confession, and Penance is the way we mortify our pride, mortify our souls, mortify our bodies. It’s a way of saying “I’m sorry for what I did”, a way of saying “I’m sorry for what someone else did”. It’s a way of uniting ourselves to Christ’s suffering on the Cross.
And listen, now that you are Catholic—life is going to get hard. Scripture tells us this in Hebrews 12:6: For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth; and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. It’s just the nature of things. It will get hard for one of two reasons: either the evil one is trying to discourage you, or God is trying to bring out the best in you. If life feels good and easy, start doing penances voluntarily before God gives you mortifications involuntarily. A priest gave me this advice once: every lent, try to choose things to give up, or practices to take on, that you will do forever, not just for some 40 day span. Make lent the runway for the rest of your life. And over your entire life—because holiness is a life-long project—you will find yourself growing spiritually. Penance is a kind of prayer, and you can choose it, and it will help your faith life.
Alright, we’ve talked about Charity, we’ve talked about Prayer. Now I want to talk about the Church. Before I get into it, Its worth noting that I started writing this before Pope Francis of blessed memory passed away, and finished writing it after we were given Pope Leo the 14th. There are few occasions when more people with less knowledge are talking about the Catholic Church! So this hopefully will help.
I’m going to open with a lengthy quote from St. Augustine because it sets the tone.
“Let us love our Lord God, let us love His Church: Him as a Father, Her as a Mother: Him as a Lord, Her as His Handmaid, as we are ourselves the Handmaid's sons. But this marriage is held together by a bond of great love: no man offends the one, and wins favour of the other. Let no man say, I go indeed to the idols, I consult possessed ones and fortune-tellers: yet I abandon not God's Church; I am a Catholic. While you hold to your Mother, you have offended your Father. Another says, Far be it from me; I consult no sorcerer, I seek out no possessed one, I never ask advice by sacrilegious divination, I go not to worship idols, I bow not before stones; though I am in the party of [heretics]5. What does it profit you not to have offended your Father, if he avenges your offended Mother? What does it serve you, if you acknowledge the Lord, honour God, preach His name, acknowledge His Son, confess that He sits by His right hand; while you blaspheme His Church?”
On formed there was a video from the Bible Project that describes the Garden of Eden as sitting in the middle of a Venn diagram arranged vertically, the top circle representing heaven, the lower circle representing earth, and where the two met sat the Garden.
The Church occupies that space now. There’s an invisible Church, whose roots are in Heaven; there’s an Earthly Church with buildings made of stone. They overlap each other, like a soul in a body.
Ven. Fulton Sheen once admonished people not to call the Church an institution, it’s not some man-made edifice, a bureaucracy that spans millennia. The Church is a living, mystical body. The Church is variously described as the Bride of Christ and Holy Mother Church. You and I are children, born in the waters of baptism, of this marriage between the Church and Christ. The Church is your holy mother.
So we should love the Church as if she is our own mother.
Now, as new Catholics, you will be bombarded from two directions with news of the Church. In one direction, from non-Catholics trying to dunk on you; in the other direction, from fellow Catholics trying to dunk on other catholics. Ignore both of these. The highest law is Love, the new commandment is love. And as discussed earlier about Charity, you should want the non-Catholics and the Catholics both to go to heaven.
When I first became Catholic, I really struggled in this tension. Like when I was arguing with my dad, I wanted to be right all the time. So it was hard for me to see the news, the bloggers, to see catholics or non-catholics criticizing the Church or people in the Church. I thought I needed to have an opinion on these things, I thought I needed to choose a side. I thought this because I thought the existence of sides meant one had to be right and one had to be wrong. I thought that the Church would struggle if we laity didn’t strive really hard to figure stuff out and tell the Church what the answer is!
I did not understand, when I first became Catholic, that the Church thinks in decades, acts in centuries, remembers for millennia. The Church tackles important, serious issues slowly and so avoids bombast and factionalism. The Church goes to great pains to take the wind out of the sails of any determined ideologues. If an idea can survive through the centuries, maybe it’s good! If an idea dies with it’s proponents, maybe it wasn’t! But if God is with us, who can be against us? So, my friends, if you get nothing else from this talk, please remember this: you do not need to choose a side. You do not need to have an answer to every critique you hear. Sometimes the best thing you can say is “I don’t know but I trust the Church has an answer for this”. Tie yourselves to the masts of the Barque of Peter, and you will avoid much danger. The Invisible Church cannot and will not fail. It will persist on this earth through all time, until the very end. If you never bet against the Church, you can’t lose.
And, listen—the Earthly Church is not as perfect as the Heavenly Church. It’s composed by humans, built by stones. There’s plenty of room for discussion, for learning, for seeking wisdom about decisions that don’t make sense. But never, never, EVER go about saying the Church is wrong. Because you can’t separate the Earthly Church from the Heavenly Church without offending your Holy Mother, and drawing the ire of your Holy Father. People can make mistakes. The Church is indefectible. People can say the wrong thing, the church cannot and will not teach error.
Trust the Church—as the mystical body, and incarnate in your daily life. You and I are lay folk, which means we don’t make decisions. We should support, and seek the wise counsel of our priests, whose job it is to care for us. Whose job it is to represent our interests up the chain to the Bishop, where appropriate; and to tell us what it is important for us to know from the bishop. Pray, pray often, for your priests, and if you hear some news about the church—ignore it. If you must do something, talk to your priest, and ask how you should handle it. Your priest, more likely than not, will tell you something like “pray for the offending party, go to confession as often as necessary, go to Mass at LEAST on Sundays and days of obligation”. In other words, stay close to the sacraments. Because as lay folk, that’s the best thing we can do for the Church and for ourselves. Nothing else in life is as important to us as the sacraments. Not a single thing.
Learn to love the Church, and learn to ignore her detractors. Trust your Holy Mother to give you everything that you need. She’s given you sacraments, she’s given you priests, she’s given you a beautiful millennia-spanning tradition. This is our little Eden—what more could we need?
You’ve just begun your life as Catholics. You’ll learn lessons that I didn’t tell you here, and in 7 years maybe you’ll be giving a similar talk to a crop of new Catholics in 2032. But you’ve done it, you’re in the Church. The easy part is done. The hard part is to just live your life.
What’s new is that you will get to live your lives as Catholics.
God love you!
If having Scoot come to your parish or event to give a talk about Catholicism sounds like your jam, send me a DM or shoot me an email, let’s talk about it!
s u b s c r i b e
The original quote references “Donatus” which is a reference to Donatism, which I had never heard of and presume others would also not be familiar. I figured it’s better to be clear what I’m referring to for the purposes of the talk, but can explain here in the footnote why I changed that word.
"... but there is no proof and sign of predilection more beautiful than this: to pass unnoticed."
That's deep, man. That is so against the spirit of our age, but I like it!
Couldn’t read the whole thing…but I do agree with this…
Don’t complain about someone before you’ve prayed for them!