Mother’s gentle prodding brings drifter back

“Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been about 25 years since my last confession…” When I said it out loud, in the confessional, it shocked me - how long I had been away. But I continued; and so began the event that signified I was actually on a profound journey, a journey back to the faith of my youth, a journey back home.

Unfortunately like many Catholics born during the Baby Boom, and far too many Catholics in total, I had drifted away from my faith, giving up the vigil Mass at Blessed Sacrament parish on Pleasant Street in Worcester for a different kind of vigil somewhat behind and away from Blessed Sacrament, at what we called Our Lady of Newton Hill.

Some who know me now are shocked that I was ever away from the Church, but drift I did, far and wide, such that my wife and I were not married in the Church, and felt almost no compunction to have our first born baptized. I intellectualized this attitude not by dismissing or denying God, I simply felt that if God was great enough to create the entire universe, then God certainly did not need my worship. Of course skipping Mass, as with abandoning the other of God’s precepts, is just so much easier when you rationalize away God’s fatherhood. We need to recognize and avoid projecting our indifference onto God. But God had other plans for me and my new family. So did my mother.

It was my mother who gently prodded my wife and I; wouldn’t it be nice to get our daughter baptized? We could get our marriage blessed by the Church too. I guess it didn’t sound all that difficult. My mother never pushed the hard-sell, nor did she appeal to my pseudo-intellectual pretensions by explaining the beauty of the Church’s doctrine or its art. She simply showed us the baptismal gown that I myself had worn some twenty-nine years earlier, and both my wife and I saw that it was good. So we had our marriage blessed, got our daughter baptized, and even had our son baptized two years later.

Many people experience a conversion, or reversion, after some critical defining event in their life, sometimes even a time of trial or of injury. I have personally met many people who came to realize God’s fatherhood, and the implications for us as His children, while recuperating in the hospital after a severe sickness or injury. Fortunately I did not need to get hit by a bus for God to get my attention.

The coolest Prophet of the Old Testament has got to be Elijah, and I mean cool in a good way, showing up the prophets of the pagan false gods by calling down God’s fire for a sacrifice when these false prophets were left dumbfounded and impotent before their cold sacrificial wood pile. I say cool because Elijah “prepared” his wood pile by pouring water on it – yet the wood pile still ignited. But Elijah was not simply all show. First Kings chapter 19 gives us one of the best descriptions of God, the true “Old Testament” God, not the manufactured popular culture misrepresentation of the angry God of the Old Testament. As Elijah writes; “And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”

You can look for great signs, and marvelous wonders, but God really is in the still small voice as Elijah said. I found out when my own still small voice said, “Bless me father for I have sinned” and I was confirmed of it when the priest’s still small voice said “..and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” If you have not been to confession in a while, a still, small voice is calling you.

– Jay Guillette is a member of the Cathedral
of St. Paul Parish