Coming Home

Part one of however many...

It's been just over a year since I came back to the Church. Memorial Day weekend, 2007, my wife and I found out that we were going to have a baby. That started a whole list of things that I had to do to get ready, and one of the biggest ones was to get back to Church.

It wasn't that I ever stopped being Catholic, really. I just stopped practicing. I was the classic "lapsed Catholic" - I would go every once in a while, maybe even for a few weeks, then something would come up, and I'd stop again. I didn't have any interest in going anywhere else. I just didn't bother to go.

Honestly, going to Mass every Sunday is in many ways a habit. That's not a bad thing, really. Habits aren't intrinsically bad things, even though people tend to think of bad habits. There are good habits too, like exercise, flossing your teeth, or going to Mass every week.

I lost the habit when I went to college. Too many Saturday nights ended too late, and Sunday morning ended up being used to recover. After I dropped out of school, I worked nights, including - more often than not - Saturday night. And after slinging stock for nine or ten hours, all I wanted to do was go to sleep.

...to be continued....