Week 1, and you get to pick what you write, so I’m answering this question:
How would you describe your lived relationship with God to this point in your life?
It was strange to me when I read about how so many Catholics do not have a notion of God as a Person (technically: Persons) with whom one can have a relationship.
I was raised barely Catholic — made my first communion, then spent most of my youth popping in at Palm Sunday and Easter for our annual two-week This Time We’re Going to Start Going Back to Church Every Sunday kick. But I always had a notion of God as someone you talk to, listen to — I wouldn’t have called it “having a relationship”, because I was just a kid. You don’t use those words when you’re a kid. But that’s what it was.
–> Even during my ardently agnostic/pantheistic kick during young adulthood, I still considered God *someone*. I might have claimed He was this Force Blah Blah Blah, but in practice, yes, a Person. You don’t chat with a Force.
The big thing that pushed me back towards the Church was the alarming discovery that I had somehow gotten so far away from God that I couldn’t feel His presence anymore — I was visiting one of the historic mission churches around San Antonio, and was deeply disturbed to drop into an active parish — sanctuary lamp lit — and feel *nothing*. It was so dead wrong I knew I was in trouble.
And the rest is details. I asked God to help me*, and He did. Here I am.
Find more answers over at CatholicMom.com. As always, feel free to share your own answers, or a link thereto, in this combox.
*By “ask”, I mean: Desperately pleaded. Tears. Lamenting. Wailing? Maybe kinda, yeah. Not on the San Antonio trip, but a little bit later, riding down 81/77 in southwest VA. In the privacy of my own vehicle, thank you. I’m not a public-weeper if I can help it.
