Essays in Idleness

I wake this morning, at last, “free, white, and twenty-one,” for it is the twenty-first anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church. This occurred on Wednesday, the last day of anno MMIII, and I was the late Father Jonathan Robinson’s catechumen.

One is not born Catholic, though I was myself born free, white, and with other markers of identity and privilege. For instance, I was born male, according to the doctor who delivered me, and to my mother, who was present at the time. As one of more than a billion (human) males alive at that moment, I could not reasonably invest pride in being male, and was generally too young for anything but what Alfred North Whitehead identified as the buzzing, “the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact,” now out of the womb although previously inside it.

“It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.”

And in a certain sense, so is the going to Church. When conversion happens to those of riper years, as I was, it is normally intentional, thus taking one beyond Lucretius, although I am uncertain whether anyone ever got beyond Whitehead.

In my case, it came after a delay of three hundred twenty-and-a-half months, for I had largely accepted the Roman faith on Maundy Thursday, 1976, while crossing the Thames on the Hungerford Bridge. Crossing the Tiber was the consequence of some additional thought and prayer.