Disturbing beauty.

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As I was reviewing my profile regarding a wife, looking at my list, I decided to deconstruct the list.  I wanted to tear each piece apart.  I wanted to see what could be negotiated, how much negotiation room there is, and what lines negotiations might take.  I think I chose which of the three listed requirements to question first badly.  No, not that everything can't be questioned.  Merely that if you start with something that cannot be completed, the projects that must follow it are also delayed.  As is I started with my notion regarding finding a woman able and willing to be married within the Church, the Catholic Church.

I thought the process of creating debate for this would be easy.  I would either take a few steps in, find a dead end, and move on... or I would trek through thought after thought, ending at some solution or set of solutions.  From the outside it may look like logic is a simple device, to be applied to apples, oranges, fruit pies, family, girlfriends, or whatever else may be presented.  Some things simply don't work like that.  This is one of those.

While I was freethinking the thing hit me that I should start from the start.  Why am I Catholic, well, to within my knowledge of even what all that means?  If I don't know that, I cannot know what it means to me.  I can't give Catholicism a value, a social or intellectual or spiritual currency basis, without comparison, understanding, requiring some thought.  I realized the seed of my conversion, the initial seeds, where probably from initial understandings.  I had been Catholic for a very short time when I was quite young, if little of that was functional.  Actually, the only thing I do remember is being in a Catholic grade school for about six months, part of either the first or second grade.  That was it.  And we didn't go to Church much, either.  That was about the sum of my introduction to Catholicism.

I did try to find God.  As a child, we moved a great deal, yearly at least, as I have mentioned.  We almost always lived in small agricultural towns.  Often there was only one church, always Protestant.  So, I would go to what was available.  I began reading and such, looking, seeking, wondering.  Oh, and there are good, great, Christians out there who are not Catholic.  And there are not so great Christians out there, me being among them.  We do what we may.  I never did find what I was looking for, eventually I drifted to secular social life.

It wasn't until after my third scrape with death that I, re-awoke?  I had seen something there.  Something wondrous.  Though even now I won't say it was more than oxygen deprivation.  But it did move me.  Having been close enough to death that only a feather would have tipped the balance forever, and twice so painfully that I was sobbing for my mother, I later came to believe that... what I had experienced that second time was as close to being near God as a human can get before actual death.  The love I felt was immeasurable.  This was the actual conscious adult seed that sent me on a search for God again, and what led me to Catholicism through accepting and rejecting this and that notion about family, faith, all, and God.

Having cried for my mother once, in part due to nearly delirium inducing pain, I thought the thing was a fluke.  I was not on good terms with my mother either of those times, for my part.  But when it happened the second time, I realized there was something more to my wanting her near me than I had allowed myself to admit.  The love of a mother is an extremely potent thing.  I reminded myself of those guys I had literally knocked out, who always suggested they had slipped on something.  *BaM*  I too was trying to say... I had slipped on something.  Well, and I did.  When humility is beyond rejection, there was the love.  What I realized in that last dying was that God's love was well beyond even the love I held for my mother, if those two things are the only thing so powerful I have ever encountered.  I try not to think about it too often.  It sort of rips me up when I do.  But I know it, intimately.  While, if dying painfully again, I realize I will still call for my mother... I know these two things.  Give unto Caesar what is Caesar, and moms are one of our Caesars.  And, mother is another name for a form of the love of God.  All of this is wrapped up in the notion of family.  It is as close to God as we can get without nearing or actually dying.

Call me a ninny, a crybaby.  Deny my death, deny my vision.  Don't deny my words upon your very soul.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  Trust me, it's a bargain.  Imagine buying the Mona Lisa for a dollar, then stretch that beyond your imagination.  For that is a weak, nearly negligible, example.

In short, being married Catholic stays.  I'm in no shape, now, to revisit the other propositions.  All men are equal when their memory fades, probably as it fades too.  Even an ogre can cry, and know what real love is worth.  It is simply everything.  That is why I am a Catholic.