Since we’re on the (inevitable) subject of the ’60s: here’s my conversion story , written back in the early ’80s, which describes my hippie-to-Catholic journey. This is the source of the Byrds/Dylan reference to which Daniel refers in a comment on the ’60s thread below.
Although, as I note in an epilogue written last summer, I might change some details of it if I were writing it now, it still represents my views pretty well on both the personal and cultural levels. Wish I could say something more positive about my current relationship with the Church, but at least I’m still here, and I ain’t goin’ nowhere (what’s that from?).
—Maclin Horton
Thank you.
I was born in 1972, and I have hated the 60s for quite some time now. I had viewed 60s “revolutionaries” as spoiled brats who didn’t understand the sacrifices their parents made for them (defeating nazism, rebuilding the economy after the depression, etc…).
However, reading your autobiographical piece has given me an insight I didn’t have before, and matter to think about for several hours.
I had not realized that the motivating factor for much of 60s radicalism had been a sense that everything was without purpose. Of course, I didn’t think that such things motivated people until the punk movement of the 80s, and didn’t really get going until the grunge movement of the 90s, when the overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of all things knocked me off my horse.
It is comforting to know that the struggle I went through finding the Church in the dark is the same struggle people have faced for generations and centuries. Wasn’t it Pilate who said “quid est veritas?” I don’t suppose that is too different from saying “freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose” or “I hurt myself today to see if I still feel”–this last one is from Nine Inch Nails, a 90s grunge band.
Thanks for sharing “Bringing It All…”; all of us who are converts do, probably, recognise aspects, at least, of our own journeys to belief etc. in yours–I myself was intrigued most by your relations with Liturgy. My own resolution of the unhappiness, nonsense and worse etc occasioned by the deformation so often encountered in parish churches takes the form, ‘well, I have been blessed to experience the Liturgy at its most beautiful [long recounting of where and how]; now I must await the true celebration in Heaven’: it has taken many years to get to the point where I can honestly hold/feel this (rather than secretly harboring disgust at, resentment of, those responsible for the travesties of Liturgy). Which is, of course, n o t to say that responsibility for t.s of L. somehow just dissolves into the ether.
I don’t know which rite you follow, but I have noticed other bloggers say that they found liturgical richness in the Eastern Rites of the Church. Have you looked there?
I am from the same era and became a Christian in 1971. I was baptized in the Episcopal church and became a Roman Catholic 9 months later. It is still true for me that the Book of Common Prayer and that tradition of hymns are the most powerful expressions of worship for me, despite 30 years as a Catholic. I stayed away for 30 years but have recently been attending an Episcopal church with my husband was baptized two years ago and started attending an Episcopal church. (I still go to mass,Saturday evenings and most weekdays.)
In my conversion I had the advantage of going to St. John’s College in Annapolis Maryland, where some of my modern materialist (in the sense of thinking that nothing exists except matter and energy) assumptions were strongly challeged by a year spent reading Plato and Aristotle.
I have told my story on the web…once embarrassingly, on a Mormon site that I had accidentally linked to through one of the Catholic legal blogs…someone asked me how I came to be against abortion….I didn’t know I was on a Mormon site and told my Catholic convert story. They were very kind about it. I also told it from another slant recently at Pontifications, where my point was that I couldn’t think that Anglican orders and therefore the Anglican eucharist, were invalid and empty, since that was how God converted me.
Right now I am at work and can’t write more. But I just wanted to let you know I was moved by your story, and by thinking that you were out there somewhere going through this, while I was in Annapolis, following my own path. (By 76, though, I had two kids and was pregnant with the third, taking my two toddlers and my big belly to daily mass at St. Mary’s, where I had been received into the church.)
Thanks for sharing this.
Susan F. Peterson
Thank you all for your interest and/or compliments.
Ben,
The diagnosis of a sense of purposelessness as a factor in the ’60s is of course mine and isn’t necessarily what was consciously in the minds of the participants. Still, I believe it was a significant factor. Also, there was a certain amount of darkness in the spirit of the ’60s that tends to get left out of the conventional story. I probably don’t have to tell you about the Velvet Underground or the Doors. That kind of influence, I would argue, was greater than usually realized, because they weren’t as hugely popular as say Simon & Garfunkel. But they were very popular among the hard-core freaks.
That being said, the simple spoiled brat syndrome you mention was definitely a factor, too. I mean, we did experience an unprecedented level of material ease which we took entirely for granted.
I guess you know Johnny Cash recorded that NiN song not too long before he died?
Marc and Thomas,
The liturgy for which I long actually exists, in the Anglican Use parishes, of which there are only a handful. I’ve actually considered moving to an area that has one of these, but for various reasons have not and probably will not. There is something about that language that goes to my heart. There is no Eastern rite church in my area, but if there were I’m not at all sure I would respond to it as many people obviously do. Maybe Daniel will chime in on this–he’s been attending an Eastern rite (forget which one) liturgy.
Susan,
I see we are of similar minds about the Anglican liturgy. I have kind of had an eye out for one of those breakaway Anglican churches with Catholic leanings where I could just go and visit once in a while, but the only ones I’ve found in my area are more charismatic or else very low-church. Re the latter–this is kind of funny–I literally peeked in the window of a local Anglican church a few weeks ago. It looked like a Presbyterian church, no altar at all.
I’m kind of troubled by the Anglican orders thing, too. Don’t have enough theological expertise to get involved in the argument, although it does occur to me that I’ve unquestionably received God’s grace and guidance from Protestant sources that don’t even claim to have orders, so maybe that doesn’t matter.
Yes, it is odd (or something) to think of someone else on the same path so long ago. Even odder (or something): one of my children graduated from SJA in 2003. Great school, although a possible down side of it is a tendency to think all questions should be perpetually open.
I belong to a Ruthenian [Carpatho-Rusin] Catholic church, and also attend a Romanian Catholic church regularly. I had attended Byzantine churches from time to time and always thought the liturgy lovely, if a bit exotic. I always said that I would always remain a Latin Catholic, as I had [and have] a great love for so much of the Western tradition. Of course, the things I love in that tradition can be hard to find in today’s liturgical climate.
What changed my mind was the week I spent at an iconography workshop in Illinois, at a Romanian Catholic parish. The day began each morning with the Divine Liturgy. By week’s end, besides an abiding love for the act of iconography, I had a new familiarity with the Liturgy. It no longer seemed like a beautiful but strange thing. It also is more attuned to the spirituality of an iconographer.
And I no longer come home from Sunday worship starved for beauty; it is a foretaste of heaven every week. The current state of the Church, where it too often takes an act of blind faith to believe that something mystical is taking place, is intolerable. In worship, your very senses should lead to awe.
To return to the topic at hand [Maclin’s conversion story]: I read this originally way back when in the National Catholic Register. Though I was raised Catholic in the upper Midwest and Maclin was raised Protestant in the South, there were so many affinities in our search and our experiences that I wrote him care of the Register. This lead to a correspondence, which lead to a friendship, which lead to a magazine….
I would die happy if I could find an Anglican rite Catholic parish. I so miss my Anglican liturgy, but I stay away because I need truth more than I need beauty. I am angry, however, that I can’t have both in the same place. My dear husband, who graduated from High School in 1967 and actually attended college in the SF area from 1967 to 1971, gets this bemused and terribly patient expression when I rant about the modern Catholic liturgy and the quasi-heretical hymns. He, you see, was a cradle Catholic and takes a very long range view about how the church will eventually purge the excesses and clean up the bad taste….
Just got back to this thread so I don’t know if you will see this, but it seems one of your kids and at least one of mine were at St. John’s at the same time. I have one, John, who will be graduating this year, so he would have started in 01-02.(or, I think, as a Febbie in 02, actually.) I am embarrassed that I can’t remember what year my son Lars graduated..he was born in 80..that would have put him graduating in 02. That’s right, he and John were only on campus together for one semester. So, did your son know either of them?
Susan