It’s not about comfort

+JMJ+ (We’re continuing our series on Catholicism 101 or What is Christianity.) People have said to me, people who should know better, but the secular world has gotten to them and their minds have been affected and they have said things like, “I understand why you need religion, it gives you comfort.”

WHAT? As if I converted to Catholicism because I was seeking comfort. Boy, did one of us get a wrong number! This is the religion that expects me to make an examen of conscience every evening before I go to bed. To meditate on my eventual (or not so eventual) and inevitable death. To remember that from dust I came and to dust I shall return. To mortify myself, my desires, my appetites. To pick up my cross daily and follow Him, the One Who was nailed to His cross, by the way, lest we forget that part that doesn’t exactly exude any kind of comfort I ever heard of.

Then there’s this whole thing of Lent we’ve been going through for the last few weeks. Fasting, praying, almsgiving. And Sunday begins Holy Week leading up to the Passion of the Lord. There is nothing about making ourselves comfortable in any of that. When we remember that our sins are the ones that He bore, that we are the reason He came to Earth and performed miracles, and gave us His teachings, and let people spit on Him and mock Him and beat Him to within an inch of His life, and then crucify Him so that He died a most horrible and painful death. Comfort? Don’t be absurd.

I am not Catholic because I found it to be comfortable or a way to receive comfort. I am Catholic because I became and remain convinced that Catholicism is true, that the Bible is true, that Christ is Who He says He is, that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no man comes to the Father but by Him, and that to be Christian in the fullest sense, with the fullness of Truth and the full Gospel is to be Catholic.

There may be other reasons people will give for why they are Catholic. But, really, the only reason you need is this one:

Because it’s true.

For the paradox of the truth that Jesus offers is that his presence within us conforms us more closely to him, and its grasp upon us increases the more we give his truth to those who have not yet received it. There are no zero-sum games in the economy of salvation, which is the expression in time of the ever-giving, ever-receiving truth, goodness and beauty of the Holy Trinity..
Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches, by George Weigel (see notes below).

Thank you for visiting and reading. Feel free to comment or leave feedback. May this Lenten season, and the Holy Week right around the corner, bring us to the knowledge of and love for the Cross of our Lord. May we pick up our own and follow Him with ever more love and faithfulness. God bless you, every one, and may His peace be always with you. +JMJ+

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Notes and Links

Meditation on the Liturgy, by George Weigel, an excerpt from his book on the Station Churches (see below).
Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches, by George Weigel: Hardcover, Kindle, Audible audiobook, MP3 CD (Amazon affiliate links, see Full Disclosure below).

Image: In the banner, Entry into Jerusalem. Other: Intocht in Jeruzalem, Palm Sunday, by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, public domain.

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