Home in the Church: Living an Embodied Catholic Faith

By Jessica Ptomey

A Catholic covert and scholar discusses why it’s important to retain ritual and spiritual symbolism in modern Christian faith.

While many Catholics feel a pull to conform to the conventions of modern culture, Home in the Church offers an inspiring call back to a distinctly Catholic way of living. It shares a vision of Mother Church as the home on earth that will lead us to our heavenly home. Author and Catholic convert Jessica Ptomey describes her journey to a more embodied Christian faith in the Catholic Church, and she invites readers to discover—or rediscover—the same experience. 

Home in the Church explores the various elements of church liturgy, teaching, and tradition that help believers to live a faith that is embodied—lived out body, mind, and soul. Home in the Church discusses the embodied nature of faith in the home, in the celebrations of the liturgical calendar, in the liturgy of the Mass, in personal prayer, in the intercession of the saints, in the sacraments, and in a redemptive view of suffering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642797091

Book preview

Preface

There is a common sentiment among converts that becoming Catholic is like coming home . I had known and loved Christ my whole life, but not until age thirty did I discover and come to love His holy Catholic and apostolic Church. And it is my active life within His Church that has drawn me closer to the reality of my eternal home with Him. Ultimately, my faith’s home is in the Catholic Church because she shows me how not to be at home on this earth. She points me continually to heaven through her liturgies, sacraments, prayers, teachings, and traditions. Though a shelter of great protection and solace, she disrupts my tendencies to be contented with the ends of this world. She is the tangible and tactile vessel that is carrying me faithfully to my eternal destination…leading me ever homeward.

From the Hall to Home

I grew up with Awanas and Missionnettes, Vacation Bible Schools and summer youth camps, Sunday School and Wednesday night Youth Group. I attended Bryan College, founded by William Jennings Bryan of the famous Scopes Monkey Trials, in Dayton, TN. I did my graduate work at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, where I met my husband, Mike. By all accounts, I am a product of Evangelicalism; and I have it to thank for many good and great experiences in my life—the greatest of which is my personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

I would describe my former self as an Evangelical because that umbrella was a constant in my Christian upbringing, much more so than the ever-changing denomination of the church we were currently attending. Throughout my childhood and adolescence my family attended numerous and divergent Protestant churches. My experience moving in and out of various Christian denominations and experiencing the theological differences and disunity of them all was perhaps the greatest impetus for my openness to Catholicism. In my late twenties, as my husband and I specifically questioned aspects of Protestantism, I consciously went through a period I can only describe as nomadic faith. I felt homeless. During this period of searching, all I had to hold on to was Christ and what C. S. Lewis describes as "Mere" Christianity—basic Orthodox faith. I never lost that, though many post-Evangelicals my age had left Orthodoxy behind completely. That mere Christian faith offered a shelter during our faith journey, but not a home. I now realize that I had actually been living under this lean-to much of my Christian life. I am desperately grateful for it, as many people have no gift of inherited faith at all; but as Lewis observes, affirmation of those basic tenets of Christian Orthodoxy is not meant to be a substitute for participating in a particular creed and communion. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms…, says Lewis, but it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.¹

I didn’t realize before that I had been living in the hall most of my life. I needed a home for my faith, not just a shelter or a lean-to to get me by. I knew instinctively that the concept of church was important, that we were not meant to be spiritually homeless people. I was not sure what the Church was supposed to look like. I was pretty sure the structures I had experienced growing up were missing important elements, but that did not mean the Church established by Jesus Christ in the first century no longer existed; the fact that my soul was seeking it made me think it must exist. And if it did exist, I would know it when I found it, because I would encounter the fullness of Christ there.

Searching for the truth often involves a period of waiting; and looking for a home means you will be wandering for some amount of time. My husband and I waited, homelessly, for about six years in the hall of our mere Christian faith. As we entered different doors one by one, we found ourselves being led through various passageways that kept connecting back to the same room—the Catholic Church. We entered to a vibrant fire that had been burning since Christ’s apostles walked the earth, to ancient chairs that had held saints from centuries before, and to a Eucharistic meal that fed souls like no other. We knew we had found a place in which to live, a home for our faith, because we encountered Christ in that room more fully than we ever had before. We had no need to go back into the hall; our waiting was over. We had found Mother Church, and we were ready to start living in this new home.

Introduction

My desire is to take you on a journey with me of discovering Catholicism as the home it is meant to be—the sacramental, liturgical, life-giving dwelling where we encounter Christ. But to do that, we have to understand what kind of home it is; and we have to realize that it is a fundamentally different place to live and way of living than we may be accustomed to in modern American culture. The Holy Spirit drew me into the Church through many avenues of grace—the ancient liturgy, the sacramental theology, and the various rituals and traditions. However, coming out of the hall and into my new home in the Catholic Church did not mean I automatically knew how to live in it. There is a difference between acquiring intellectual knowledge that leads you through the doors of Catholicism and becoming an active participant in the revealed truth— living in it . Catholic practices and rituals were not suddenly intuitive the day I was confirmed. With practice, they would become more and more automatic in my faith life over time; but other intuitions would also have to become unpracticed over time.

Growing up in modern American culture, most of us have inherited a Christian faith that is interwoven with modernist thought; so we tend to view elements of our world, our faith included, according to principles that stem from the Enlightenment—namely, that all truth is reduced to observable, non-paradoxical collections of facts that impact our lives by our thinking about them. (Remember Descartes’ mantra, I think; therefore, I am?) Because a modernist approach is so ingrained in our culture, we automatically approach daily Christian life from this assumption that we are primarily thinking beings—disembodied brains on stick figures—and we are actually no more aware of this operating assumption than we are aware of the very air we breathe moment by moment. It’s the norm.

Philosophy of religion scholar James K. A. (Jamie) Smith aptly summarizes the impact modernism has had on the life of our faith: Modern Christianity tends to think of the church either as a place where individuals come to find answers to their questions or as one more stop where individuals can try to satisfy their consumerist desires.² Strains of American Protestantism have particularly deep roots in modernistic thinking;³ and though the Catholic Church’s foundation in ancient Christian thought and practice provides a stark contrast to modernistic expressions of American Christianity, many modern Catholics and Catholic institutions have been significantly impacted by a modernist mindset as well.

Our journey toward a lived-in Catholic faith cannot be primarily approached as a job for the intellect, in hopes that understanding the theological arguments and truth of the sacraments and liturgy will automatically transmit their impact in our lives. It is actually the practice of our Catholicism that will transform our Catholic identities. There is a poignant saying attributed to Saint Francis de Sales: You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working, and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves. What St. Francis is describing is an embodied faith—a faith that is realized in the practice of it.

Let me give you a practical example of how powerful this concept of embodiment is. During one epic Maryland winter storm (we are talking four feet of snow), I had my garage all moved around to accommodate our van and truck, plus everything else that was already in the garage. It was a tight fit, and we had to arrange everything in sort of a puzzle to get it all in there. I had to walk around the truck, squeezing by, to put things in the trash or recycle bins for about two weeks. It was a pain, and I couldn’t wait to get the truck moved out and the garage back to normal once all the snow had been removed. However, the day I moved everything back, I started walking the wrong direction to put bags in the trash—I had learned a new habit (whether I liked it or not), and intellectually knowing that the trash cans were back in their original locations did not automatically translate to me walking to that location. If this is what can happen with my practice of taking out the trash, what are the implications for the practice of spiritual habits and our worship of God?

My understanding of embodied faith took shape in 2009, toward the middle of six years of church homelessness, and this discovery was actually a strong catalyst for me beginning to consider the Catholic Church. I was completing my doctoral dissertation when, through my research, I realized how much my Christian faith, in practice and belief, had been impacted by modernist presuppositions (those assumptions about the world that we bring to all of our experiences). I engaged the question: If modernism has set much of Christianity on the wrong path, then how do we get back to a more faithful one? I found the answer in reading Jamie Smith’s work on cultural liturgies. He says that since we are not first and foremost thinking beings, but rather, desiring beings, we were created to love. We were created to think as well, obviously; but we were created in love and for love in the first place. Smith goes on to say that what we love we worship, and we all worship something.⁴ And what is it that determines our love? Our habits. What we repeatedly do, what we practice over and over again, is the thing that makes evident and real our love and our worship. An embodied faith is rooted in the concept that we feel our way around our world more than we think our way through it.⁵

My paradigm was being turned on its head. So, it’s less about how much I think about and study Christian doctrine that