Time Past and Time Present

So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.   2 Cor. 5:17

St. Anthony of Padua Church has for many years stood out in my memory as a beautiful church. I say that even though it was only recently that I actually entered the inside of it. I grew up on Compton Street in St. Louis’s near south side in the 1950’s and 60’s, and our family faith was the United Church of Christ. But the impression left by St. Anthony’s tall twin spires, its large stained glass windows and imposing brown doors never left me. Throughout most of my life, though (as Eliot might say), it was the door I never opened.

I was baptized and confirmed at St. Paul United Church of Christ, and my parents, sisters and I attended church every Sunday. My particular religious heritage was somewhat mixed, however, with the line from my paternal grandmother being Catholic, and most of the rest of my European ancestors being Lutheran. Some of the latter, having migrated here in the mid-1800’s, found their way to the United Church of Christ for reasons I was never told. But it does not matter - we were Christians, in an orderly way, in the way society is supposed to be orderly, with a time for work, and a time for play, and a time for God.

For me, the Catholic Church was a mystery. The Catholicism of my grandmother was never talked about, as she had died over thirty years before I was born. I saw it as a way that some people chose to live and believe, though one that I knew little about. On matters of religion, a child sees differences but is taught not to question. Raised by loving parents, taught by caring pastors and Sunday School teachers, I was brought to an “understanding” of God, if not truly a belief and faith.

Still, moving into adulthood, I never forgot the tall spires of St. Anthony of Padua. I had observed them many times through the car window of the old ’36 Ford my Dad drove as we went to visit family in the south city. And as a student at Cleveland High School, walking home, their presence always seemed to attract my recognition. The spires were distinctive and visible even from our home, which was five city blocks to the north. They conveyed a message that stayed in the sub-conscious, unspoken, latent, half-understood, but no doubt influencing a decision I made many years later. Perhaps it was the thought of what must have inspired the people of St. Anthony to build such a beautiful symbol of their belief and faith.

I converted to the Catholic faith well into adulthood. For me and probably for many like me, especially if they practiced their prior faith with any devotion, there is a recurring sense of a need for reconciliation of the new life with the old understanding. A desire for a peaceful harmony of time past and time present. Where the old is not rejected, but merely assimilated and built upon.

Recently, I had occasion to visit St. Anthony of Padua. Not this time to pass by those doors, but to open them and enter. This time as a convert of twenty-plus years. As one who had, over time, fallen in love with the Mass. As one who looked forward to celebrating it in the cathedral-like atmosphere of this beautiful church.

Entering, I had a combined sense of being both a visitor and being at home, as in the restless mingling of our flesh and spirit, the former always conscious of the passage of time, the latter knowing only the present.

But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man's decision but by God.  John 1:12-13