Yes, it is official. I was received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church at the Saturday Easter Vigil at my parish this year. So many of my friends made it out to support me. I love my parish, my Church and my priests. I am so very, very blessed. Receiving Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist for the first time was soberingly exciting. I have tried to make it to daily Mass every day this past week. I am so happy. I so long to be a holy woman. I welcome any and all of your prayers. I'm truly home and I want to live and breathe the fullness of the faith which Jesus has given to His Bride, His Church. Thanks you so much, all of my friends, who came out to partake of our Lord and my joy in being received into His Church!!!
Well, I had an old girl friend from high school and college drive up to see me this weekend. It was good to catch up. The first thing she said when she set her bags down in my room was, "So you're Catholic now? What made you decide that?" Good times. We had some lovely conversations. Although, we did waste a good hour and a half surfing the internet together and looking up old friends from our high school and college days. Some of our discoveries were disturbing, I must say. But the useful part of it all is that I just felt so thankful to have our Lord, to have His Church, and to have so many friends who long to please Him as well. (Thank You so much, Lord, for where you have brought me. Please, "grant that I may love you always and then do with me as You will"!)
As I awoke this morning, my friend was still sound asleep. So I took advantage of the quite moment and the secure feeling I have when a friend is near to do some quality reading. I picked up Fulton Sheen's Guide to Contentment. It's a quick read, really. One particular part that I enjoyed was on the issue of "love at first sight". Here comes the typical long quote . . . ;-D
A young man may know and appreciate a number of young women, and yet in the depths of his soul remain unmoved. And then one day, a woman with no conscious purpose will release some secret spring in the depths of his personality, and from that moment on, she becomes the center of the world.
What creates this new condition? It may have been knowledge of her character and personality, but it may also have been rather spontaneous, or what is called love at first sight.
One may ask if each of us does not really carry in his or her own heart a blueprint of the one that he or she loves. This blue-print is made by our reading, our prayers, our experiences, our hopes, our ideals, by our mother and father. Then suddenly the ideal becomes concretized and realized in a person, and we say, "This is it."
Each of us carries around in his own heart the music that he loves. We hear a certain kind of music for the first time, and we immediately love it. It satisfies the rhythm and the tempo that are already inside our hearts. Love at first sight may be incomprehensible, but it is a fact, nonetheless. In the end it may not be first sight; it may be just a dream coming true. (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1967. pg 23-24.)
I can tell I'm going to love this book. It deals with much more than romantic love, it focuses also on our affections in general and how our "loves" orient us toward virtue or vice.
Easter Blessings! Christ is Risen!
Natalie
