We were three happy chappies. We ran cross country together, rode our bikes and did what we pleased.
And then everything changed.
The contrast was hard to comprehend. Before we were just good ol’ boys, playing basketball, hanging out. We had met on the cross country team in our public high school. John was a year older than me, his family having moved into our blue-collar neighborhood to escape the changing neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side.
Steve was a year younger, and attended one of the three Catholic parishes in town. The loyalty of youth is strong, and we stuck together like magnets. Our world was formed together as we ran, played tennis, and talked about everything under the sun.
But religion was a non-issue. As far as I knew, each of us went to Mass with our families. But our life at school wound around hobbies, friends, sports, and girls. We didn’t mock religion, as some do when they get older. It’s just that issues of God just didn’t come up on our radar screens.
In fact, the larger world around us had suddenly changed. For years, Catholics had nourished the great cities of America with a strong Catholic presence, training its members to honor God, defend the country and culture, work hard, stay with your family and respect the marriage bed.
Everything but God
But the tables had turned. I’m not saying that the good ol’ days were perfect, but you cannot deny the cultural revolution that hit western society like a huge meteor smashing into the earth in the mid-60s.
And our family for one had been unprepared. We, like millions of other families, had no tools to deal with or understand this cultural change. It seemed that Christianity had been pushed out of the public square, scorned for being an anachronism and guilty of ignoring modern ways.
In our public school there were no Bible clubs, as you sometimes see today. Although the city was probably mostly Catholic, we, like many others were pulled into a secular culture likes bodies flowing downstream who don’t know they are dead.
The new books were fluff
The clear teaching of the Baltimore Catechism that I had in classes up to the fourth grade in my Catholic school faded more and more into the past. The new religion books were fluff, and I knew it. But I didn’t know that the new religion was not really the real religion. This cardboard version of the faith didn’t amount to much. As far as my family, my parents had me attend parish catechism classes for public high schoolers, but the parish dropped the program early on for some reason.
And suddenly the three of us guys – religious orphans in fact – found ourselves sitting in church pews, forming Bible studies, singing hymns, playing guitars, and talking about God.
What happened? We all had converted to Jesus Christ, plain and simple. It was the mid-70’s, and the Holy Spirit was moving throughout the Catholic Church as well as fundamentalist denominations. Nothing would be the same from now on.
(Photo credit for Chicago skyline: Unsplash, Lance Anderson)
