The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, by Ronald Rolheiser, was the second of two books I read while going through RCIA this year.

RCIA is Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. It’s part of the process of joining the Catholic Church. I didn’t start the class intending the join the Catholic Church. I am Protestant, Conservative Baptist by upbringing, and I was comfortable with that flavor of Christianity.

I started taking the class because after going to Catholic Mass with my family for years, I wanted to better understand the beliefs that my kids were learning in Faith Formation.

I also wanted to better understand the rituals and beliefs for myself so that going to church could have greater meaning. Our church doesn’t have nursery or children’s church, which I believe is typical for Catholic churches. I have to filter Mass while sitting in a pew full of humanity. There is whispering and paper airplanes on a good Sunday, lost children and loud wails on a bad week. Understanding the underlying meaning behind the tradition felt critical for me if I was going to get the most out of an experience that is often stressful and full of distraction.

When I first started the class, I thought we would be meeting for a few weeks. We started in the fall, and I was surprised to find I was be meeting with three veteran Christians each week for an hour, and that they anticipated the class would continue through Easter.

I balked. I’ve already added dancing and meditation to my life this year. I wasn’t sure if I was willing to commit to months of a class when my end goal wasn’t even the same as the stated purpose of the class – for me to join the Catholic Church.

Beyond that, the first book we read was really difficult for me. It was basically a textbook of Catholic beliefs, without a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. The early weeks and months of the class felt like a physical struggle as I worked through the ideas and challenged my teachers to defend or explain what we were reading.

Initially, I thought the reason I couldn’t join the Church was that I didn’t believe in the Transubstantiation, the belief that during Communion, the bread and wine actually become Christ’s body and blood.

Two things brought me around. First was my gradual realization that Catholics and Protestants just choose to interpret different parts of scripture as literal and figurative. I didn’t know till I was an adult that Genesis contains TWO Creation stories. When the Chaplain first told me, it sounded like heresy. It’s really important to the Protestant tradition I grew up with that the earth was created in six days.

But the Bible ALSO says that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ. I read that section of scripture over and over again and couldn’t deny that was what it said. This led to a kind of crisis of conscience, because I realized it was there, but I didn’t believe that it was true.

It was my divine encounter on my psilocybin trip that brought me around. I went in feeling stuck about many things, and one of them was the way I understood communion. I came out unstuck. After I had that realization, I told my Team of Three that I wanted to pursue joining the church after all.

The whole way through the first book we used, the Deacon who led the class kept mentioning The Holy Longing and how he couldn’t wait to get to it and how good it was. I was afraid it wouldn’t live up to the hype, but I figured it would probably be better than the first book we’d read.

It was much, much better. The Holy Longing combines the faith of the mystics with practical explanation and application. The connections Rolheiser makes are powerful and memorable, and it helped me think about things in new ways. Like After the Ecstacy, the Laundry, Rolheiser is able to pick out the threads in our lives that connect us to one another. He isn’t afraid of truth, nor is he afraid to challenge us to make sure our lives are a full reflection of our faith.

Jacques Maritain, the great Catholic philosopher, once stated that one of the great spiritual tragedies is that so many people of good will would become persons of noble soul, if only they would not panic and resolve the painful tensions within their lives too prematurely, but rather stay with them long enough, as one does in a dark night of the soul, until those tensions are transformed and help give birth to what is most noble inside of us – compassion, forgiveness, and love. – Ronald Rolheiser

Over the weeks that we met, I came to appreciate the unique perspective each of the Team of Three brought to our group, and I grew with respect for these people who were willing to give up so many hours of their time to help me wrestle with, and ultimately own, my faith.

This weekend I’ll be joining my church community through Confirmation and Communion. I’ll be taking Communion for the first time with a new understanding of its meaning.

The Holy Longing was a fitting end cap to the work of RCIA. The ideas are practical and enduring. It is a book that could and ought to be read and re-read.