B. U. G. S.

After my second nervous breakdown the friends I still had in Washington were all Catholics.

Hard-core Catholics.

Conservative Catholics? That is one hell of an understatement.

I have no use for anybody who believes in an omnipotent God of Heaven and Hell and then tries to make this concept reasonable and acceptable to Modern Thought. He is speaking a language that means nothing to me.

If there is no Heaven or Hell religion is silly.

And believe me, at that point in my life I could believe in Hell. You think I am joking?

DEFINITELY no joke.

In my state “Creo in Deo Crudel,” “I believe in a cruel God,” made perfect sense to me. I gave it a one percent chance of being true.

Being true FOREVER.

At that time I was also very interested in the Shroud of Turin. It was inexplicable, and I was ready to be convinced.

One never wholly sheds the faith he was raised in.

So I went to the only religious friends I had. Calvinists required a faith I could not mustger.

Myy friends were so Catholic they weren’t Catholics any more. All of them had decided that, since Vatican II, the pope wasn’t really Catholic any more.

You think I’m joking, don’t you?

Paul Weyrich and the others had gone to the Eastern Rite. They would have gone to the Orthodox Church if the theologians had not stood in the door blocking their way.

So I joined Paul’s church, in which he later became a deacon. That is the order just below priest.

Jesus forgave the repentent thief, so the idea that he had passed on the power to forgive sins made sense to me.

Politics is everything.

By my connections, I got a benefit. To become a member of this sort of church normally requires a year as a catechumen. It took me three months, which was the amount of time I had in DC during that particular assignment.

I spent a lot of my time worrying about the “tonsure.” In order to join you had to have a new baptism and a “tonsure.”

I kept thinking about going around with a monkish haircut, the whole top of my head bald, until the hair grew back.

It turn out this was a fortunate. In fact, the “tonsure” was just cutting a tiny bit of hair off. I still have the hair along with my baptismal certificate. But worrying about weeks with a bald head kept me from minding the baptism too much.

And the baptism was something else.

The Orthodox baptism makes you Baptists look like a bunch of amateurs. I was staying with my ex-wife, and on the day of my baptism I put on a bathing suit. I had to explain to her that I was being baptised.

Being a good Odinist, she had a little trouble understanding why you had to wear a bathing suit when being baptized.

Oh well, you know how ignorant these heathens are.

In the Orthodox Church and the Melkite Church you are not just immersed in water the way the Baptists do it. You are taken to the huge font which is filled with oil and water — you can certainly feel the oil, Lord knows how much they put in — and you are shoved under three times.

Which is just the start.

Over your bathing suit you are given a thin white robe to wear. You are soaking wet and your hair is oily.

There is more ceremony, then you have to stand in front of an icon during the entire church service with a wooden cross in one hand and a burning candle in the other.

Did I mention you are soaking wet and you don’t comb your hair?

Have you ever stood motionless for a solid hour with candle in one hand while you are soaking wet?

Probably not.

For one thing, the candle drips. Having wax on a hand is like having a nose itch. But you have a cross in your other hand.

Have you ever stood for a solid hour, soaking wet, while your nose itches and both hands are full and you have to think nothing but Elevated Thoughts because you have just been baptized and you really want to be good and earn the trust the priest and Paul Weyrich have placed in you by giving you a short catechumen?

Probably not.

At the end of the hour, the service ends with the taking of the bread and wine. The priest had told me that the catechumen was served FIRST, even if a bishop was present.

I wanted to have my Holy Supper soonest for purely spiritual reasons. But the physical part of me was anxious too. It wanted to stop standing there with the nose itch and both hands full as soon as it could.

The priest totally forgot I was there. So I stood there while everybody else went up front and took the bread and wine. Finally I just put down my burden and got to the back of the line.

I never reminded the priest he had forgotten me.

I also never demanded what I should have gotten for this ordeal:

A medal that declared me a Martyr, Second Class.