Actually, after a long while making my spiritual communion, I myself was only just confirmed this past Easter vigil. So I hear ‘ya: One feels the incongruity of blogging on Catholic topics with such passion, before having received all the usual sacraments!

(But it’s fine, of course. Imagine how Chesterton felt, defending the faith with increasingly obvious Catholic loyalties for all those years, before finally becoming a Catholic!)

Y’know, there seems to me a sort of odd symmetry, you and me getting chrismated so nearly the same time.

Anyhow, congratulations, and God’s grace and peace and blessings to you, Joe.

Awesome! Welcome Soldiers of Christ.

I am talking about myself below, so please excuse my ego, or if you have no interest move on.

I was blessed by God to be baptized in the Melkite rite so I had my baptism, confirmation (chrismation) and first communion simultaneously at the age of three months from the womb. Interestingly, that was the last bit of the faith I ever received for over three decades. Other than the observance of Christmas and Easter – with the modern application of denying anything mystical and ascribing some ‘scientific’ explanation for all the alleged miracles. All of this with a gross amount of materialism and secularism.

I followed a very similar path to Joe, in the sense that I was so full of myself and such a master of my own destiny that I was going to be honest and truthful of my own accord. So I would not succumb to the hypocrisy of being a religionist, much less a papist. I peeked at Communism but it was devoid of any meaning. Granted the libido dominandi and my own libertinism may have lead me to any anthro-god paradigm but I was far too interested in Gordon Gekko to become a pinko. So I made the same mistake as Joe with a different velocity and decided to follow that other Russian – Ayn Rand. Objectivism (the hypocrisy of the name was lost on me in my youth), seemed to echo what I was already thinking so it must be true. Of course a materialist outlook and impulses from the lower brain would certainly make this type of ‘objectivity’ appealing. This led me to the libertarians and I must admit much of my thinking is still there – although I can’t stand the libertine inheritance from the so-called Enlightenment.

Of course nagging at me all this time was our Lady and her Son. I liked Jesus and I molded Him into what I wanted Him to be. He is so kind that he tolerated that and guided me through my interest in history because He made me aware of all the lies of our age. Anyone who studies history with a desire for the authentic truth, one truth, will invariable encounter Truth Himself. Then a decision has to be made. Love Him or hate Him. Thanks be to God, I fell in love.

I also had an easier time than both of you because all I had to do was petition my Patriarch, which I did not even know I had, to release me from my baptized rite so I could become a Roman. No other sacraments needed and no waiting for confirmation or Easter. Scratch that I had to confess my sins – three decades worth is no picnic and convalidate my secular marriage. BTW – marriage was awesome before and so much better now as a sacrament.

Praise the Lord Jesus – He offers so many paths to the one sure path, the way, the truth and the life. I am honored to be a fellow soldier for Christ with fine gentlemen like you.

Congratulations to both of you.