Notes from a conversation with Hambone
I had two conversions.
1- I realized the Catholic Church is the true Church.
2- I realized that I am not important or essential.
- Conversion 1 had to happen before conversion 2, otherwise I would despair. I am not important because I am united to God. Without that corollary, the world is a scary place.
- Even when/if God calls us to be Saints, he will not fill us with a sense of importance. Joan of Arc didn’t wake up one day and say “I am important”. In her mind, God asked her for a favor and she had faith and obedience enough to follow. God provided for everything else.
- Both conversions are important. The Catholic Church is the true Church and no one can be truly fulfilled until they order their lives to God through His Church. The realization that we are not important is itself important because it allows us to properly order our relationship to God once we are joined to Him through His Church.
- Most evangelism focuses on #1- bringing people into the Church. This is important work. Less effort is spent on #2- which helps them understand their relationship with the world and with God.
- Wanting for #2 is what drives people to cling desperately to political ideologies, sports teams, their own opinions and feelings. We have a natural human desire to be a part of something and to win. The proper fulfillment of these desires is to join the true Church, in the case of the former desire; and to trust in Christ’s ultimate victory, in the case of the latter desire.
- This latter desire–to win–is difficult. My sports team can win all the time–winning teams are always the most popular teams. But how often does Christ win? It seems like he loses an awful lot, it seems like the Church is losing an awful lot. But we know that Christ wins in the end, Christ wins at the only moment it matters.
- The former desire–to be a part of something–is easy. Supporting a sports team costs us nothing. Supporting a political position or cause costs nothing. We make no personal sacrifices by going to the street and saying “I think our tax rate should be different”. Being a part of the Church is hard. Not only because we are going to lose every time until the last time, but because Christ demands everything from us. Literally, everything. He tells a man who wanted to bury his father “Let the dead bury their dead”. In Acts, a man who withheld some of his money from a contribution to the Church and lied about it is smote, and his wife along with him. Christ demands nothing less than everything we have and everything we are.
- What are we holding back?
No conversion is one and done. Both conversions must always and eternally be refreshed. I will wax and wane in my zeal for the Church, I will want very badly to feel important. It is the work of a lifetime to rein in these beliefs and yoke them to Christ.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
I don’t want to sound like I am encouraging narcissism, but Christianity declares that you are supremely important, although not perhaps in the way you may like. You may live out your life in humble obscurity, but God loves you none the less. You know that I often write against perversions of this doctrine, but Christianity certainly assures us that we are supremely important (to God) even when we are absolutely unimportant (to the world).
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This is an important clarification, and one I should have made more clear. We are absolutely unimportant to the world. My agitations and prognostications about politics, the weather, sports, the stock market, all amount to dust in the wind. I am not in a position to make any major decisions that affect the world. Subordination to God in light of that decision requires us to understand that He loves us and we should seek our value from Him and not from the world.
Thank you for this, it is a very important thing to keep in mind.
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