Readership of this blog dips on weekends, so I worry that many of you will not have seen my post titled “The Cult of Wall Street.” In it, I mentioned something a Catholic priest told me, about an old monsignor of his acquaintance who, in a conversation about some seminarians headed off to study at the NAC in Rome, said, “Those poor boys. They leave here in love with Jesus, and come back in love with the Church.” A commenter, Bones, just posted the following on that thread:

Rod, your anecdote about the monsignor is painfully true, at least in my experience.

I had 2 friends apply for the seminary after university: 1 was somewhat of an outspoken and prideful lad, the other a more humble and nervous fellow. Prior to joining the seminary, the former decided to take 6 months to work with mission priests among the poor in the streets of Tijuana, while the latter was invited to a summer-long seminar by George Weigel to be held in Krakow. So the one friend goes and works among the poorest of the poor in one of the most dangerous cities in our hemisphere, and the other heads off to Krakow and listens to the movers and shakers of the American Catholic Right for 6 weeks.

It was to my dismay that when they returned and we met up, the roles had been reversed. My friend who’d worked in Mexico had become a very soft and spiritual person, and his idea of the priesthood was to basically live a life of utter servitude to all the people in his parish. The friend who’d spent his month and a half in Krakow came back enamored with the glory and splendor of the institutional church, and wanted leadership and his own journal. He was also very upset with ‘liberals’, though he never named names.

I see in the Krakow student Bones knows myself, and a temptation to which I would have been — and would be — almost helpless in the face of. I suppose it’s useful to know that about oneself. I suppose.

By the way, I listened today to a Fresh Air interview with NYT media columnist David Carr, recorded a couple of months ago but sitting dormant on my iPhone. It was quite interesting. I was taken by the last eight minutes or so of the piece, in which Carr, a recovering drug and alcohol addict, talked about his faith. From the story version:

“I’m a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of, it’s good to stand with my family. It’s good that I didn’t have to come up with my own creation myth for my children. It’s a wonderful community. It’s not really where I find God. The accommodation I’ve reached is a very jury-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in [substance abuse] recovery, I’ve been helped … by all of these strangers who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life — and one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. Not only is that not a general human impulse, but it’s not an impulse of mine. And yet, I found myself doing that over and over again. Am I, underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good? That’s sort of as far as I’ve gotten.”

He says significantly more than this, and I encourage you to listen to the interview if you have the time and the interest. Carr was fairly nervous talking about his faith. My guess is that he just doesn’t have the vocabulary, nor does he work in a professional environment in which people have faith, or if they do have faith, where they talk about it. This, to my ears, makes his discussion of faith on this interview all the more genuine, and affecting. In fact, I thought when it was over that this is probably how most people who practice religion do so. They don’t understand much about what they profess, nor do they see it as all that necessary. But they do intuit, at some level, that what’s going on here is important, and in some sense necessary. The part of the interview that I found most affecting was his characterization of religion as the thing that frees him from the prison of Self. My path to religion was rather different from David Carr’s, and I practice it in a different way. But you know, I get what he’s saying, and feel the same way. I think the reason I drank so much as a younger man, before I became religious, and certainly before I met my wife, was because it was the only way I could get free from bondage to Self. Of course it is a false freedom, only the simulacrum of freedom. I suppose an atheist would say I just traded one opiate for another. I disagree, obviously.

A mystery of faith: to find oneself, one has to lose oneself. But to lose yourself in drink or drugs is to be in a worse hell.