Living faith …

… A Hard-Earned Detachment | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Murphy was raised Catholic and fell away from the church when he was young, in large part because of the church’s sexual doctrines. (Murphy is himself gay.) In 2004, though, he came back. As he puts it in “The Sea of Faith,” a poem whose title and first line come from Matthew Arnold’s doubt-filled poem “Dover Beach,” “Like Jonah I was vomited ashore; / now every night a spring tide runs for me.” In rite and ritual, word and sacrament, the Catholic faith offers Murphy a way to understand, and make meaningful, his fear and suffering.

Wandering from the Church, if not the faith, can be strangely fruitful, as I can myself attest.