Confirmation of Arrival by Robert Giebisch

Istand on the sidewalk outside the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West 71st Street between Broadway and Columbus on the Upper West Side in Manhattan on a cold spring night. The sun has set behind the canyons of the city streets. An Easter fire crackles outside the church, emitting tiny sparks. I’ve donned a long, white cowl that covers me, shoulders to ankles. My wife sits inside the church. She has come to witness my confirmation into the Catholic faith.

Tonight marks the culmination of a half year of weekly Zooms that have prepared me for my much-delayed confirmation. A motley crew of adults who were never baptized or who, like me, were baptized but never confirmed, lines up to start their procession into the dark recesses of the church on this holiest of nights.

Catholics are usually confirmed as teenagers, typically around fourteen to sixteen years old. Oops, I’m sixty-six, Medicare eligible, riding the subways of New York City on a senior pass. I guess you could say I’m a bit late, a half century to be exact. I repeated first grade. Maybe it just takes me a long time to figure things out.

I initially hesitated to share this story. I felt ashamed to reveal that I was Catholic. Why? Because it seemed so unprogressive, so uncool, so intolerant, so unenlightened. Wasn’t Christianity spent, associated with the Western hubris of colonialism, replete with the violent, bloody images of the Bible, not to mention its utterly irrational metaphysics and its increasingly conservative political associations? And especially Catholicism, with its unapologetic patriarchy and its stance on reproductive rights, wasn’t it pushing things a bit to embrace such a flagrantly suspect brand of organized religion? And besides, what is some guy like me with a picture of two bodhisattvas on the cover of his book doing telling you he’s Catholic? And yet here I am. I guess I’ve got some explaining to do. Where to begin?

♦ ♦ ♦

A few months after I was born, my mother, a lapsed Catholic herself, had me baptized in a Catholic church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. When I was a little boy, my mother’s mother brought me to Catholic Mass a couple times. Smells and bells. Incense, holy water, chimes. My parents dragged me to Episcopal and Congregational churches for a few years, then to the famous Reverend William Sloane Coffin’s fiery sermons opposing the Vietnam War at Yale’s Battell Chapel in the late 1960s, just as I approached puberty.

None of this convinced me. The image of some old, bearded guy up in the sky who could read my mind, predict the future, and reward or punish me after I died—well, it all seemed a bit improbable, farfetched, even corny. Try as I might to believe it, I never really could. Besides, wasn’t Marx right? Wasn’t religion the opium of the masses? By the time I imbibed European philosophy during college, it seemed fairly obvious that “God” was either a projection of the human mind (Feuerbach), was outright “dead” (Nietzsche) or, at best, consisted of some mythical jumble of symbols residing within our collective unconscious (Jung). Just because I wanted or needed God to exist didn’t mean She or He did.

As a freshman at Harvard I entertained a brief flirtation with Catholicism at Saint Paul’s Church off of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. In retrospect, my attraction remained purely esthetic. Again, smells and bells and the choir. A mixture of stained glass, aromatherapy, and Baroque music? It was around this time that I attached the fuzzy adjective “mystical” to all things Catholic, as opposed to the more preachy, rational flavor of Protestantism. I closed my eyes and floated into another realm.

But all this didn’t last long. With Harvard came an awareness of the European religious wars, the Inquisition, the suppression of Galileo and the rise of science and modern philosophy which didn’t have much room for what seemed, at best, a quaint vestige of the Middle Ages. As I approached graduation, I turned toward Zen and Tibetan Buddhism (as was fashionable at the time) and, finally, Thai Buddhism before ultimately visiting Thailand during the summer of 1982 to live in a Buddhist monastery. In Thailand, I meditated in earnest. Here was something real and honest and tough. No leaps of faith. Just follow one’s breath and see what happens. Bare bones. Minimalistic. Clean. No complicated theology or outlandish metaphysical claims.

That summer of 1982 left a deep impression on me. I realized that whatever I was looking for lay beyond the realm of words and ideas and books. It required “practice,” hard work: letting go of my thoughts; cultivating a non-judgmental state of mind; and, of course, following my breath, thoughts, and feelings, culminating in non-attachment and, ultimately, the non-self of enlightenment. Moral behavior would flow naturally from all this. No need for faith. Or a savior. Or ritual. Or “God.”

In this western form of neo-Buddhism, science happily coexisted with spirituality, and no claims of exclusivity or uniqueness were made. One might practice and remain a Jew, a Christian, or anything else, at least from a Buddhist perspective. An eminently tolerant religion, compatible with the open mindedness and non-dogmatism of the post-Enlightenment world.

I stuck with this path for the better part of my twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. I practiced meditation sporadically and attended Buddhist retreats in the Bay Area, New York City, and Massachusetts. I followed my breath. Moments of clarity came and went. My behavior remained largely unchanged, i.e., fairly intellectual and self-centered except to the extent to which my roles as a husband, parent, and physician required me to act with varying degrees of altruism. And I read dozens of books on Buddhism, including scholarly tomes on its history, sutras or the equivalent of Buddhist scriptures, and how-to books on meditation in what was becoming an ever-expanding cornucopia of Buddhist literature geared toward an educated, Western audience. I rode the wave of the “mindfulness” movement, and as the millennium crested, I felt in tune with the times, as an ever-rising tide of Baby Boomers, Millennials, and other demographic cohorts left organized religion and its monotheisms behind.

Preah Vihear Temple, Cambodia. Tetsuya Kitahata / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

All the while, though, in the back of my mind, the notion of “God” wafted about. I felt “Him” or “Her” or “It,” sensed something or somebody “out there,” and I prayed to this presence that could never be seen or felt. I remained an agnostic, being too philosophically sophisticated to come down hard on a metaphysical issue that was clearly non-falsifiable and, in any case, beyond the realm of rational debate or discussion. But it was life itself that slowly and inexorably brought me back home.

I suppose you might call them breaking points, moments in my life when my coping mechanisms faltered and I turned toward a force beyond myself. A malpractice scare in my mid-forties. The death of my mother to lung cancer as I approached fifty. The slow disappearance of my father to dementia. Or was it decades of struggling with my own unmedicated, recurrent major depressions? Or treating the sickest of the sick in an inner-city mental health clinic? Those times when reality forced me to accept that I couldn’t get through this thing called life alone. That I must be better than my little, selfish self. Or, alternately, those times, when, overcome with a sense of beauty, joy and gratitude, I felt as if science and logic just fell short of explaining what I experienced. The birth of my children, the transcendence of music, the loving kindness of my wife. Or was it the voice of my conscience that kept speaking to me, demanding that I become a better man and live in accordance with the Golden Rule? I know that all these experiences are easily reducible to biological, psychological, and social explanations. But, for me, they pointed toward something “out there” or perhaps “deep inside.”

Curiously enough, it took a trip to Asia to turn me toward Catholicism. It was Thomas Merton—the great Trappist monk, an adult convert himself, an initiator of Christian dialogue with Buddhism and Taoism in the mid-twentieth century—who led me back, but by a most circuitous route.

During the late aughts and early teens of the twenty-first century, I, like Merton, traveled to Asia, in my case to Burma and Cambodia. I became obsessed with an obscure Hindu-Buddhist temple named Preah Vihear, perched high atop a remote, war-torn escarpment on the Thai-Cambodian border. Some irrational force drove me to visit and revisit this place. Gazing out from that temple over what once constituted the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, I was flooded with an overwhelming sense of the inexplicable, of the old questions of the theodicy (if God exists, why this?) and of the juxtaposition of extreme beauty and extreme suffering that constitute the stuff of life.

Back in Phnom Penh, I strolled along the banks of the Mekong and heard the Muslim call to worship one night. I told myself, “You’re fooling yourself, Robby, you’re accountable to something greater than yourself, a real God exists, greater than you, not just a projection or a need, no, something transcendent, ineffable, infinite, it’s speaking through your conscience, it’s time to come home.” Call it my Damascus moment? I’m not sure. But it changed me forever. From that point on, God began to become real for me, not just some projection of my mind, some sociobiological construct of the human species.

To make a long story short, I flirted for another ten years with Buddhism, Christianity, and all sorts of philosophies ranging from stoicism to existentialism and Taoism, but I kept coming back to God. I still tried a Buddhist retreat in Massachusetts, checked out a Zen center in New York, popped into the local Episcopal church on the Upper West Side. But I began to ask myself, hey, what am I doing? On my deathbed, with whom do I wish to be reconciled?

I picked up the fourteenth-century Christian mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing and Merton’s twentieth-century one, Contemplative Prayer. These Christian writings described a sort of clearing in the woods of the mind, a still space where God might enter. This space appeared to overlap with the emptiness of Buddhist meditation. Perhaps the purpose of all those years of meditation had been to prepare me for the receptivity necessary to allow something greater than myself to enter my soul. I don’t know. But I began to pray without words, without supplications, without hopes or fears, expecting nothing in return. I waited for God. Yes, it sounds funny, doesn’t it, to acknowledge the existence of a force invisible and greater than oneself. A bit crazy, eh?

Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ also deeply affected me. After reading his book, I realized that both Buddha and Jesus were my spiritual ancestors. I could pray to and believe in Jesus and still acknowledge the wisdom of the Buddha. Although it might sound unorthodox to some people, I found a fundamental overlap between Buddhism and Christianity. Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, in which he delineates an underlying mysticism common to all world religions, also made a deep impression on me. Might all world religions share a universal mystical experience, even if religions, for reasons of power and control, insisted upon their differences?

Then came the pandemic. The isolation. Retirement, my father’s passing. The world kept turning. Death. The passage of time. The finitude of our lives on Earth. I read two Thomases, Thomas Keating and Thomas Merton. I read them daily. Both Catholics of a liberal bent. Something in their words, steeped in psychology and mysticism, resonated with me. Keating wrote of his spiritual journey almost as a psychotherapy, a healing of the soul, a profound sense of forgiveness, humility, grace, and gratitude. Merton, with whom I was already quite familiar, acknowledged an overlap between Eastern and Christian mysticism. Prayer became a matter of one’s spiritual posture, a willingness to receive into one’s heart a love greater than one’s own.

At my sister Christina’s suggestion, I began to subscribe to a daily email newsletter from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who lives in New Mexico. A self-described “panentheist” (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), Rohr advocates both social activism and meditation. He privileges the role of Christianity in advocating for the oppressed and marginalized, and de-emphasizes the top-down hierarchy of the church. “A doorkeeper must love both the inside and the outside of his or her group, and know how to move between these two loves,” he says. Like Merton, Rohr impressed me with his openness to other faiths and spiritual traditions.

And so one hot summer day during 2023, I’m not quite sure why, I walked into the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West 71st to make my first confession. I wanted to come clean. For all the mean and selfish and nasty and “small” things I had done over the course of a narcissistic lifetime. And, lo and behold, I literally ran into this priest by the name of Father Nolan, who struck me as so relaxed and cool and kind and just plain “light.” He sat me down in a pew, mumbled something about his own psychoanalysis, and off I went with a litany of my crimes. He appeared profoundly underwhelmed. I echoed some phrases he spoke and stood up. He handed me a book on the Eucharist, the essence of which was that God was present in the wine and bread of Holy Communion, and I immediately realized that I was entering a new world, one of sacraments and saints and mystery, no-holds-barred religion, a huge tent that embraced and transcended time and place and politics, a world that might just have a place for someone like me.

I came to know Father Nolan better over the coming weeks and months. He was an older man with an Irish last name who had grown up in Brooklyn, Catholic by birth, with a New York accent. Although probably only a few years older than me, he provoked what might be described as a “paternal transference.” He had worked at Rikers Island and in Harlem and spoke of the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, including immigrants and LGBT people. In his homilies, he spoke of God’s unconditional forgiveness and of Christ’s revolutionary message. I liked him. He mentioned figures such as Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin whom I had previously studied. I sensed a kindred soul, who didn’t take a literal approach to the Bible. Scripture as poetry. Revelation as metaphor.

Charles Sims, “Holy Eucharist,” from “The Seven Sacraments,” 1917

I started attending weekly Mass. I looked forward to Holy Communion. A mystical experience. A union with God in real time. No preachy sermons. Ritual, pure ritual, much maligned by modern types, but here unapologetically infused with the power of Jesus, this intensely human figure who had walked around the Middle East two thousand years ago speaking and acting in seemingly irrational ways. And at the center of it all lay love, a love that I barely knew, mind-blowing forgiveness and a moral message that cut like a sword through greed and power. Sure, the Catholic Church was corrupt, the repository of some of the most heinous crimes in history; and, yes, power was inherently corrupt, including that of the Catholic Church. And yet, yes—there was a “yet,” a “but” here—I encountered a religion that, despite all its obvious faults (human, all too human) challenged me to live in harmony with a force greater than myself.

That Catholicism was a big tent that included liberation theologians, anti-war types and pro-refugee people, as well as a pope who acknowledged the need to address climate change as a moral matter didn’t hurt. But I was enough of an amateur historian to realize that popes and policies changed with the decades, and that whatever attracted me to the Catholic Church must transcend politics. It was the church’s mystical dimension that reassured me. If it was large enough to accommodate Thomas Merton, well, it was large enough to accommodate me.

I asked Father Nolan if I should complete adult confirmation, and he replied, “Oh, you’re a doctor, only if you want to.” His seemingly nonchalant attitude motivated me to undergo the process nonetheless. And so I started attending the weekly Zooms, asked a deacon to serve as my godfather (my original one, an alcoholic Austrian friend of my father, had passed away decades ago), and I learned about Mother Mary, the saints, and the various holy days and rituals of the church.

Mostly I just attended Mass, especially a Sunday 5:30 p.m. gospel-style one where African American vocalists helped walk me through the service, culminating in the Body and Blood of Christ. I would kneel and watch the long line of parishioners walk up to the front of the church and receive their wafer. The young, the old, the casually dressed, the well attired, the women, the men, all races and ethnicities—there was something about their attitude that impressed me. Their faith, yes, their faith impressed me. It strengthened mine. And their reverence for something sacred. The three-stroked sign of the cross. The genuflection. The kneeling. This was more than self-help, meditation, feeling calm or discovering oneself. This was something much more profound.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so the fire outside crackles in the dark. Jesus was nailed to the cross yesterday. Tomorrow three women will discover his open tomb. I light a taper and follow the procession into the Church of the Blessed Sacrament. Three priests lead the way.

Just this morning, I paid my respects to John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, a few blocks from I stand now. I whisper the lyrics of his iconic song:

Imagine there’s no heaven,
it’s easy if you try,
no hell below us,
above us, only sky.
Imagine all the people
living for today.
Imagine there’s no countries.
It isn’t hard to do,
nothing to kill or die for
and no religion, too . . .

I love those lines. Yes, “no religion,” so why am I here? I suppose I remain a bundle of contradictions, a spiritual globalist, an incorrigible child of the sixties, a pilgrim on a spiritual journey, a perpetual beginner. Religion as metaphor? Scripture as poetry? I don’t have all the answers. All I know is that my path has led me to Jesus through the Buddha. If yours leads you somewhere else, well, that’s fine, too. Who am I to opine on final truths?

I walk down the aisle of the church on this holiest of nights. Our candles light up the dark space. The pews are packed. The parishioners turn their heads to smile at me. Their eyes are glowing. I am beaming.

I close my eyes for just one moment. The crowds disappear. Thomas Merton, Father Nolan, my wife appear. Has God spoken to me through these three, two living, one dead, two Catholic, one not?

I proceed to the altar beneath my white cowl. My godfather stands behind me. He places his right hand over my shoulder. His hands tremble. Father Nolan walks up to me. He places both his hands on the top of my head, then, with oil of chrism, traces the sign of the cross across my brow. He blesses me as “Thomas,” the confirmation name that I have chosen. Yes, Thomas, after Thomas the apostle, the doubting Thomas, the one who needed to touch and see the wounds of Christ to believe that he had risen from the dead, and after Thomas Merton, without whom I would not be standing here tonight.

Father Nolan hands me a wafer. I place it in my mouth and swallow it. I’ve arrived.

Robert Giebisch is a retired psychiatrist and world traveler with a lifelong interest in Christianity, Buddhism and world religions. He is also a published poet (https://robertgiebischauthor.com/), whose work has appeared in The RavensPerch and Orenaugh Mountain Poetry Journal. He lives in Woodbridge, Connecticut, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he enjoys taking long walks with his wife, Ninrong, in Central Park. He graduated from Harvard College and the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.

Banner image: Katherine Hanlon / Unsplash