The First Year After Reception

If you came into the Church at the Easter Vigil, you will very likely remember that night for the rest of your life. The candles. The Exsultet sung into the dark. The water poured, the oil cold on the forehead, the host placed on your tongue for the first time. Many new Catholics, asked years later, still describe that Vigil as the most profound hour of their life so far. That is not an exaggeration and it is not fervor talking. Something really did happen. The sacraments worked.

And then, slowly or suddenly, the hour ended. The sponsors hugged you. You went home. You slept. A week later there was a Tuesday, and the Tuesday was ordinary.

The temptation at that point is to read the ordinary as a failure — as if the Vigil had promised a permanent altitude and something has already gone wrong because you are no longer there. It had promised no such thing. The Vigil is a peak, not a plateau. Peaks, by their nature, do not last; you visit them, and then you come down. The Spirit almost never leaves a soul on the mountaintop, because the mountaintop is not where the work of ordinary Catholic life is done. That work is done in the valley — in the parish that is not as beautiful as you imagined, on the morning you do not feel like praying, in the week when nothing particular is happening and you are still, quietly, a Christian.

Peter on the mountain of the Transfiguration is the type. He sees Christ in glory with Moses and Elijah and blurts out, "Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three tabernacles." Build a shelter. Stay. Do not come down. And Mark notes, gently, that he did not know what he was saying. He wanted to freeze the peak. But the road from that mountain led down, and then to Jerusalem, and then to the cross, and only then to the empty tomb. The glory was not cancelled by the descent. The glory was the reason the descent could be borne.

So: expect descent. Not as failure, not as punishment, not as a sign that the Vigil was less than it seemed. Expect it the way a climber expects the walk back down — as the ordinary second half of the thing, the half in which the ascent is carried into the rest of the life.

The Vigil is still true on the Tuesday. The character is still sealed. The grace is still there. You have not lost anything. You are simply, now, a Catholic on a Tuesday, which is what the whole mountain was for.

"And a flood came, and the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and it could not shake it; for it was founded on a rock." (Luke 6:48)

Somewhere between month two and month five, the honeymoon ends. It does this quietly, without a single dramatic event, and usually in a cluster of small disappointments that arrive close enough together to feel like one large one.

The parish you came into is not the parish of your imagination. The hymns are dated and badly chosen. The cantor is off key. The homily, which last Easter seemed to be spoken directly to you, now strikes you as flat, or political, or simply tired. The parishioner you admired in RCIA — the one whose questions were sharper than yours, whose notes were neater — has begun to miss Mass, and when you asked him about it he shrugged. The building is smaller than you remembered it. The coffee after Mass is bad.

The cradle Catholics around you do not seem to believe what you just risked everything to believe. The cousin who served as your sponsor does not know the names of the four marks of the Church. The colleague who encouraged you to cross the Tiber has not been to confession in a decade. People speak casually of missing Sunday Mass for a football game. You came in expecting to meet a body of witnesses; you appear to have walked into a room half full of sleeping ones.

The spiritual reading that set you on fire a year ago now bores you. Those passages of Augustine that you underlined with three colors of pen — you can still see that they are true, but they no longer burn. The podcast that converted you now seems repetitive. The new book is thinner than you hoped.

And then, underneath all of this, the worst one: you have started to notice that you yourself have not changed as much as you hoped. The temper is still there. The old sin came back last Thursday. The prayer is drier than it was in Lent. You suspect, for the first time, that you may have over-sold your own conversion to yourself.

None of this, taken together, is a failure of your conversion. It is the ordinary condition of the faith as it enters the ordinary conditions of a life. The saints describe this exact passage as routine — John of the Cross calls a version of it the "night of sense," and notes that souls who do not know it is normal often mistake it for having lost God, when in fact God has simply stopped entertaining them and begun forming them. The warmth of the beginning is real and is also pedagogical; it is the milk given to infants so they will grow. It is not meant to last. What replaces it — a plainer, steadier, less emotional adherence — is not a step back. It is the faith becoming adult in you.

Do not interpret the flatness as evidence. Interpret it as weather.

"Let us run by patience to the fight proposed to us." (Hebrews 12:1)

Here is the practical problem no one in the program warned you about: after the Easter Vigil, the scaffold disappears. For most of a year you had a weekly meeting, a reading schedule, a sponsor, a catechist, and the quiet pressure of a group walking in the same direction. On Monday after the Vigil, all of that is gone. Nobody calls. Nobody sends a reading. You are alone with a Catholic life and no frame around it.

The convert's most common first-year failure begins in exactly this vacuum and takes exactly this shape. Told to "build a rule of life," and freshly in love with the riches of the tradition, the new Catholic attempts everything at once: daily Rosary, daily Mass, the full Liturgy of the Hours, spiritual reading morning and night, a weekly holy hour, meat fasting on all Fridays plus Wednesdays, a First Friday devotion, a First Saturday devotion, a consecration to Our Lady beginning next month, and a novena recommended by a friend. For two, perhaps six, perhaps ten weeks, it all holds. Then one ordinary Tuesday the whole structure gives way at once. A second chapter in this library — Pacing — describes that collapse in detail and is worth reading beside this one.

The response is not to try harder next time. The response is to build, from the very beginning, a rule so small that a sick week does not break it.

For the convert in the first year, the recommended rule is this, and only this:

• Sunday Mass, every Sunday. Non-negotiable, the way eating is non-negotiable. If you miss through grave fault, confess it before the next Sunday and go.
• One Friday penance each week. The simplest and most traditional is abstinence from meat. If your state of life makes meat awkward, pick a single other sacrifice and keep it on Fridays without changing it. The point is not severity; the point is that Friday is different.
• Confession every two months. On a fixed schedule, not by mood. Mark it on a calendar like a dentist appointment.
• Daily: one Our Father, one Hail Mary, one Glory Be. Three minutes. On waking, or before sleep, or both. Said slowly, not rushed.

That is the whole rule. Nothing else. No Rosary yet; no daily Mass yet; no Liturgy of the Hours yet; no Carmelite meditation yet; no consecration yet. All of those are good. None of them belong in the first year.

If you keep this rule for twelve months without adding to it, you will have done something unusual: you will have finished a first year. You will also have acquired, without noticing, a spine — Sunday Mass anchored, a Friday rhythm, a confessor who knows your name, and a daily prayer that reaches you on every kind of day. A second thing can be added in year two, from a position of strength. Adding now, from a position of enthusiasm, is how first-year Catholics quietly stop being Catholics by the third year.

If anything here feels too small for the fervor you still have: that is the correct feeling. That is what you are supposed to feel. Hold the fervor; do not spend it.

"My yoke is sweet and my burden light." (Matthew 11:30)

This is the section that is the hardest to write honestly, and the one new Catholics need most. Some months into the first year, almost every convert runs into it: the quiet, unwanted realization that many of the cradle Catholics around you do not appear to believe what you just turned your whole life upside down to believe.

The friend who sponsored you at the Vigil barely goes to Mass now and laughs about it at brunch. The aunt who fought for your Catholic wedding cannot finish the Creed. The pastor who received you seems tired, distracted, short with the sacristan. A man who made a long speech at your reception about the joy of the faith has, it turns out, not been to confession in fifteen years. The examples accumulate. The shock is real, and because it is layered on top of your own still-fresh fervor, it stings in a way that is hard to put words to. You risked something to come in. They seem to be inside without risking anything. And you begin, without meaning to, to feel a small, superior disappointment in them — and, worse, a creeping contempt for the Church that lets them stay.

Three things have to be held together here, and if you hold them together, the scandal can be made to carry you deeper. If you do not, it will turn you sour within two years.

First: the Church is not the Catholics in it. The Church is Christ's body, and his body contains both saints and the half-asleep, and has contained both since the apostles themselves quarreled about who was greatest while he was walking to Jerusalem to die. The Church you believe in at the Creed is not the roster of names on the parish list. It is Christ with all his members, living and dead, awake and drowsy, and it is held together by him, not by the average fervor of the people in the pew next to you. No cradle Catholic's tepidity disproves the Creed, because the Creed was never a claim about the cradle Catholics. It is a claim about Christ.

Second: you were once where they are. Maybe not at the same place in the same way — your sleep may have been a different sleep, outside the Church rather than inside, or a different inside — but you were not better than them. You were earlier in the journey, or differently asleep, or simply not yet visited by the particular grace that visited you last Easter. The grace that woke you was a gift, not a diploma. If you had been handed the faith at six days old, fed it in badly-catechized classes, and surrounded by the noise that surrounded them, you would very likely be standing exactly where they are standing, making exactly the shrugs they make. Remember that honestly, because it is honest.

Third: judging them is a step back into the Pharisee's coat you just took off. You were washed at baptism or at the Vigil. The Pharisee's coat — I thank you that I am not like other men — does not belong on a newly baptized Christian. When you feel it settling on your shoulders as you watch a cradle Catholic scroll through his phone at the consecration, take it off. The moment you are proud of being more serious than other Catholics is the moment you have stopped being a Catholic and started being a critic, and the critic will not persevere.

What, then, to do. Pray for them. By name, quietly, on your own, without telling them. When you find yourself preparing to complain about a parishioner or the pastor, close the sentence before it is spoken; complaint about the Church is acid on a new soul, and converts who speak it fluently by year two are usually out the back door by year five. Let the disappointment, instead, drive you further into your own fidelity — deeper into Mass, deeper into confession, deeper into the small rule you have begun — rather than into the managerial posture of auditing everyone else's fidelity for them.

The cradle Catholics whose lukewarmness scandalizes you are, many of them, one honest conversation and one good confession away from their own Vigil. You will not be the one who gives it to them by despising them. You may be the one who gives it to them by being, without comment, the person who kept Sunday and kept Friday and kept the three-prayer rule for a year while they watched.

"Why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye?" (Matthew 7:3)

By month twelve, if you have kept the small rule, something has changed that you may not notice from inside. You are no longer new. The catechumens at this year's Vigil are the new ones; you are a year ahead of them. The question in front of you is no longer how do I build the habit? — the habit is built. The question is now how do I deepen?

The honest answer is that the second year looks very different from the first, and is quieter, and is slower. Four things are worth considering, one at a time, not all at once.

A regular confessor. Not a different priest every time, chosen by whoever has the shortest line. The same priest, ideally monthly, who begins to know the shape of your life and can tell when a sin you are confessing is an old pattern and when it is new territory. This matters more than any book you will read in year two. If your parish has a priest who is available, ask to see him on a regular schedule. If not, find a nearby parish or a religious house. Converts who acquire a confessor in year two are substantially the ones who are still praying in year ten.

One spiritual classic, read slowly. One. Not a shelf of them. A traditional first choice is Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ — short chapters, plain language, read a page or two at a time with a pause afterwards. Other defensible first choices are St. Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life and St. Thérèse's Story of a Soul. Pick one; read it over six months; finish it. A book read at that pace enters the soul; a book read in three nights is entertainment.

One corporal work of mercy, integrated into the week. Not as a project; as a rhythm. Visit a specific elderly parishioner every Saturday for a half hour. Bring food to a specific shut-in once a month. Take one shift at the soup kitchen the first Tuesday of every month. The point of integration is that the work becomes boring, and still gets done. Mercy that survives boredom is how charity is actually acquired.

The beginning of mental prayer — ten minutes daily. Not twenty, not thirty. Ten, in a fixed place, at a fixed time, sitting still before God with a short piece of Scripture open. If ten feels too short, good — keep it at ten. If ten feels too long, keep it at ten and endure. Year two is the year to begin this; year one was too early. The chapter on mental prayer in this library (the Carmelite method) will give you a shape. Do not add a fifth thing in year two. These four, over a second year, are enough.

And the unromantic truth, since it will save you years of confusion if you accept it now: sanctity is not built in the first year. The first year is for surviving. The second year is for beginning to deepen. The third and fourth are for the first real acquaintance with your own predominant fault. The fifth through the tenth are for learning, slowly, that the Christian life is not a series of ever-higher peaks but a long and mostly hidden faithfulness. The decades after that are where the saints are made, and they are made almost entirely out of Tuesdays.

The Vigil was the door. The first year was the threshold. The second year is the first few steps of the house. The house itself is large, and you have the rest of your life in it.

"But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:18)