{"id":5196,"date":"2005-07-18T15:10:53","date_gmt":"2005-07-18T15:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/full-circle.html"},"modified":"2005-07-18T15:10:53","modified_gmt":"2005-07-18T15:10:53","slug":"full-circle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/full-circle.html","title":{"rendered":"Full Circle"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the SF paper, a spiritual journey:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Often you hear stories about people starting out as a Catholic and leaving Catholicism behind after getting into Eastern religions. But you went back to it. What do you make of that?<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Three things came together for me at this point. One was that I was in Jungian analysis, and I had heard that Jung said to Catholics that if they could find it in their hearts to go back to the Catholic Church that he would advise they do so because all of the elements were in place in Catholicism in terms of helping bridge the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious worlds. <\/p>\n

At the same time, I also happened to find a book at a New Age bookstore called "Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism." It was a very powerful book for me because the author had also spent time searching around and ended up delving into esoteric spiritual ideas before converting late in life to Catholicism. It helped me see that there wasn’t a contradiction in being a Catholic and living the path that I wanted to live [seeking out truth in various spiritual traditions]. <\/p>\n

On top of that, I happened to overhear these two guys talking at a restaurant in the Castro, where I lived at the time, about a priest who performed the Mass entirely in Latin at a church down the street, so I went to hear him. There was something really moving to me about the way he said the Mass, the kind of consciousness that he embodied, his tenderness, the way he kissed the altar in the middle of the Mass. <\/p>\n

Somehow these three things coalescing around me convinced me to return to the Catholic Church. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}