Old diaries

When I was nine I received a diary for Christmas. It had a puffy cover with a picture of Minnie Mouse and pages of three different colors, but the great selling point was this: it locked shut with little keys!

Not that I had any interesting secrets to write, but I did confide some petty thoughts to that diary which certainly were better kept under lock and key. Apparently at that age I thought I was above my friends. I'm lucky they put up with me.

I kept journals intermittently from that time on and I've got a lot of them now, a long row of books with pages filled. And you know what? I hardly ever read them. Most of the entries I probably haven't looked at since I *wrote* them. They'd be more interesting if I'd written not just about special activities and vacations, but about the day-to-day stuff, what I was thinking and feeling in general, and what the people in my life were saying.

The more recent journals are absorbing, though. Two years ago, after researching and praying about it, I had just made up my mind to become Catholic and had joined the RCIA class at the local parish. There we discussed the Bible in warm fuzzy terms and were taught no doctrine at all. The sermons at Mass were vague and wishy-washy, and the congregation seemed uninvolved. (I realize now that I was judging the congregation by Protestant culture, and Catholics have entirely different ways of showing their piety.) So I wasn't much impressed with my first personal experiences of the faith I believed was the true one. Here I am on 12/4/06: "On Monday morning I prayed to the Lord that Catholicism would become more present and meaningful to me, or something-- I'm convinced in my head but don't love it in my heart."

WOW, did He answer that one! A few weeks after that entry I found a parish where the priests loved the Faith enough to preach it, and in short order I became so fanatically happy to be Catholic that I could not contain myself. And you know what happens with people like that. They start blogging. :)