Welcome aboard!

To those who have entered the Church this Easter Vigil, welcome home. I would especially like to congratulate Sean Roberts of Swimming the Tiber, Will of Mysterium Crucis, Joe of Meet Joe Convert, Jim Kalb of Turnabout. Mea Culpa for any that I forgot to list.

I still reflect with joy my own entry into the Church at Easter Vigil 1999. After two years of immercing myself into religious reading which covered Protestant Evangelicals to the Church Fathers I had finally become convinced of the truth of Christ and his Church I contacted the pastor of the Catholic Church that my wife and I had started attending. Since it was February he told me that I would have to wait till fall to start attending RCIA. The next months were the longest of my life. I was already totally convinced of the Church and to have to sit back and watch as my wife would go up and receive Jesus in Communion was difficult indeed. After finally being received in the Church as I went back to the pew I realized that I had spent exactly 40 years in the wilderness before entering the promised land of his Church.

The boat itself is a symbol for the Church, the Bark of Peter. The boat holds the apostles, and symbolically all of Christ's disciples. "The world is a sea in which the Church, like a ship, is beaten by the waves, but not submerged,". We are doing God's work, fishing for people, in Peter's boat, the Church. However, we are strangers in a foreign land, i.e. the boat is on the sea, on the chaos that is not God. It is a dangerous and storm-swept place, where even seasoned-fishermen fear. Yet the place that is not-of-God contains the people who need God, the people who need salvation