Jeffrey Miller

The path to conversion is met with many stepping stones and looking back you can identify some of these stones as means of grace. Today I am thinking of the first milestone I can identify in my conversion from atheism to Catholicism.

In the early nineties was stationed in Patuxent River, Md I started listening to G. Gordon Liddy on the local Washington D.C. station when he first started broadcasting. One day while driving on the beltway an atheist caller called in challenging him and Mr. Liddy replied by going through the five ways of knowing God’s existence as formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. I must admit this rather stunned me the idea of Christians using reason to defend faith in God. I had really figured that theists could only apply to authority or “holy” books. This event marked the first chink in my atheist armor that opened my up to hear more. This was a small chink though and it would be several years more until I started to seriously look at faith and reason not as foes in some battle being forever separated. Regardless I look at this event as that first step into thinking that just possibly I had it all wrong.

I bring this up because today G. Gordon Liddy is retiring at the age of 82 from talk radio. The fact that he played some role in my conversion is very surprising to me having been in High School during the Watergate scandal and an uber-liberal. Even as I came to later admire Mr. Liddy, I never did admire his involvement in this scandal and the justifications I have heard him use regarding it. Still listening to him off and on over the years I have learned much from him in his wealth of knowledge and his example as a family man. I always appreciated the way he talked about his wife, who died last year and his life-long Catholicism certainly played a role in his life beyond just a cultural thing.

So thank you Mr. Liddy for the role you played in my life and being an illustration of the tools that God can use.

Ten years ago today I entered into the blogosphere with my first post.

Warning ahead: Self-reflective ego post on ten years of blogging.

I first became aware of Catholic blogging via the National Catholic Register which did an article on Catholic bloggers. I found Mark Shea’s blog that way and have been hooked ever since. In those early days of Catholic blogging you could read every Catholic blog over lunchtime. No RSS feeds back then so I would just click on all my bookmarks.

It was interacting in the comment sections on Catholic blogs that first got me to think about starting my own blog. As I noted in my first post is was my vanity that wanted to bring my comments out of the comment section and into full view. Embarrassingly my first blog post contained the extremely pretentious “This blog is my comment section on life.” My blog was the first to reference Chesterton’s “if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”, but it certainly was not the last to do so in an opening post. This quote is often taken out of context as Chesterton actually used in a defense of hobbies – which blogging certainly is for me.

My first blog was on blogspot and was called “Atheist to A Theist.” After six months I moved to my own domain with Movable Type and started The Curt Jester. Of that handful of Catholic bloggers ten years ago some of them are still blogging. Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, Tom at Disputations, Domenico Bettinelli, TS at Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor.   Victor Lams was also one of those early pioneering Catholic bloggers and his creativity and humor really sparked me into blogging.  The first Catholic blogger though was  Kathy Shaidle  of Relapsed Catholic which started in 2000. I’ve also seen many blogs come and go and among those many that are sorely missed.  There have also been some interesting rises and falls.  One very popular  blog that went all wobbly  and then closed, ironically it was called “The Cafeteria is Closed”.  Another early Catholic blogger went back to being a Seven Day Adventist.  Though my favorite exit from St. Blogs was a former atheist who blogged on his new found faith and later became a Monk in an Eastern Catholic Church.  Nicely in the early days of St. Blogs there weren’t really any liberal Catholic blogs.  An article in Commonweal despaired of this lack and even took some potshots at me and other so-called conservative bloggers.   Due to a suggestion from Kathy Shaidle I started a parody blog called Thoroughly Modern Mary where I blogged as an extremely liberal religious sister to give Commonweal what they asked for   Though that blog is several changes behind in Blogger templates and so now only has the text of my posts.

So ten years and some 7,556 posts later I am still rather surprised to be still writing. Writing was never something I really aspired towards.  It was the joy of conversion and a way of expressing it that lead me in this direction.  In real life I am one of those quiet class clowns that will sit in the back of the room waiting for an opportunity for a quip while also being rather shy and bookish. So I don’t naturally find many opportunities to express my faith. I remember when my blog was getting five to ten hits a day how wondrous it was for me that five to ten people were paying attention to what I was saying.  That was a 500 to 1000 percent increase for me.  This blog has kind of taken of life of it’s own since it went down channels I never expected.  The funny thing is that I never originally intended a humor related blog – how little I knew myself.  My first humor post is still one of my fondest “A Night at the the Jesus Seminar” a mashup between the Marx Brothers movie and a conversation with an adherent of the Jesus Seminar.  Another thing I never expected was becoming a book reviewer.  As my blog started to get popular enough I started to get offers from publishers to review their books.  The idea of getting books for free certainly appealed to me as way too much of my disposable income goes to them.  Having to write a review in exchange seemed like a pretty good deal, though I don’t find book reviewing particularly easy.

What I like the most about St. Blogs though is how much I have continued to learn about the faith as there are so many quite excellent Catholic writers that range from the amateurs to the professionals.  There is so much expertise out there on so many topics that it can really help you from having a narrow view of the faith.  The long tail of St. Blogs creates a lot of great writing even if these bloggers will never get awards or are hardly noticed.  Not to diminish those more well-known Catholic writers who became bloggers, but one thing I always liked about the blogosphere is that you didn’t have to have a pre-built audience and that you could create one from scratch.  There is something very Catholic about the blogosphere in a very “here comes everybody” way.  There is a very small bar to do so and I remember another sadly missed Catholic blogger who blogged from the library computer.  The other thing I so like about St. Blogs is that you seem to have a personal connection to these writers.  Writers with a byline seem to be off in the distance, but members of St. Blogs I seem to have grown up with as they get married, have children, etc.

Over these ten years I have also had some 50,000 comments.  Though I think 49,000 of them were from my atheist commenter Salvage.

Now to close out this overly long post I leave you with a story of my naiveté.

Before I started blogging I noticed that often Mark Shea would announce some new blog.  So after I started my blog I kept waiting for Mark to announce mine.  For some reason I must have thought he was omniblogospheric and notice every new Catholic blog that came on the scene.  I am not the self-promoter enough to realize these new bloggers simply wrote Mark announcing their blogs.  Though Mark Shea did ironically link to my Litany of Blog Humility

The Litany of Blog Humility

From the desire of my blog being read
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the desire of my blog being praised
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the fear of my blog being despised
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the fear of my blog being forgotten
Deliver me dear Jesus
From the fear of no page views
Deliver me dear Jesus
That other blogs may be loved more than mine
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That Nihil Obstat may find all my grammatical and spelling errors
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That Google may never list my blog
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That comments always be negative and abusive
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That my commenting system always say “commenting temporarily unavailable”
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That Mark Shea may notice every blog but mine
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it
That others may be pithier than I, provided that I may become as pithy as I should
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it

* Nihil Obstat  was another early Catholic blogger who corrected the grammatical mistakes on Catholic blogs until his anonymity was accidentally compromised by Barbara Nicolosi. There really needs to be a history of Catholic blogging full of these stories.

* Ten Years After is a nod to the group by the same name. Alvin Lee named the group referencing ten years after Elvis, though I did write a post about the amazing coincidences between Elvis and Pope John XXIII.