I’ve been struggling between “Catholic” and “Protestant” for quite some time. I know those are huge categories- hard to define, understood differently by different people. In some cases these labels even impose false dichotomies. But this week, as I sifted through memories, participated in a discussion on the diverse faith backgrounds of the residents and nonresidents in our community, and thought about the impending 500 year anniversary of Luther’s supposed vandalism (his 95 theses), I came face to face with the difficulties between my own Catholic and Protestant identities. 

Here’s a brief timeline of my life trying to “mind the gap.” 

I grew up attending a Roman Catholic church every Sunday with my family- going to religious education, helping out in the parish, all that jazz. 

In high school, I began to experiment a little bit with some reformed churches. I attended a non-denominational Sunday service with a friend. I got interested, just a little bit at first, in the Taize Community. I played interludes during the service at a local UCC church. 

I became a religious studies major in college, and the fun began. I read Paul’s Letter to the Romans straight through and found myself changed. I read Martin Luther and Karl Barth and found myself agreeing. I started leading a children’s choir at a Methodist church. I wrote about Lutheran theology in Bach and even started attending an Episcopal church with some frequency. My journeys to Taize and Iona happened. I navigated my participation into and out of leadership in my campus Intervarsity chapter. I went to Orthodox and Presbyterian services, many flavors of Catholic mass, Lutheran and UCC and even Moravian one time. 

I found myself in the middle of internal (and occasionally external) debates over the meaning of community, the ordination of women, the place of tradition, the validity of the papacy, the use of music in worship, the emphasis (or de-emphasis) on specifically sacred space. I could bore you and myself to tears recounting the many debates on which I can just see both sides and don’t yet have a firm conviction. 

In one of my favorite courses, “Divine Love in the 17th Century,” I developed a yet unproven and very shaky theory that the development of tonality in Western common practice music is intrinsically linked to the Protestant Reformation. Our understanding of language, and of the shape and arc of the Bible and culture, is intertwined with how we hear music. Protestant models of understanding scripture, to my ear, fit with the tonality cultivated by composers such as Bach much more than the modal music to which Catholic spirituality is akin. More on this in grad school? 

In any case, I don’t find myself convicted toward agreeing wholeheartedly with one denomination’s approach to Christian spirituality and discipleship. I thought this “year in God’s time” might be for bringing me into one place I can call home, and perhaps it might yet. But for now, I find myself called more and more into the gap. More and more into the questions, misunderstandings, areas of pain, between our Catholic and Protestant brothers and sisters. 

I think Jesus shows us that we’re all called to live with wounds. Often, I believe that from our woundedness comes our deepest point of ministry. I’ve been on a journey toward understanding my wrist injury this way. Although it prevented me from achieving what I perhaps “wanted to” with piano, it continues to teach me what music really is. Music is not about me and what I can prove; music at the core, God’s music, is the life-giving vibration that holds the universe together and sustains us all. It’s not in my control; I get to enjoy it as a gift. My relation to it, just like my relationship to God, has been broken by my incessant striving for perfection. But through acknowledging and offering up my brokenness and my wounds, I can experience the healing of restored relationship. 

My wounds, my places of non-belonging and betweenness in the whole Catholic and Protestant divide, are somewhere I believe I’m called to minister from. I can’t see it yet, but I have to trust the voice of God beyond any one institutional claim to truth. This does not mean denying that the institutions of our faith are important teachers. I believe it does mean laying down my fear of disappointing a structure or hierarchy when it gets in the way of listening to the voice of God’s restorative justice and love for my life. 

I struggle with when and where to receive communion and when to receive a blessing instead. I accidentally sign the cross in Lutheran church and mistakenly try to speak the words of the grace along with the priest in Catholic church. I find myself without an anchor in the midst of theological debates. And yet I have to believe that Christ is with me in this gap, and that this too is a part of the path to which I’m called. My prayer is that I can keep walking forward, not to get sucked into the confusion and despair at it, but to hear Christ’s reconciling voice as he calls out to me and my brothers and sisters. Bread broken for us, broken bread we are, but whole, I believe, only through Christ, whose woundedness restores us.