I recently saw a social media post by someone I grew up with in New Hampshire. Like most of the fellow French-Canadians in our area, he was raised as a Roman Catholic. I remember as a young girl being jealous of him and his coterie for being released from class early at the end of the week to attend CCD classes, not really aware of what that even meant. I didn’t know they were leaving to get schooled even more while I got to go home and ride my bike and look for tadpoles in the brook.

My old acquaintance was lamenting his alienation from the institutional church. He said he feels “spiritually Catholic,” but has too much cognitive dissonance and internal tension over their regressive dogma to give himself fully to the practice of his faith. “I considered being a cafeteria Catholic,” he wrote, “rejecting a lot, but occasionally going to church and praying to the saints etc.” In the end, he feels like he is drifting toward the Episcopalian Church (aka “Catholic Lite”) as a remedy for the dissonance and tension, but increasingly feels like he doesn’t “want to be part of a ‘team.’ I just want to seek union with God through Christ in whatever forms make the most sense to me.”

Though I came to my Perennialist faith from the opposite direction, I found both his lament and quest for a resolution relatable, and I told him so. His response brought back a hilarious memory: 

“Are you the same Estelle Perdue who put a bag of Doritos and a pack of cigarettes in the hands of the Jesus statue at St. Dominic on Good Friday??”

Only in the strictest, most nominal sense, I assured him. (I always did wish I could take credit for the idea though. It was on a dare from Mimi.)

But anyway…I went on to tell him that I think most of us who aren’t rabid fundamentalists are small-c cafeteria “catholics” in the original sense of the word –”universal”– and I mean that in a very good way. We are all pursuing the same Truth, diffused through our diverse human cultures in a wide variety of ways, and we sample from the whole selection available to us and choose what resonates the most.

One of the main beefs he has with the RCC is that he believes in universal salvation, while the Church, though it flirts with universalism and probably acknowledges it openly in the teachers’ lounge, still clings to Eternal Conscious Torment for the unsaved as an institutional belief. I doubt that any person with an active pipeline to conscience actually holds ECT in their heart as an article of faith. On the other hand, we all know that dogmatic belief can be a sneaky surrogate for faith, though it is as far from faith as East is from West.

But to be a universalist, or to subscribe to principles that are in some manner universal as Christians do, is to assent to something transcultural and multi-denominational. Thus it is extremely unlikely that any one cultural variation is exclusively correct, but extremely likely that Truth has diffused into all of them. Only the “cafeteria” approach affords us the chance to use spiritual discernment and truly inquire of conscience where the gems of truth can be found.

If ECT is one item in the cafeteria of the Spirit — and it never ever would be on my watch —there is likely no mature Christian who can swallow and keep it down, so it probably goes untouched as it should. That’s some serious beginner level ideation and it is toxic beyond a certain level of individual growth.

Therefore there is no good reason to commit one’s soul to the menu of any one exclusively ethnic or themed restaurant, and if we are being honest, any spiritually mature Christian is already coming to the cafeteria for nourishment, regardless of partisan alignments they maintain for social purposes. We all come to the same cafeteria, and eat according to our tastes and appetites and the foodways we learned. I believe it really is that simple.

He was grateful for the perspective, and later he came back to say it had eased a lot of his tension about finding the right spiritual home. I reminded him that his Lord himself is a man who hath not where to lay His head, which seemed to blow his mind a little. He insisted on knowing where I’d learned all of this, and how I could have chosen to steer clear of Christianity while understanding it so well. 

I told him I realized a while ago that my calling is to be a cafeteria worker, not a customer per se. My job is to make nutritious entrees and side dishes from trusted recipes and keep them fresh, the condiments fully stocked etc, and see that all are well fed. When I take my lunch break, I partake gratefully of the same handiwork, but I take it out to the back porch so I can eat in peace and feed the pigeons.

— from “When I Woke Up: Excerpts from the Notes of Estelle Perdue After the Vince Lombardi Service Area,” featuring ideas derived from the novel UNLESS