I was quite taken with the CNT's question.

I was quite taken with the CNT's question, "How has your thinking changed," because my experience in coming to diocese 'the big picture' often appears to stand in contrast to that of many of my peers

Born into a rather left-of-centre family, I was brought up with what common might call a less-than-traditional Catholic worldview.

My "hippie parents," as I frequently refer to them, truly embodied the potential for change articulated by the agency of both the peace movement of the 1960 and the hopeful theology of the next to the first Vatican Council.

My siblings and I were swept along in their youthful optimism. It was not until I was a young adult that I became aware that it was not commonplace to have been raised with an understanding of the omnipotent that went beyond gender, a universal of inclusivity that embraced differences of class and sexuality, and a commitment to social justice which insisted upon grassroots activism.

It was, to say the least, a bit of a cultivation shock to move into the 'real' world, where it pretends God sits in "his" heaven, where every-man-for-himself guides ethics, and where Uncle Jack and Uncle Murray is not a 'family.'

What I had the greatest difficulty understanding as a young adult, however, was the place of what I call the 'capital-C Church' in this worldview. Thinking back in succession my childhood and early adolescence, I cannot recall thinking about 'the church' as anything other than the friendly the bulk of mankind in my parish community, the folk who offered at the youth centre, or the T-shirt-clad protester at local labour rallies. I knew that the hierarchy of the meeting-house existed but I guess I pondering that we were all in it together, working for equality, justice and peace.

When I went to St Jerome's University in 1985 my thinking was challenged in ways I could not ever have anticipated. Mary Malone, Michael Higgins, the late Walter Bildstein and other gifted and committed theologians and scholars engaged us in debates forward liberation theology, the role of women in the house of god reproductive technologies, environmentalist and feminist scriptural interpretations.

I was stimulated and challenged, and at the same time, disoriented and anguished.

The 'cutting-edge' theology of the sixties, seventies and early eighties supported my understanding of meeting-house but the controversy within the temple itself over what seemed to be issues foundational to the achievement of social justice and equality struck me as arcane and self-defeating. by what means dare the 'Church' impede the extension and self-understanding of the 'church!'

I left my undergrad years with many more questions than answers and, real to my parents' examples; I sought to find solutions between the sides of action. I taught eager high instruct students about scripture and social justice. I read world religions and politics, and took courses in ethics and women's history.

freshly I have worked out a framework for a doctoral thesis that brings me into contact with communities of women religious whose work in teaching and social service infuses their dwellings and their lives with the feeling of 'church' I knew as a young girl. In many ways my thinking has get to full-circle.

It's not that I have chosen to ignore the 'capital-C Church;' on the contrary I am neither jaded nor naive. Maybe it's just that I can now, with sights wide open and the lived experience of a hardly any decades, truly enter the "kingdom" like a child.

Still, there are times in my life when I question whether my parents really did me a service; perhaps their rose-colored perspective did not adequately prepare me to face the realities of the world and the meeting-house Maybe if they had become a bit more jaded, a tad les hopeful if they had succumbed to the temptations of the North American dream and traded in their orange station wagon for a beige Buick, or bought a color television instead of sending coin to some family overseas--maybe then, I would have understood life a bit better.

Of course, the older I come by the more I understand that my upbringing was sincerely a gift, and that, while my childhood was not necessarily idyllic, I was make happyed with a worldview that was at one time both engaging and hopeful, changeable and enduring, single in kind in which I was not the middle of the universe but where I was certainly an integral part of the on-going throw out of creation.

And upon I go ...

Renee Bondy from Chatham, Ont is a PhD scholar in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo.

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