A Shameless Popery Book… Finally!

Literally for years, I’ve talked about wanting to put together some kind of Shameless Popery book. I dragged my feet, and then life got in the way. In the eight years since feeling out interest in a book, I moved to Rome, discerning out of seminary after three years, started working with School of Faith, got engaged, got married, and we’re now awaiting the birth of our baby girl on November 1st!* In the meantime, I wrote and rewrote several variations of chapters that I would like to see in books someday. Some of them I turned into blog posts, some I scrapped, some I lost when my laptop died (I know, I should have saved them to the cloud!), and some I’ve still got filed away to be turned into book material someday.

But this book is very different from what I imagined I would write as a first book. Amidst the major life changes I just described, I spent a long time praying and reflecting on the role of identity. For years, my identity was a seminarian. If you said, “who are you?” my answer would immediately be “I’m Joe Heschmeyer, a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.” If you seemed like a nerd, I might also mention Shameless Popery (just kidding, I love you guys).

But in 2017, that seminarian identity came kind of crashing down, when I became increasingly convinced that God wasn’t calling me to ordination. There’s a whole story there that I might share someday, but for now, suffice it to say that it made me aware that I had overinvested in the seminarian identity, and underinvested in my deeper identity as an adopted son of God (cf. 1 John 3:1-2).

That’s not to say that the seminarian label was bad – it wasn’t! I loved my time in seminary, and I am grateful to have been called to it. But it let me see the subtle shift between wanting God’s will for your life and actually wanting God. I don’t think I’m alone in having been through that search for identity. People today (religious and non-religious alike) are aching to find who they are. That’s not a bad thing, because how you live is rooted in who you believe yourself to be. The problem is that there are a lot of really bad ways we tend to define ourselves – our jobs, our sexual orientation, our political affiliation, our kids, etc.  Even though these things may not be problematic in themselves, they don’t belong at the root of who we are, or who we understand ourselves to be. There’s a more fundamental identity, which can only be found in Christ.

I recently finished (again) the Flannery O’Connor short story A Good Man is Hard to Find, and as is my norm, I was somewhat confused by the story. So what did I do? I looked for people better able to tell me what it all meant. Unfortunately, the “experts” disagreed about the meaning of particular points. Fortunately, I stumbled upon (in a YouTube comment, no less!) someone who shared Flannery’s own explanation of the story. If anyone knows what the story is about, it’s the author, right?

Life is like that. You and I are created, and if we want to understand who we are, and why we exist, we need to get to know our Creator. As St. John Paul II says in Fides et Ratio, “God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” If you want a Scriptural basis for this way of thinking, look at Matthew 16:13-19,

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

We talk a lot about the implications of that passage for the papacy, but have you ever noticed that Simon only learns his deepest identity as Peter after he learns Jesus’ identity as the Christ? In coming to see Jesus more clearly, Jesus lets Simon Peter see himself more clearly.

So that’s the theme of this book. There are plenty of books on identity and “discovering yourself” and the like, but they tend to be either non-religious or theologically lightweight, and the advice is often selfish and bad (looking at you, Eat, Pray, Love). There are plenty of books on Christology, too, but they can risk being too abstract and speculative. This book is an exploration of the identity questions rooted in solid (but accessible!) Christology, so that you can come to know both Christ and yourself better.

The manuscript is to my editors at Our Sunday Visitor right now, and so we’re just smoothing our the writing, fixing any typos, and then working on design. The tentative release date is Spring 2020. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably go from “I’ll have to check that out” to “I totally forgot about that” between now and then. Fortunately for you, I’m making an e-mail list so I can remind everyone when it’s time to actually order the book. It’s free, and no obligation, so if sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, you can sign up here to join the list. To sweeten the (already-free) deal, people who pre-register now get two bonuses:

#1 – A sample chapter from the book, so you can see what it’s all about before you buy; and

#2 – The ability to pre-order before everybody else.

Interested? Here you go.

*I don’t write about myself very often, so apologies to any readers with whiplash from the sheer number of life updates I’m giving in a single post.