There are three stages of engagement with anything: courtship, honeymoon, and marriage. Courtship and honeymoon are thrilling. Marriage is not. Marriage can bring stability and contentment, but not a constant state of rapture. Our nervous systems are not built like that. And yet we are told that we should be eternally in search of rapture, that we are not living our lives properly unless we are in a state of rapture every day. This can lead people to an endless round of marriage and divorce, conversion and apostasy, forever seeking the excitements of courtship and honeymooning in a new relationship.

As a cradle Catholic, I have never had the kind of peak religious experience that so many of the converts I know either claim to have or continually strive for. I'm sure that the courtship and honeymoon phases of their conversion were full of intense emotions, which perhaps they attributed to the faith itself rather than to the ordinary psychology of courtship and honeymooning. But in the end, whether the subject is marriage or membership in a faith, the thrills of courtship and honeymoon must give way to the calm of married life. It is in the dull contentment of everyday life that most of us should find quiet consolation. Anything more than that comes in God's time, not ours, at his fiat, not ours, and to the few, not to the many.