That I'm sitting here writing this testimony is proof God is kind to dumb animals.
What follows is the story of a modern day Doubting Thomas' conversion from agnosticism to Christianity. It's a bit of a winding and sordid tale which spans exactly 40 years. Maybe time spent in reviewing my bumpy road to Christ will allow you to avoid your own eternal pitfall.
One of three siblings, I'm a proud Gen-X'er, born in the late 60s, and while I was the product of good parents, I evolved into something of a feral child. I enjoyed breaking things: my best friend's arm (I only meant to scare him), the windows in the garage (an honest accident with dad's sand wedge, or so I tell people), model airplanes (typically with fireworks left over from the Fourth), and my young cranium full of mush (mom will attest to multiple trips to the ER for sutures).
Ours was an acutely "areligious" household, but nonetheless, as I grew I professed a general fear of God just in case one existed. In my heart of hearts though, I was a full blown agnostic. I was never baptized, nor did our family pray or go to church.
My mother was the consummate skeptic; I found out later in life that my dad spent a couple years in scripture, reading from a tattered KJV bible when I was a small child. The former condition prevailed, the latter did not, and a wholly secular upbringing ensued.
A picture of complete immorality isn't what I'm trying to paint of my folks, however. No, they instilled many good qualities in their kids. My mother and father both possessed a remarkable work ethic, mom in the home, cooking, cleaning and doing laundry for five, and dad outside the house involving a marketing job in the petroleum industry which had him on the road alot.
Selling oil proved to be a windfall career for dad. As a result, we had "everything" growing up. A new, usually custom built house every few years. Nice cars. RV-borne family vacations to Yellowstone and other far off places. Lots of stuff to open on birthdays and at Christmas. Even a second home, a beautiful condo in Estes Park, Colorado.
Good intentions and material possessions were not enough. I was destined for real trouble.
At the tender age of 13, I welcomed myself to the contents of our home's substantial wet bar one night when my parents were at a dinner party down the street. I had watched both of them partake in the daily consumption of alcohol for as long as I could remember, and I figured whatever it was in booze that made dad funny and mom relaxed might be a good thing for me too.
So drink I did. My parents found me passed out later that night - an array of partially consumed bottles of hard liquor telling the tale of my intrusion. A vague recollection of being gently slapped in the face and having cups of ink black coffee poured down my throat at the kitchen table prevails to this day.
The same year, I got into trouble with a hooligan friend while vandalizing exterior holiday decorations and displays during the Christmas season. Ages passed, or so it seemed, before I was able to pay full restitution from my meager salary as a paper carrier for the Omaha World-Herald.
Garden variety delinquency wasn't entertaining enough. My path to moral decay was paved smooth and straight when I had intercourse at the age of fifteen. Such was the foundation for future behavior that demonstrated a distinct lack of respect for myself and others. I didn't wind up a dad or diseased, but no one would deny the social and medical ills which often result from teen and premarital sex.
It is staggering to ponder the implication of my actions and decision making during this time of my life. It begs the question how I didn't wind up in Boys Town, the juvenile detention center, or the morgue. Why was I spared? Hrmph. Good question. It wasn't because of my embracing of Christianity, though I would be exposed to it from time to time.
In my late teens, I hung out with a kid whose dad was a Born again Christian. One night after dinner at their house, he engaged me in conversation about whether I was "saved." I didn't know how to answer. Dialogue ensued, followed by prayer, followed by my verbalizing acceptance of Jesus as my savior, acknowledgment of my sinful nature, and asking Him to take over my life forever.
You would have thought I won the lottery, what with the excitement of the man who had led me through what I know today as the "Sinner's Prayer." High-fives all around. Sadly, I wanted to feel a change in the wake of this event, but I never did.
It should then not surprise the reader... I continued on my sinful path, a slave to promiscuity, under age drinking, drag racing on city streets, and a newfound penchant for shoplifting auto parts I developed to help fund my hot rod project at home.
Anyone else pondering the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13 as I catalog these events?
Now my father was a physical specimen. He was a State Heavyweight Champion wrestler for North High School and, later, a football great at the University of Nebraska at Omaha during the 50s (he was even drafted by the San Francisco 49ers). Despite his physical abilities, he regularly admonished me, "You'll make more money with your mouth than you will your back!" Thus was his mantra when stressing the importance of a college education to get ahead in the business world.
The thought was dreadful. I'd graduated from high school with only a "C" average and a couple credits to spare. Reluctantly, and chiefly because dad was paying my way, I enrolled at UNO with my eye on mediocre grades and beer parties.
I decided to join the walk-on program for UNO Maverick football. While standing 6'3", weighing well over 200 pounds, and having a couple years of high school ball under my belt, I was never the athlete my father had been.
I'd gotten lazy at Millard North H.S. and quit the team midway through my junior year, so there existed no tape of me on the field. Dad knew Sandy Buda, UNO's coach at the time. Being an influential alum, he pulled the necessary strings to get Coach Buda to take a look at me. I was in the door, though I had hardly earned it.
No one was more acutely aware of the chasm between my father's athleticism and mine better than me. Having heard the virtues of anabolic steroids as professed by a teammate, I bought my first bottle of methandrostenolone, or "D-bol" as it's called on the street, as a way to build my body and enhance the odds of my making the squad. This would later lead to sticking needles in my thigh and injecting myself with more powerful, black market equine steroids.
In the end, "juicing" didn't make me a better football player, but it did make me an angrier person, quicker to disrespect my mother and shout at my handicapped younger brother for no good reason whatsoever.
Thankfully, my college career wasn't a complete bust. The shotgun approach I employed to pick my electives as I pursued an undergraduate degree in Business Administration paid dividends; I signed up for a basic Criminal Justice class, Intro to CJ 101.
In part because the professor was cute, I never missed that class, though I skipped plenty of others. About halfway through the semester, I experienced a bonafide epiphany. I knew I wanted to be a cop.
I quit drinking, stopped doing steroids, and withdrew from the football team. I enrolled in all the CJ classes I could carry. My GPA went from a borderline "C-D" average to a 3.85 by the time I left UNO. And after three years cutting my teeth as a sheriffs deputy in Papillion, Nebraska, I raised my right hand and swore a solemn oath in my hometown of Omaha as mom pinned a brilliant, nickel plated shield to my heaving chest. The year was 1991.
In short order, my existence revolved around being a police officer. I loved being a cop and I pursued the criminal element with reckless abandon. Few police officers worked harder than I did while patrolling the mean streets of northeast Omaha in the early '90s.
Police work makes you grow up fast. By the time I finished five years of the four to midnight shift in the city's projects, I had been in countless fights, three shooting situations, and had seen my friend and trainee, Officer Jimmy Wilson Jr., shot to death in the line of duty by a criminal affiliated with the Bloods street gang.
I became a decorated officer, earning the department's Medal of Valor for engaging in a 12 mile vehicle pursuit of two armed robbery suspects while the passenger fired shots at me during the course of the chase. With six years on the job, I successfully sought the rank of sergeant, testing #4 out of 60 peers vying for promotion.
Did I say I loved my job? Yeah, in fact, I used to proclaim, "God put me on this earth to be a cop!" even though I held no particular belief in or reverence of the deity whose name I invoked when I stated so.
In 1993, I impulsively married into an Italian family of practicing Catholics. I occasionally spectated at Mass, but as was the case with my Born again experience, the exposure had no effect. Best I could do was try to stay awake during the hour long service. I struggled through this on a few Sundays, eventually refusing to attend church at all.
My marriage stunk. We endured for seven years before I filed for divorce. While unsure why I was doing so, I petitioned the Omaha Archdiocese for an annulment and, a year after typing out a 20 page affidavit for such, was granted one.
Afterwards, I continued my boyish pursuits, running around at work with my hair on fire and tear-assing through the countryside on my motorcycle during time off. I toured the Smokies and the Rockies aboard my bike and lived responsibility free but for duties at work. I spent my energy and money on myself. Time passed. I thought I was pretty happy.
Deep down though, in a corner of my psyche I didn't want to peer too deeply into, I knew there was something missing: depth and meaning of life.
Early in 2005, I met an angel of a woman who would later become my beloved wife, Denise. The confluence of our paths was a miracle.
After much goading, a married couple I was friends with talked me into a double date with a female acquaintance (not Denise). I was promised the girl was pretty, earned big money as a pharmacist, drove a cool Audi, and lived in a fancy home.
Well, the woman seemed most if not all those things, but midway through the evening she was planning out our married lives and the children we'd have together. To be blunt, I could conjure few things I wanted to be less than I wanted to be a husband, and I was aching for the date to end.
Denise was out that night with family. She spied my friend Nick who had arranged the double date and came over to say hello. Pleasantries were exchanged and, as soon as I shook her hand and took in her infectious smile, I was hooked. Sounds sappy, but it's the truth.
A ten month courtship ensued. After attending premarital training as required by the Omaha Archdiocese, we were married. And this time, I really did win the lotto.
My wife is a light of a human being. She is the love of my life and is the finest woman I have ever known. She is a gem of a daughter, sister, and friend to those she loves. She is also a devout Catholic and is very faithful to the Christian life.
By example alone (via the manner in which she conducted herself), Denise softened my heart to the point the previously unthinkable was made possible. Ten months after the wedding, I entered into the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults - RCIA.
Noteworthy is the fact I did so only out of respect and a desire to better understand her faith. She knew I wasn't agreeing ahead of time to be baptized or join the Church, however, I left that door ajar in case I were inclined to do so by the end of the nine month program.
The byproduct of my spiritual enlightenment was not without dark moments and they didn't take long to materialize. I experienced significant levels of stress early on in RCIA due to a secretly held fear my wife would be disappointed if I didn't join the Church. I believed going through the training and opting not to join would let Denise down and hurt our marriage, though she gave me no reason to believe this.
Then enter my bible-only fundamentalist friend from work. He had me on the ropes on a couple occasions to the point I went to my wife one evening after dinner and asked if she'd feel differently about me if I didn't join the Church, if I embraced Protestantism instead of Catholicism.
Denise desired me to share her faith, but she reiterated her love for me and her belief God would prevail no matter how this turned out... so back to my studies I went.
I'm a semi-suspicious, sometimes cynical person. Blame the job, but for better or worse, I've never been a proponent of blind trust. So I attacked my studies in the same manner I attacked my responsibilities as a cop. God either existed or He didn't, and I was hell bent on finding out.
I took a very honest, holistic approach to my faith walk. Aside from reading handout material from Thursday evening RCIA classes, I began to read the bible for the first time. I developed an appetite for it, reading the New Testament in four weeks. Then I leaped into the Old Testament and various biblical commentaries.
I investigated early Christian history through the writings of the Church Fathers. I read the Compendium cover to cover and made a big dent in the full length Catechism. I listened to Christian apologetics and I began to fellowship with Protestants and Catholics alike. I spent time in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and doing Stations of the Cross. I began to pray, challenging God to reveal Himself to me and to spur on my expedition.
Be careful what you ask for, because He reached out like the lightning bolt depicted above, and a material change of heart ensued.
The priest who married me, a Nigerian clergyman, shattered biases I had developed toward African-Americans during years spent working nights in the inner city.
I prayed my mother's heart softened in the same way mine had proved malleable. I recall the day I took her a book entitled The Case for Faith written by Lee Strobel, a former atheist. Rather than telling me to get lost (I was sure this was going to be her response), she accepted the gift with a smile and a promise to read it.
I noticed myself interacting with co-workers and strangers in a different way. Instead of shooting my mouth off about some perceived transgression committed against me, I was slower to judge and quick to forgive and pray.
I quit a lucrative part-time job moonlighting as security at a local bar as it finally dawned on me being around dozens of flirtatious, intoxicated college co-eds wasn't the environment a married man should be in.
Were these positive events in my life the manifestation of a changed will? Hardly. You've seen where my will took me before: Self Service.
As the months unfolded in RCIA, I went back and forth some, but the overall leaning was eventually toward Catholicism and is fully that direction today. If, however, my prayer and study had led me to Protestantism, I would have gone to my wife with that revelation, no matter how much I feared the result. I've always said, a person must have the courage of their convictions. Today, I believe that more than ever, hence the reason for the telling of this story.
While my Christian walk will not end until the day I die and bow to the Lord outside the Pearly Gates, I've come to what I think is the pivotal question for anyone earnestly searching for the truth. When you set everything else aside, I believe a person's decision on whether to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church hinges on one thing:
Do you believe Jesus Christ installed a visible, apostolic Church with teaching authority while He was here on earth?
If your answer to that question is "no," or "maybe," or "I'm not sure," this could be your call to critical study of early Christianity and to prayer. You may not feel comfortable joining the Church unless you want to take one for the team, say, in the interest of joining your spouse in faith (which is not entirely without virtue).
If, however, your answer to that question is "yes," then despite reservations or past religious practices, it could be argued you have an obligation to follow that path which leads to the truth. After all, Jesus is truth. Our Lord said it himself in John 14, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."
Me? My answer is a resounding "Yes!" and, God willing, I'll receive the Holy Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and first Eucharist on the night of the Easter Vigil, 2007.
When I look back on my life, it's with wonder and amazement that I got where I am today. I lied, I stole, I cheated, I fought, I rebelled against my parents, I abused alcohol, I used illicit drugs, I didn't respect myself or others, and my grades were poor.
It's not lost on me that my communion with the Church will take place mere days after my 40th birthday. Truly, I have spent 40 years in the wilderness! Now, after my own personal period of exodus, Jesus Christ is the reason I get out of bed every single day.
As it says in Galatians 2:20 -and this verse is frequently quoted by the inspirational Fr. Larry Richards from Erie, PA- "I have been crucified in Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."
So what does all this mean for you?
It's simple: you gotta do something. No more talking the talk without walking the walk. Only after availing yourself to Jesus will you find a true changing of your heart, an innate conviction to do good and an honest desire to repent when you slip and sin.
I invite you to take that first step of faith, no matter how skeptical you may be, and embark upon your own spiritual investigation. I sought and have been rewarded. If a cretin like me is worthy of the grace of God, so too is everyone who reads this.
I challenge you to seek the truth for yourself and to do something more than simply going through the motions. Sponsor someone in RCIA, or tithe an hour of your time each week to the Church, or help the less fortunate in your community with donations of time or money to the Food Bank or other charities.
Learn something more about your faith. Listen to Christian radio. Order apologetics CDs from the Bible Christian Society, The Reason For Our Hope Foundation, or the Mary Foundation.
Buy a book that explains the Mass in lay terms so you can become rejuvenated with your weekly experience of the Eucharist. (The How-To Book of the Mass by Michael Dubriel, a Creighton University grad, is superb.) Browse the Compendium. Go to church each Sunday and on Holy Days of Obligation. Go to confession. Read the bible, if even only a few verses a day. And pray - because without a prayer life, you can't build a relationship with Jesus.
Tom Hanks's character in Saving Private Ryan made a dying declaration while he lay mortally wounded on the battlefield. He said simply, "Earn this."
While only by God's grace might I attain salvation, I nevertheless feel a tremendous debt to Jesus for His sacrifice on the cross. So, while I cannot "earn this" gift of salvation, I feel compelled to act - especially in this age of moral relativism. I hope you do too.
Live out your faith! I can attest, if you seek earnestly, you shall find.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Jason
It's tough to know exactly where to begin a personal tale, so I guess I'll just muddle through the best I can.
My childhood was rather a plain one. I was born on Christmas Day 1974 and baptized in the Lutheran church the following Easter. The extent of my religious training was from around age 4 until I was 16 and consisted of Sunday school -- not church, but Sunday School. My mom and dad would go to my grandma's house and after class, we'd all have a big Sunday dinner.
Since my dad worked shift work and my mom didn't drive, my aunt drove 10 miles out of town to get me and take my Sunday lessons. This lasted until I was 10 and then my best friend's mom started taking me to their Methodist church.
Being of an obvious male mentality, the fuzzy/squishy theology of the Methodists never really clicked with me, so when I got my license at 16, I got hit with a case of the fumes (gas fumes and per-fumes). I thought, "K, I've learned what I need to know about God, so I'm done."
Once in college, I bought into the whole "the only truth is that there is no truth" mentality and basically lived my life as a "good person." So, I was free to live my life on my own terms, and I did. Nothing like drugs or binge drinking, I had too much common sense and pride in myself for that, but I was on a rather easy path to Hell.
One day in the karate class I was attending, we were working on wrist locks. The pair of ladies next to us were arguing. "Your not doing it right and it hurts! Let's ask them for help." (meaning my partner and me).
Well next thing I know, I'm paired up with the lovely young Catholic (lapsed) lady named Amanda and after class, I asked her out. Well things went along very well and we ended up marrying at 19 year olds.
The first 3 years of marriage were anything but wedded bliss, so I'll cut that part of the story short. However, one night things exploded. Amanda went to her class and I was left in our apartment with our toddler-daughter. It looked like the end of this marriage had come at last.
At this point, I did something I don't remember ever really doing before. I prayed. Not reciting words, but actually prayed. "God, help me. Things are so hard on kids nowadays that I don't want Jessie to come from a broken home. Help us work it out."
When Amanda got home, I was waiting for her. Not with the venom in my heart of 2 hours before, but with a serenity I never before had. She seemed altered too, so we talked and agreed to work it through. We both agreed that it would be touch and go because we're both so stubborn. We also agreed that we needed God in our lives if it would work. We started flip-flopping services - Catholic one weekend and Lutheran the next.
At this time, I worked for a company that was 95% Catholic and I mean CATHOLIC. Staunch defenders of the faith every one. I was also reading through Scripture and Luther's Confession. What I heard at work and in Scripture sounded more like what I was hearing at Mass than at my Lutheran church, but I still wasn't convinced.
Then, it happened. My wife dropped the bombshell. "I want to raise the kids Catholic."
WHAT!? No way.
I'm not asking you to convert, but I want to raise them Catholic. I got you this book (she hand's me The Catholic Church has the Answer) so that we can talk about what I believe.
It won't happen, I say and grabbed our daughter and left for my parent's house. When I got home that evening, I put Jessie to bed and went to our room without even talking to Amanda. I locked the door and read every page of that booklet.
About an hour later, I came out and said, "I'm sorry about earlier. We need to talk. I've got questions and I need answers. I'm not promising I'll convert, but you can raise the kids Catholic."
A week later, they were baptized (we also had Aidan at this point). My wife and I also had our marriage blessed by the Church (it was nearing our 5th anniversary, so I thought it'd be cool). While we were signing the parish register, I asked, "Fr.....uh.....when do those...uh....Catholic classes start. I need some answers."
Amanda looked delighted. "Are you serious?!!"
Well, RCIA was interesting. What I heard at work and what I was reading on my own was much more informational than what I learned at RCIA. I had the usual Protestant fears...Mary, purgatory, the Eucharist, etc. But I fell in love with Mary and could see the logic of purgatory. The Eucharist was my stumbling block.
Right before the Great Easter Vigil, I told the RCIA teacher, "I can't go through with this. I can't believe that that bread is the Body of Christ. I can't."
She actually laughed at me. "That's nonsense. That's just the devil trying to give you cold feet. I've heard you talk, Jason and you do believe it. Come into the Church and work it out afterward."
Not the best advice, but there it is. So I went through with it as planned. The Confirmation rite came and went and then my name was called to receive my First Holy Communion.
I stood there. "The Body of Christ."
"Amen."
I consumed Our Lord and then something strange happened. Remember, I've received communion in a Lutheran Church and a Methodist church before, but nothing like this ever happened.
I heard these words in my head "I AM HERE!" WHY DO YOU DOUBT MY WORD." I felt Him in my very soul, but I'm stubborn and continued to doubt.
"The Blood of Christ" "Amen."
"I AM HERE MY SON. WHY DO YOU STILL DOUBT."
The next morning, Jessica (5 at this time) said, "Daddy, were you happy last night after receiving Communion?"
"Yes, honey, why?"
"Because you had the biggest smile on your face. I can't wait to receive Jesus."
Well that was 7 years ago and life has been a whole lot more beautiful since then. My wife and I have 8 children (5 here on Earth and 3 in Heaven) and continue to love and cherish each other. We love our Faith and can't imagine where we'd be without it.
My childhood was rather a plain one. I was born on Christmas Day 1974 and baptized in the Lutheran church the following Easter. The extent of my religious training was from around age 4 until I was 16 and consisted of Sunday school -- not church, but Sunday School. My mom and dad would go to my grandma's house and after class, we'd all have a big Sunday dinner.
Since my dad worked shift work and my mom didn't drive, my aunt drove 10 miles out of town to get me and take my Sunday lessons. This lasted until I was 10 and then my best friend's mom started taking me to their Methodist church.
Being of an obvious male mentality, the fuzzy/squishy theology of the Methodists never really clicked with me, so when I got my license at 16, I got hit with a case of the fumes (gas fumes and per-fumes). I thought, "K, I've learned what I need to know about God, so I'm done."
Once in college, I bought into the whole "the only truth is that there is no truth" mentality and basically lived my life as a "good person." So, I was free to live my life on my own terms, and I did. Nothing like drugs or binge drinking, I had too much common sense and pride in myself for that, but I was on a rather easy path to Hell.
One day in the karate class I was attending, we were working on wrist locks. The pair of ladies next to us were arguing. "Your not doing it right and it hurts! Let's ask them for help." (meaning my partner and me).
Well next thing I know, I'm paired up with the lovely young Catholic (lapsed) lady named Amanda and after class, I asked her out. Well things went along very well and we ended up marrying at 19 year olds.
The first 3 years of marriage were anything but wedded bliss, so I'll cut that part of the story short. However, one night things exploded. Amanda went to her class and I was left in our apartment with our toddler-daughter. It looked like the end of this marriage had come at last.
At this point, I did something I don't remember ever really doing before. I prayed. Not reciting words, but actually prayed. "God, help me. Things are so hard on kids nowadays that I don't want Jessie to come from a broken home. Help us work it out."
When Amanda got home, I was waiting for her. Not with the venom in my heart of 2 hours before, but with a serenity I never before had. She seemed altered too, so we talked and agreed to work it through. We both agreed that it would be touch and go because we're both so stubborn. We also agreed that we needed God in our lives if it would work. We started flip-flopping services - Catholic one weekend and Lutheran the next.
At this time, I worked for a company that was 95% Catholic and I mean CATHOLIC. Staunch defenders of the faith every one. I was also reading through Scripture and Luther's Confession. What I heard at work and in Scripture sounded more like what I was hearing at Mass than at my Lutheran church, but I still wasn't convinced.
Then, it happened. My wife dropped the bombshell. "I want to raise the kids Catholic."
WHAT!? No way.
I'm not asking you to convert, but I want to raise them Catholic. I got you this book (she hand's me The Catholic Church has the Answer) so that we can talk about what I believe.
It won't happen, I say and grabbed our daughter and left for my parent's house. When I got home that evening, I put Jessie to bed and went to our room without even talking to Amanda. I locked the door and read every page of that booklet.
About an hour later, I came out and said, "I'm sorry about earlier. We need to talk. I've got questions and I need answers. I'm not promising I'll convert, but you can raise the kids Catholic."
A week later, they were baptized (we also had Aidan at this point). My wife and I also had our marriage blessed by the Church (it was nearing our 5th anniversary, so I thought it'd be cool). While we were signing the parish register, I asked, "Fr.....uh.....when do those...uh....Catholic classes start. I need some answers."
Amanda looked delighted. "Are you serious?!!"
Well, RCIA was interesting. What I heard at work and what I was reading on my own was much more informational than what I learned at RCIA. I had the usual Protestant fears...Mary, purgatory, the Eucharist, etc. But I fell in love with Mary and could see the logic of purgatory. The Eucharist was my stumbling block.
Right before the Great Easter Vigil, I told the RCIA teacher, "I can't go through with this. I can't believe that that bread is the Body of Christ. I can't."
She actually laughed at me. "That's nonsense. That's just the devil trying to give you cold feet. I've heard you talk, Jason and you do believe it. Come into the Church and work it out afterward."
Not the best advice, but there it is. So I went through with it as planned. The Confirmation rite came and went and then my name was called to receive my First Holy Communion.
I stood there. "The Body of Christ."
"Amen."
I consumed Our Lord and then something strange happened. Remember, I've received communion in a Lutheran Church and a Methodist church before, but nothing like this ever happened.
I heard these words in my head "I AM HERE!" WHY DO YOU DOUBT MY WORD." I felt Him in my very soul, but I'm stubborn and continued to doubt.
"The Blood of Christ" "Amen."
"I AM HERE MY SON. WHY DO YOU STILL DOUBT."
The next morning, Jessica (5 at this time) said, "Daddy, were you happy last night after receiving Communion?"
"Yes, honey, why?"
"Because you had the biggest smile on your face. I can't wait to receive Jesus."
Well that was 7 years ago and life has been a whole lot more beautiful since then. My wife and I have 8 children (5 here on Earth and 3 in Heaven) and continue to love and cherish each other. We love our Faith and can't imagine where we'd be without it.
Tom
In April of the year 2000 the administration of Trinity International University, where I was a tenured professor, and where I had successfully and happily served for seven years, called for my resignation. I was about to be received into the Catholic Church, and that put me outside the boundaries of orthodoxy prescribed by Trinity’s statement of faith. I tendered my resignation, knowing I might never again teach at any college and that my professional life might be an uphill struggle for the rest of my life.
Many people find this difficult to swallow. You gave up your job to become Catholic?
Just to join a church? Isn’t one church basically the same as the next? Don’t they all teach about Jesus? Does it really matter which one you attend? Do you really want to go that far—endanger your career, struggle financially, be misunderstood—for the sake of Church membership? Does it matter that much which “flavor” of religion you prefer?
And, if you are going to take a stand for a church, you’ll do it for that one? The Catholic one? Its hierarchical governance gives rise to all sorts of ills, everything from pedophile priests and to blatant discrimination against women. And . . . don’t they practically worship Mary? Don’t they make you obey the Pope, no matter what he says? Don’t they believe in salvation by their own works? They’re more like a cult than a church, aren’t they? Don’t they talk to dead people and pray to statues and . . . oh yeah, don’t they tell you it’s like this huge sin to use artificial birth control? Didn’t they torture Galileo? Didn’t they persecute the Jews? Didn’t it finally come out that Pope Pius XII was like a Nazi or something? And didn’t they torture gazillions of people in the Inquisition, and didn’t they ban the bible and . . .
The barrage of indictments against the Catholic Church is truly without end, and there was a time when I believed all of them. Careful study over a number of years gradually showed me that most of them are simply not true. Any truth to the remaining accusations could be understood if seen in a greater context.
I became a Christian in 1979 at the age of 28, not because of some personal preference, not to be helped, not to meet my needs, not to feel good, but because I became convinced that the claims of the Jesus Christ were true. The apologetic works of C.S. Lewis, which I had begun to read in the spring of 1977, had initiated the work of conversion, opening my mind to the truths of the gospel. Back then, this discovery of Lewis marked the beginning of a process whereby, one by one, my misconceptions and prejudices about Christianity would be challenged. His sparklingly logical explanations, bolstered by his use of common sense and every-day language made the case for the truth Christianity. Surprisingly, many of Lewis’s arguments would later be part of my becoming Catholic.
I was working at the time as an orchestral musician in Germany. In July of 1979, during a vacation trip to I ran into group of enthusiastic young Christians, mostly American, who were spending their summer ministering evangelistically, under the auspices of a group called Youth With a Mission, in, of all places, Amsterdam. These young people made it clear that you could actually know Jesus, talk to Him, invite Him into your heart. In spite of much hesitation and no little doubt, I decided to do just that. The day after I spoke my first prayer, as I awoke early in the morning in my little pup tent, I knew God loved me, and that I could never earn His love. Everything in my life changed.
God granted me three of my most heartfelt wishes that day; nothing outlandish, everything very much in keeping with what any parent would wish for their child. He freed me from a fierce addiction to nicotine. He gave me so much joy that I discovered I did not need to drink in order to enjoy myself (I had been well on my to ruining my life with frequent and uncontrolled drunkenness) . And, thirdly, He placed my mother's quintessentially Catholic words about marriage deep within my soul; words I had ignored for many years: "Sex is beautiful and it belongs to marriage.” It occurred to me that I should seek to be faithful to my future wife in thought and deed. It also became clear to me that God could give me the strength and power to do so if I asked Him.
I was not a Christian more than a day or two, when, for the first time, I was confronted with the gut-wrenching reality of serious disagreement between believers. It began with a discussion, not without heat, about man's free will. How could they say man does not have free will? C.S. Lewis had based his entire case for the faith on the contention that man is free to choose. And then came the scriptures, like bullets . . . or bombs: Paul, Romans, Galatians—boom, bang, crack. Scriptures from the other side, Paul, Jesus, James, Peter, boom, bang, bang! I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all!
After a few weeks in Amsterdam, I returned to Germany, and from 1979 through 1987 lived in Essen, where I joined a charismatic Anabaptist congregation. In that church in Essen I met my wife, Angelika, and also in Essen, all three of our children were born. During this time I discovered how much I love to teach and began to look for ways to make a career change. This led me to pursue graduate studies at the University of Florida., in 1987.
In Gainesville we fellowshipped at an Evangelical Free Church. I went to graduate school and taught music out of our home. After a few years I had almost 100 students studying horn, piano, guitar and recorder. My students came from a myriad of churches: not only Creekside Evangelical Free Church, where we worshipped, but also a Baptist church that was led by followers of Bill Gothard, another Baptist church which taught that the King James Bible is the only legitimate translation, yet another Baptist church which, in 1988 taught from the pulpit that Christ would return in 1988 (for 88 reasons!), a staunchly five-point Presbyterian Church, one of those flamboyant charismatic Churches called The Rock that actually claims to have apostles, another charismatic congregation with prophets and healers, a Vineyard congregation, a Church of the Nazarene, a Dove International congregation, the Church of Christ, the Salvation Army, the Church of Christian Science, a good Lutheran congregation, and an Episcopal Church. I had a large number of pastor's kids studying with me. I got to know the students and the parents. I got to know their churches. I read about their different theologies. Each tradition had its definite strengths, and each was equally troubled by its own narrowness. I began to feel as if I ought to belong to all of the churches in this colorful mosaic, but, as I studied and experienced them, I was actually capable of completely lining up with none of them.
In 1993 I was offered a faculty position at Trinity College in Deerfield Illinois, which, with the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) is looked upon as one of the leading evangelical institutions of higher learning. I quickly became engrossed in building Trinity’s music program, recruiting students, directing the band, teaching classes, and eventually chairing the department. The faculty was charged to “integrate faith and learning” and I attempted to take this very seriously, as did my colleagues.
Though we were all involved in different disciplines, from music to history, from English to biology, faculty members came together with some regularity to study a particular book or an article. One of the books we read was Mark Noll’s exposé of the intellectual weaknesses of Evangelicalism, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It had a deep effect on me. Noll provides page after page of evidence that, in his own words:
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."
This was accepted as a truism by the participants in our faculty forum. The irony of it—we were supposed to be in the business of integrating faith and learning even though the parameters forced upon us by the evangelical culture promised, as far as I could tell, very little prospect for success—struck me harder than it did the others, much harder. They had, almost all of them, grown up in the evangelical fold; they were “cradle Evangelicals” as it were, whereas I was an adoptive son. The harsh contradictions in their world, which Noll so bluntly fingered, did not cause them to wonder about the very legitimacy of the integration endeavor, but they did me.
I encountered a major surprise when, in 1998 I discovered the testimony of the Early Church Fathers. At some point I visited a Catholic bookstore and bought Volume I of The Faith of the Early Fathers, selected and translated by William Jurgens. It contains teachings from the Church Fathers of the first three centuries, from the time before the “Catholic stuff” was supposed to have entered the Church—i.e. before Constantine in the 4th century.
I was very surprised at what I found. This was not supposed to be! These people all had rock solid convictions about the centrality of the Eucharist in worship, and strong statements about its essence being both physical and supernatural. I found the Gnostics’ heretical denial of the goodness and significance of the material world was specifically demonstrated by their denial of the incarnational reality of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. This was all very surprising and did not square with what I had been told, repeatedly for many years.
The early Fathers spoke of the Mass as a sacrifice, Mary as the second Eve, and real authority vested in the office of the bishop. They strongly implied the primacy of the bishop of Rome. These essentially Catholic distinctives were presented by the Fathers not as tentative propositions, certainly not as cutting-edge innovations, but rather as well-accepted facts of the faith, already universally believed, very early on.
These sorts of teachings, the kind which are Catholic and not Protestant, were, according to Protestant teaching, not supposed to have entered the Church until the time of "creeping paganization" after Constantine, i.e. after 325 A.D. But here they were, in the second and third century Church! I was shocked at how wrong Protestants were about the early Church.
I was also surprised by the Pope himself, John Paul II. His thoroughly Christ-centered teaching and life—which included a stance on the moral issues of our day so insightful and profound as to be truly prophetic—whittled away at the idea that the Pope is a sort of anti-Christ. There was an undeniable authority in his resolute insistence that the smallest and weakest amongst us must be protected from the deadly knife of the abortionist. If the Pope is a foreshadowing of the Anti-Christ, as Protestants had told me, where does he get the spiritual gumption to resist the entire Western world on the question of abortion? Where did he get the fortitude to stare down Communism? How could he so resolutely decry the materialism of the West?
John Paul II was an enigma—and a surprise! Whenever I would read something about him or even see a picture of him, I could perceive something very special, wholesome, good, and child-like. He was full of joy, yet stern as an Old Testament prophet. He exuded an attractive simplicity, yet could speak as an exquisitely educated philosopher. And, unlike most well educated people, he was not bamboozled by the relativistic tomfoolery of many contemporary thinkers. His enthusiasm for everything beautiful, especially for the young, not only fascinated, but began to inspire me.
We began to regularly watch Marcus’ Grodi’s “Journey Home” on EWTN every Friday night, which presented a quiet parade of joyful converts from all different sorts of religions and non-religions. Their arguments, backed by the diversity of their experience made an indelible impression. On the show, Marcus interviews a good number of people who have come from Evangelicalism. In moments of self-reflection I was forced to admit that I envied them for the step they had dared to take. I wouldn’t have admitted it then, but they were paving a way for me out of the various ant-Catholic misconceptions and prejudices I had harbored for so many years.
I read a number of apologetics books by such people as Thomas Howard, David Currie, Steve Ray, Scott Hahn, Karl Keating, Karl Adam, Hans Urs von Balthazar, Karl Adam, Karl Keating, G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman and St. Francis DeSales. I also collected and read books from the other point of view: anti-Catholic books by authors such as R.C. Sproul, John Ankerburg, Norman Geisler, and Dallas seminary’s Ron Rhodes, etc. The Protestant book were pervaded by the stale odor of manipulation: straw-man arguments, selective use of historical data and outright misrepresentations.
The Catholic explanations began to make more sense than any of the Protestant ones.
G. K. Chesterton once said of his own conversion to the Catholic Church: “I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even to cannibals . . . [but] it is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it . . .”
Exactly as Chesterton describes, I had ceased to pull against the Catholic Church, and was definitely being tugged towards her. I was beginning to ask that she be “fairly treated” and a secret fondness was waxing in the hidden recesses of my heart
There eventually came the time when my discussions with Evangelicals, especially colleagues at Trinity, took on a new tone. I would be discussing any one of a number of issues (transubstantiation, communion of saints, papal infallibility, salvation by works, authority of bishops, confession, Mary, Purgatory, etc.) with an Evangelical, who would say "Catholicism teaches thus . . . ." More often than not their statement would represent some substantive misunderstanding of what the Church actually teaches. So I would retort, "No, actually the Church teaches thus . . . " and proceed to explain Catholic doctrine. Without realizing it, I was becoming a defender of the Catholic faith.
I made friends with one of the philosophy professors, Dale, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, who would present Luther's view, while I presented the Catholic one. During one conversation, I prefaced an answer to one of his questions with, "well, Dale, if I were Catholic I would tell you . . ." He stopped and turned to me (he is very tall and I am pretty short, so the moment had a certain visual drama to it, not without humor) and said, with a big grin, "What do you mean, if you were Catholic? You ARE Catholic!" Uh-oh, I don't want to be Catholic, I don’t want to lose my job! But he made me listen to myself defending the Church. Yes that is what I was doing.
For years I had stifled the cry in my heart for unity in Christ’s Church. From the very first experiences in Amsterdam, to the fierce party spirit in our church in Germany, the potpourri of Protestants in Florida, and now this microcosm of the evangelical world at Trinity, one undeniable truth emerged—Protestantism does not and, alas, cannot, express oneness. Its essence is not unity, but division. There are very few features that unite all of Evangelicalism and even fewer that unite all of Protestantism. Some would suggest that the Bible provides unity, and yes, the various Protestant groups can unite around the idea that it is authoritative—but they cannot agree about what it says. Others say the Holy Spirit provides unity—but Protestants agree even less about what the Spirit is saying. Most of the few doctrines this assemblage of diverse groups does hold in common are the very ones they also hold in common with Catholicism: the deity/humanity of Christ, an elementary understanding of the Trinity, salvation through faith in Christ. Other than the doctrines held commonly with Catholicism, Protestants agree on only one thing: they are not Catholic. Thus, Protestantism’s identity is established by what it is not.
We began to regularly attend Mass at St. Paul's, held in a thoughtfully modern, aesthetically pleasing building. I was moved by the carefully coordinated scripture readings and the beautiful prayers. I was there to meet God. Why others were there I did not know, nor did I really care. Emancipation from the necessity to judge others has been one of the glories of the journey! At Mass I was in the presence of Jesus Christ. I was also in the company of, not only the parishioners of St. Paul, but of innumerable others from every tribe and tongue, from every continent, who, for 2000 years, had, as one Body, worshipped the Lamb, offered the Lamb, received the Lamb, and been blessed and fulfilled by the Lamb. I was in the presence of something not only palpably bigger than myself, but also bigger than the building or even the culture or time I lived in.
After Sunday Mass we would drive over to our own evangelical church, to worship in our new building, one which expresses, unfortunately, the profoundly impoverished aesthetic sensibilities of the evangelical world. It includes a "worship space" which looks pretty much like a movie theater. The room, constructed with no source of natural light, is dominated by an elevated stage, which is spotlighted during the worship service. The congregation sits before a cadre of spotlighted "worship leaders" up on the stage, who, with ecstatically closed eyes, raised hands, beaming faces, sing the newest top 40 here-today-gone-tomorrow worship choruses, over and over again. After the singing, other individuals would go to the microphone and speak long extemporaneous prayers, which were incomparably less rich, less differentiated, and frankly, less appropriate, than the ones being prayed in the Catholic Church. There was very little Scripture reading, which seemed odd, even ironic. Supposedly the Catholic Church kept the Scriptures away from the people so they wouldn’t find the truth. Why was I getting far more Scripture at St. Paul’s than at our evangelical church? Then there would be this long sermon about what pastor had to say about a series of Bible passages, then more “worship”. It all began to seem quite man-centered, and the strong whiff of manipulation could no longer be ignored.
Through my studies up to this point I had begun to see not only good sense, but also a compelling cohesiveness in the fabric of Catholic doctrine. However, some Catholic teachings, like the Marian dogmas, represented an insurmountable obstacle to my ever being able to fully embrace the Catholic faith. I had read, talked and prayed my way most of the way into the Catholic Church, and all along the way I had been surprised at how wrong Protestants are about this ancient Church. But Mary? Were Protestants wrong about her too?
I made friends with David Currie, the author of one of the books I had read, who gave me a Rosary. Oh my! It had been "blessed by the Pope"—whatever that meant! I took it in to the basement at our house where no one could see me, along with a book about the Rosary and began to pray. All of the prayers were rich in Scripture, and the meditations led me deep into the life of Christ. Through the Rosary I began to experience a renewed sense of Jesus’ presence in my prayer life.
I began to pray the Rosary regularly. Now, years later, I can say, outside the Mass, there is nothing that more dependably brings me into an awareness of who Christ is than the discipline of the Rosary. The quietness of the repetitions sets just the right tone to think deeply about Jesus, about His incarnation, His suffering and His everlasting glory!
As I warmed up to the idea of one day becoming Catholic, Mary had presented a huge obstacle. I had been deeply indoctrinated into the notion that Catholics worship her. However, as my vision cleared and the glory of worship in the Catholic Mass became evident, the accusation that Catholics worship Mary gradually began to seem not only untrue, but absurd. The liturgy of the Mass is the pinnacle and the essence of Catholic worship. It is absolutely God-centered, Trinity-centered, and Christ-centered. At Mass Mary plays no central role whatsoever.
There is not a worship service on the earth which more completely and utterly focuses on Christ and his sacrifice than the Holy Mass. Protestants do not know such exalted worship. For them the content of worship is, at least outwardly, limited to singing songs and hearing a sermon, so when they hear Catholics sing a hymn to Mary, they suspect she is being worshipped. But Catholics know, when they sing Marian songs or seek Mary’s intercession, they are not making her into a Goddess to be worshipped, but rather seeking the aid of a powerful advocate and ally.
I eventually became convinced that the Catholic beliefs about Mary are in fact not only true, but function as a necessary protector and guarantor of the central Christological truths. Wherever Marian piety is miniaturized or eliminated, the Christology of the Nicene Creed—fully God and fully man—begins to erode. This results, on the one hand, in the squishy relativism of Protestant liberalism, or, on the other hand, in the rough, edgy, tomboyish hardness of fundamentalism/evangelicalism. Both are lopsided. Of course they are! You cannot exclude the Mother and expect to really know the Son.
In the years since becoming Catholic the recognition that Mary is Our Mother has begun to grow and bear fruit in my life, our family. She is in fact the most powerful heavenly intercessor. To pray with her, especially through the Rosary, is to be brought into a whole different experience of wonder and awe, of knowing the power of the Cross and Resurrection and of growing in the personal knowledge of Jesus Christ.
We have been Catholic for five years. Our conviction that the Catholic Church is in fact the Church Christ founded on Peter and the Apostles, one, holy universal and apostolic, has grown more profound, year by year, in spite of the enormous problems the Church encounters. She is fiercely attacked from without and from within—she always has been. That she stands—and stand she does—can certainly not to be attributed to any human effort, nor to some bizarre coincidence, but solely to the promise given to Peter almost 2000 years ago, “the gates of hell shall not prevail . . . “
Many people find this difficult to swallow. You gave up your job to become Catholic?
Just to join a church? Isn’t one church basically the same as the next? Don’t they all teach about Jesus? Does it really matter which one you attend? Do you really want to go that far—endanger your career, struggle financially, be misunderstood—for the sake of Church membership? Does it matter that much which “flavor” of religion you prefer?
And, if you are going to take a stand for a church, you’ll do it for that one? The Catholic one? Its hierarchical governance gives rise to all sorts of ills, everything from pedophile priests and to blatant discrimination against women. And . . . don’t they practically worship Mary? Don’t they make you obey the Pope, no matter what he says? Don’t they believe in salvation by their own works? They’re more like a cult than a church, aren’t they? Don’t they talk to dead people and pray to statues and . . . oh yeah, don’t they tell you it’s like this huge sin to use artificial birth control? Didn’t they torture Galileo? Didn’t they persecute the Jews? Didn’t it finally come out that Pope Pius XII was like a Nazi or something? And didn’t they torture gazillions of people in the Inquisition, and didn’t they ban the bible and . . .
The barrage of indictments against the Catholic Church is truly without end, and there was a time when I believed all of them. Careful study over a number of years gradually showed me that most of them are simply not true. Any truth to the remaining accusations could be understood if seen in a greater context.
I became a Christian in 1979 at the age of 28, not because of some personal preference, not to be helped, not to meet my needs, not to feel good, but because I became convinced that the claims of the Jesus Christ were true. The apologetic works of C.S. Lewis, which I had begun to read in the spring of 1977, had initiated the work of conversion, opening my mind to the truths of the gospel. Back then, this discovery of Lewis marked the beginning of a process whereby, one by one, my misconceptions and prejudices about Christianity would be challenged. His sparklingly logical explanations, bolstered by his use of common sense and every-day language made the case for the truth Christianity. Surprisingly, many of Lewis’s arguments would later be part of my becoming Catholic.
I was working at the time as an orchestral musician in Germany. In July of 1979, during a vacation trip to I ran into group of enthusiastic young Christians, mostly American, who were spending their summer ministering evangelistically, under the auspices of a group called Youth With a Mission, in, of all places, Amsterdam. These young people made it clear that you could actually know Jesus, talk to Him, invite Him into your heart. In spite of much hesitation and no little doubt, I decided to do just that. The day after I spoke my first prayer, as I awoke early in the morning in my little pup tent, I knew God loved me, and that I could never earn His love. Everything in my life changed.
God granted me three of my most heartfelt wishes that day; nothing outlandish, everything very much in keeping with what any parent would wish for their child. He freed me from a fierce addiction to nicotine. He gave me so much joy that I discovered I did not need to drink in order to enjoy myself (I had been well on my to ruining my life with frequent and uncontrolled drunkenness) . And, thirdly, He placed my mother's quintessentially Catholic words about marriage deep within my soul; words I had ignored for many years: "Sex is beautiful and it belongs to marriage.” It occurred to me that I should seek to be faithful to my future wife in thought and deed. It also became clear to me that God could give me the strength and power to do so if I asked Him.
I was not a Christian more than a day or two, when, for the first time, I was confronted with the gut-wrenching reality of serious disagreement between believers. It began with a discussion, not without heat, about man's free will. How could they say man does not have free will? C.S. Lewis had based his entire case for the faith on the contention that man is free to choose. And then came the scriptures, like bullets . . . or bombs: Paul, Romans, Galatians—boom, bang, crack. Scriptures from the other side, Paul, Jesus, James, Peter, boom, bang, bang! I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all!
After a few weeks in Amsterdam, I returned to Germany, and from 1979 through 1987 lived in Essen, where I joined a charismatic Anabaptist congregation. In that church in Essen I met my wife, Angelika, and also in Essen, all three of our children were born. During this time I discovered how much I love to teach and began to look for ways to make a career change. This led me to pursue graduate studies at the University of Florida., in 1987.
In Gainesville we fellowshipped at an Evangelical Free Church. I went to graduate school and taught music out of our home. After a few years I had almost 100 students studying horn, piano, guitar and recorder. My students came from a myriad of churches: not only Creekside Evangelical Free Church, where we worshipped, but also a Baptist church that was led by followers of Bill Gothard, another Baptist church which taught that the King James Bible is the only legitimate translation, yet another Baptist church which, in 1988 taught from the pulpit that Christ would return in 1988 (for 88 reasons!), a staunchly five-point Presbyterian Church, one of those flamboyant charismatic Churches called The Rock that actually claims to have apostles, another charismatic congregation with prophets and healers, a Vineyard congregation, a Church of the Nazarene, a Dove International congregation, the Church of Christ, the Salvation Army, the Church of Christian Science, a good Lutheran congregation, and an Episcopal Church. I had a large number of pastor's kids studying with me. I got to know the students and the parents. I got to know their churches. I read about their different theologies. Each tradition had its definite strengths, and each was equally troubled by its own narrowness. I began to feel as if I ought to belong to all of the churches in this colorful mosaic, but, as I studied and experienced them, I was actually capable of completely lining up with none of them.
In 1993 I was offered a faculty position at Trinity College in Deerfield Illinois, which, with the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) is looked upon as one of the leading evangelical institutions of higher learning. I quickly became engrossed in building Trinity’s music program, recruiting students, directing the band, teaching classes, and eventually chairing the department. The faculty was charged to “integrate faith and learning” and I attempted to take this very seriously, as did my colleagues.
Though we were all involved in different disciplines, from music to history, from English to biology, faculty members came together with some regularity to study a particular book or an article. One of the books we read was Mark Noll’s exposé of the intellectual weaknesses of Evangelicalism, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It had a deep effect on me. Noll provides page after page of evidence that, in his own words:
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."
This was accepted as a truism by the participants in our faculty forum. The irony of it—we were supposed to be in the business of integrating faith and learning even though the parameters forced upon us by the evangelical culture promised, as far as I could tell, very little prospect for success—struck me harder than it did the others, much harder. They had, almost all of them, grown up in the evangelical fold; they were “cradle Evangelicals” as it were, whereas I was an adoptive son. The harsh contradictions in their world, which Noll so bluntly fingered, did not cause them to wonder about the very legitimacy of the integration endeavor, but they did me.
I encountered a major surprise when, in 1998 I discovered the testimony of the Early Church Fathers. At some point I visited a Catholic bookstore and bought Volume I of The Faith of the Early Fathers, selected and translated by William Jurgens. It contains teachings from the Church Fathers of the first three centuries, from the time before the “Catholic stuff” was supposed to have entered the Church—i.e. before Constantine in the 4th century.
I was very surprised at what I found. This was not supposed to be! These people all had rock solid convictions about the centrality of the Eucharist in worship, and strong statements about its essence being both physical and supernatural. I found the Gnostics’ heretical denial of the goodness and significance of the material world was specifically demonstrated by their denial of the incarnational reality of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. This was all very surprising and did not square with what I had been told, repeatedly for many years.
The early Fathers spoke of the Mass as a sacrifice, Mary as the second Eve, and real authority vested in the office of the bishop. They strongly implied the primacy of the bishop of Rome. These essentially Catholic distinctives were presented by the Fathers not as tentative propositions, certainly not as cutting-edge innovations, but rather as well-accepted facts of the faith, already universally believed, very early on.
These sorts of teachings, the kind which are Catholic and not Protestant, were, according to Protestant teaching, not supposed to have entered the Church until the time of "creeping paganization" after Constantine, i.e. after 325 A.D. But here they were, in the second and third century Church! I was shocked at how wrong Protestants were about the early Church.
I was also surprised by the Pope himself, John Paul II. His thoroughly Christ-centered teaching and life—which included a stance on the moral issues of our day so insightful and profound as to be truly prophetic—whittled away at the idea that the Pope is a sort of anti-Christ. There was an undeniable authority in his resolute insistence that the smallest and weakest amongst us must be protected from the deadly knife of the abortionist. If the Pope is a foreshadowing of the Anti-Christ, as Protestants had told me, where does he get the spiritual gumption to resist the entire Western world on the question of abortion? Where did he get the fortitude to stare down Communism? How could he so resolutely decry the materialism of the West?
John Paul II was an enigma—and a surprise! Whenever I would read something about him or even see a picture of him, I could perceive something very special, wholesome, good, and child-like. He was full of joy, yet stern as an Old Testament prophet. He exuded an attractive simplicity, yet could speak as an exquisitely educated philosopher. And, unlike most well educated people, he was not bamboozled by the relativistic tomfoolery of many contemporary thinkers. His enthusiasm for everything beautiful, especially for the young, not only fascinated, but began to inspire me.
We began to regularly watch Marcus’ Grodi’s “Journey Home” on EWTN every Friday night, which presented a quiet parade of joyful converts from all different sorts of religions and non-religions. Their arguments, backed by the diversity of their experience made an indelible impression. On the show, Marcus interviews a good number of people who have come from Evangelicalism. In moments of self-reflection I was forced to admit that I envied them for the step they had dared to take. I wouldn’t have admitted it then, but they were paving a way for me out of the various ant-Catholic misconceptions and prejudices I had harbored for so many years.
I read a number of apologetics books by such people as Thomas Howard, David Currie, Steve Ray, Scott Hahn, Karl Keating, Karl Adam, Hans Urs von Balthazar, Karl Adam, Karl Keating, G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman and St. Francis DeSales. I also collected and read books from the other point of view: anti-Catholic books by authors such as R.C. Sproul, John Ankerburg, Norman Geisler, and Dallas seminary’s Ron Rhodes, etc. The Protestant book were pervaded by the stale odor of manipulation: straw-man arguments, selective use of historical data and outright misrepresentations.
The Catholic explanations began to make more sense than any of the Protestant ones.
G. K. Chesterton once said of his own conversion to the Catholic Church: “I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even to cannibals . . . [but] it is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it . . .”
Exactly as Chesterton describes, I had ceased to pull against the Catholic Church, and was definitely being tugged towards her. I was beginning to ask that she be “fairly treated” and a secret fondness was waxing in the hidden recesses of my heart
There eventually came the time when my discussions with Evangelicals, especially colleagues at Trinity, took on a new tone. I would be discussing any one of a number of issues (transubstantiation, communion of saints, papal infallibility, salvation by works, authority of bishops, confession, Mary, Purgatory, etc.) with an Evangelical, who would say "Catholicism teaches thus . . . ." More often than not their statement would represent some substantive misunderstanding of what the Church actually teaches. So I would retort, "No, actually the Church teaches thus . . . " and proceed to explain Catholic doctrine. Without realizing it, I was becoming a defender of the Catholic faith.
I made friends with one of the philosophy professors, Dale, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, who would present Luther's view, while I presented the Catholic one. During one conversation, I prefaced an answer to one of his questions with, "well, Dale, if I were Catholic I would tell you . . ." He stopped and turned to me (he is very tall and I am pretty short, so the moment had a certain visual drama to it, not without humor) and said, with a big grin, "What do you mean, if you were Catholic? You ARE Catholic!" Uh-oh, I don't want to be Catholic, I don’t want to lose my job! But he made me listen to myself defending the Church. Yes that is what I was doing.
For years I had stifled the cry in my heart for unity in Christ’s Church. From the very first experiences in Amsterdam, to the fierce party spirit in our church in Germany, the potpourri of Protestants in Florida, and now this microcosm of the evangelical world at Trinity, one undeniable truth emerged—Protestantism does not and, alas, cannot, express oneness. Its essence is not unity, but division. There are very few features that unite all of Evangelicalism and even fewer that unite all of Protestantism. Some would suggest that the Bible provides unity, and yes, the various Protestant groups can unite around the idea that it is authoritative—but they cannot agree about what it says. Others say the Holy Spirit provides unity—but Protestants agree even less about what the Spirit is saying. Most of the few doctrines this assemblage of diverse groups does hold in common are the very ones they also hold in common with Catholicism: the deity/humanity of Christ, an elementary understanding of the Trinity, salvation through faith in Christ. Other than the doctrines held commonly with Catholicism, Protestants agree on only one thing: they are not Catholic. Thus, Protestantism’s identity is established by what it is not.
We began to regularly attend Mass at St. Paul's, held in a thoughtfully modern, aesthetically pleasing building. I was moved by the carefully coordinated scripture readings and the beautiful prayers. I was there to meet God. Why others were there I did not know, nor did I really care. Emancipation from the necessity to judge others has been one of the glories of the journey! At Mass I was in the presence of Jesus Christ. I was also in the company of, not only the parishioners of St. Paul, but of innumerable others from every tribe and tongue, from every continent, who, for 2000 years, had, as one Body, worshipped the Lamb, offered the Lamb, received the Lamb, and been blessed and fulfilled by the Lamb. I was in the presence of something not only palpably bigger than myself, but also bigger than the building or even the culture or time I lived in.
After Sunday Mass we would drive over to our own evangelical church, to worship in our new building, one which expresses, unfortunately, the profoundly impoverished aesthetic sensibilities of the evangelical world. It includes a "worship space" which looks pretty much like a movie theater. The room, constructed with no source of natural light, is dominated by an elevated stage, which is spotlighted during the worship service. The congregation sits before a cadre of spotlighted "worship leaders" up on the stage, who, with ecstatically closed eyes, raised hands, beaming faces, sing the newest top 40 here-today-gone-tomorrow worship choruses, over and over again. After the singing, other individuals would go to the microphone and speak long extemporaneous prayers, which were incomparably less rich, less differentiated, and frankly, less appropriate, than the ones being prayed in the Catholic Church. There was very little Scripture reading, which seemed odd, even ironic. Supposedly the Catholic Church kept the Scriptures away from the people so they wouldn’t find the truth. Why was I getting far more Scripture at St. Paul’s than at our evangelical church? Then there would be this long sermon about what pastor had to say about a series of Bible passages, then more “worship”. It all began to seem quite man-centered, and the strong whiff of manipulation could no longer be ignored.
Through my studies up to this point I had begun to see not only good sense, but also a compelling cohesiveness in the fabric of Catholic doctrine. However, some Catholic teachings, like the Marian dogmas, represented an insurmountable obstacle to my ever being able to fully embrace the Catholic faith. I had read, talked and prayed my way most of the way into the Catholic Church, and all along the way I had been surprised at how wrong Protestants are about this ancient Church. But Mary? Were Protestants wrong about her too?
I made friends with David Currie, the author of one of the books I had read, who gave me a Rosary. Oh my! It had been "blessed by the Pope"—whatever that meant! I took it in to the basement at our house where no one could see me, along with a book about the Rosary and began to pray. All of the prayers were rich in Scripture, and the meditations led me deep into the life of Christ. Through the Rosary I began to experience a renewed sense of Jesus’ presence in my prayer life.
I began to pray the Rosary regularly. Now, years later, I can say, outside the Mass, there is nothing that more dependably brings me into an awareness of who Christ is than the discipline of the Rosary. The quietness of the repetitions sets just the right tone to think deeply about Jesus, about His incarnation, His suffering and His everlasting glory!
As I warmed up to the idea of one day becoming Catholic, Mary had presented a huge obstacle. I had been deeply indoctrinated into the notion that Catholics worship her. However, as my vision cleared and the glory of worship in the Catholic Mass became evident, the accusation that Catholics worship Mary gradually began to seem not only untrue, but absurd. The liturgy of the Mass is the pinnacle and the essence of Catholic worship. It is absolutely God-centered, Trinity-centered, and Christ-centered. At Mass Mary plays no central role whatsoever.
There is not a worship service on the earth which more completely and utterly focuses on Christ and his sacrifice than the Holy Mass. Protestants do not know such exalted worship. For them the content of worship is, at least outwardly, limited to singing songs and hearing a sermon, so when they hear Catholics sing a hymn to Mary, they suspect she is being worshipped. But Catholics know, when they sing Marian songs or seek Mary’s intercession, they are not making her into a Goddess to be worshipped, but rather seeking the aid of a powerful advocate and ally.
I eventually became convinced that the Catholic beliefs about Mary are in fact not only true, but function as a necessary protector and guarantor of the central Christological truths. Wherever Marian piety is miniaturized or eliminated, the Christology of the Nicene Creed—fully God and fully man—begins to erode. This results, on the one hand, in the squishy relativism of Protestant liberalism, or, on the other hand, in the rough, edgy, tomboyish hardness of fundamentalism/evangelicalism. Both are lopsided. Of course they are! You cannot exclude the Mother and expect to really know the Son.
In the years since becoming Catholic the recognition that Mary is Our Mother has begun to grow and bear fruit in my life, our family. She is in fact the most powerful heavenly intercessor. To pray with her, especially through the Rosary, is to be brought into a whole different experience of wonder and awe, of knowing the power of the Cross and Resurrection and of growing in the personal knowledge of Jesus Christ.
We have been Catholic for five years. Our conviction that the Catholic Church is in fact the Church Christ founded on Peter and the Apostles, one, holy universal and apostolic, has grown more profound, year by year, in spite of the enormous problems the Church encounters. She is fiercely attacked from without and from within—she always has been. That she stands—and stand she does—can certainly not to be attributed to any human effort, nor to some bizarre coincidence, but solely to the promise given to Peter almost 2000 years ago, “the gates of hell shall not prevail . . . “
Will
This is a very brief account of how I came to the Catholic Church. I can't call it a conversion, because to convert you need to be something to begin with. I wasn't anything. I was raised without religion, in eastern Kentucky, where there are very, very few Catholics.
First, a word about my upbringing. My mother is from Buffalo, New York, and my father is from Cleveland, Ohio. Going back to my great grandparents on both sides, you would find regular churchgoers, Congregationalists on my mom's side and Methodists on my dad's. When you get to my grandparents, you find four people who went to church semi-regularly for most of their adult lives out of a certain concern for middle-class respectability. By the time you get to my parents, children of Aquarius, you find a couple with very little regard for God or religion.
I was baptized, along with my brother, at the insistence of my grandparents. They held out a superstitious regard for the sacrament, on one hand, not taking their religion seriously, and, on the other, not wanting their grandsons to go to hell if they died young. It was at Mt. Washington Presbyterian Church in Uniontown, PA. After that, I didn't see the inside of a church for about eight years.
I was raised in eastern Kentucky from age two on. Religion, in particular the hard-shell variety of Protestantism, was a force in daily life among my peers. My mother, from time to time, would take my brother and I to a church near by the house, again out of concern for middle class respectability. But, in every case, our attendance would fall off eventually due to an unpleasant encounter with a congregant.
In time, I realized that I had no religion. This was because I had encounters with my school peers, all of whom were church members, and all of whom, to a man, were protestant. I was distressed by my lack of religion at an early age (about seven,) and I approached my parents as to why we didn't go to church. Mom told me that, when I was ready and had studied the subject, I could belong to any church I wanted.
I took up the subject of religion, drawing mostly from the Encyclopedia Brittanica, edition of 1969, that we had inherited from my mom's parents. At the public library, there were several books about religion, and I read all I could. In time, I realized that polytheism was too vague to be true, Judaism too fatalistic, and Protestantism too fractional. I focused on Catholicism.
The serious books on Catholicism in our little country branch library were these: Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. John Hardon, S.J., Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma by Ludwig Ott, and a Catholic Bible. I checked them out and read them over and over, making reference and praying for guidance. By age 10, (yes, it seems far fetched that I read Ott at age 9 and 10, but so help me it's true) I asked my parents if I could join the Catholic Church.
The answer was a flat no, adding that "you can join any church you want" didn't mean to include the oppressive, backward, and authoritarian Catholic one. Beside, the nearest catholic church was in town, about 20 miles away. I was encouraged to bide my time, maybe consider the Episcopalians or Unitarians. I was to wait quite awhile.
A few years later, on a trip to Beaufort, South Carolina, I stole away to the old St. Peter's Church downtown on afternoon. The old church, since 1986 replaced by the much bigger church for regular worship, had been converted to a perpetual adoration chapel. There I absconded with piles of literature (God forgive the theft,) and, very importantly, a rosary, which I prayed secretly in the back of the van on the way home, following the instructions on the pamphlet. I asked God to make me a Catholic.
I was given the chance a few years later when I transfered to the city high school. Now I was only two miles from the Catholic church. One day after school, with the help of a friend who drove, I went to the Church and asked a priest for instruction. I told him I could walk there after school. He told me about two things I didn't know. First, that I would either need my parents permission or have to wait until I was grown up. Second, that to enter the church I would need to enroll in something called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, which, considering the time of year, would take another year and a half.
My parents, while not pleased, were still liberal enough to allow my instruction, provided that I get to the church myself. So, for a year and a half, once a week, I walked to Church for instruction. For mass, I traded a ride with a friendly Episcopalian in exchange for my bass voice in his chior. After their service, I would strip out of my robe, book it to the Catholic church down the street, normally in time for the Gospel.
Without getting into too much detail, I can say that the church, the liturgy, and especially the RCIA, as presented, were not the Church "as advertised" in the books and other literature I had read (mind you, there was no internet at this point, so I couldn't make independent reference.) My RCIA teachers, modernist feminists all, and I argued for the entire year and a half about the Real Presence, the Petrine office, contraception (not an appropriate topic for a 15 year old,) and the Mass. I was already wondering why it was changed after so many years. Finally, the instructors told me, a week before my scheduled entrance into the Church, that I was not ready and would require another year of "instruction." I had to appeal to the Pastor, who overrode the harpies (God bless them they were harpies,) and on Easter Sunday, 1993, I was received into the Church. My folks gamely tried to support me, but ended up leaving the church a third of the way into the Vigil because the pews hurt. We have since naturalized the subject of religion in our family, as I am the only one of my immediate and distant relations who goes to church regularly, and I am the only one in living memory to be Catholic.
I give all the credit and thanks to God for calling me to his holy Church early in life. I can't explain how it happened, or even why, other than to say that God loved me very much.
There is much more to this story, including the death of my primary antagonist in RCIA. The details regarding RCIA are really interesting, cautionary, even lurid at times. In 1995, I told my story to Fr. Hardon, who said I should write a book or long article about it. I said I would, but I haven't made good on the promise yet. Pray God, some day.
First, a word about my upbringing. My mother is from Buffalo, New York, and my father is from Cleveland, Ohio. Going back to my great grandparents on both sides, you would find regular churchgoers, Congregationalists on my mom's side and Methodists on my dad's. When you get to my grandparents, you find four people who went to church semi-regularly for most of their adult lives out of a certain concern for middle-class respectability. By the time you get to my parents, children of Aquarius, you find a couple with very little regard for God or religion.
I was baptized, along with my brother, at the insistence of my grandparents. They held out a superstitious regard for the sacrament, on one hand, not taking their religion seriously, and, on the other, not wanting their grandsons to go to hell if they died young. It was at Mt. Washington Presbyterian Church in Uniontown, PA. After that, I didn't see the inside of a church for about eight years.
I was raised in eastern Kentucky from age two on. Religion, in particular the hard-shell variety of Protestantism, was a force in daily life among my peers. My mother, from time to time, would take my brother and I to a church near by the house, again out of concern for middle class respectability. But, in every case, our attendance would fall off eventually due to an unpleasant encounter with a congregant.
In time, I realized that I had no religion. This was because I had encounters with my school peers, all of whom were church members, and all of whom, to a man, were protestant. I was distressed by my lack of religion at an early age (about seven,) and I approached my parents as to why we didn't go to church. Mom told me that, when I was ready and had studied the subject, I could belong to any church I wanted.
I took up the subject of religion, drawing mostly from the Encyclopedia Brittanica, edition of 1969, that we had inherited from my mom's parents. At the public library, there were several books about religion, and I read all I could. In time, I realized that polytheism was too vague to be true, Judaism too fatalistic, and Protestantism too fractional. I focused on Catholicism.
The serious books on Catholicism in our little country branch library were these: Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. John Hardon, S.J., Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma by Ludwig Ott, and a Catholic Bible. I checked them out and read them over and over, making reference and praying for guidance. By age 10, (yes, it seems far fetched that I read Ott at age 9 and 10, but so help me it's true) I asked my parents if I could join the Catholic Church.
The answer was a flat no, adding that "you can join any church you want" didn't mean to include the oppressive, backward, and authoritarian Catholic one. Beside, the nearest catholic church was in town, about 20 miles away. I was encouraged to bide my time, maybe consider the Episcopalians or Unitarians. I was to wait quite awhile.
A few years later, on a trip to Beaufort, South Carolina, I stole away to the old St. Peter's Church downtown on afternoon. The old church, since 1986 replaced by the much bigger church for regular worship, had been converted to a perpetual adoration chapel. There I absconded with piles of literature (God forgive the theft,) and, very importantly, a rosary, which I prayed secretly in the back of the van on the way home, following the instructions on the pamphlet. I asked God to make me a Catholic.
I was given the chance a few years later when I transfered to the city high school. Now I was only two miles from the Catholic church. One day after school, with the help of a friend who drove, I went to the Church and asked a priest for instruction. I told him I could walk there after school. He told me about two things I didn't know. First, that I would either need my parents permission or have to wait until I was grown up. Second, that to enter the church I would need to enroll in something called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, which, considering the time of year, would take another year and a half.
My parents, while not pleased, were still liberal enough to allow my instruction, provided that I get to the church myself. So, for a year and a half, once a week, I walked to Church for instruction. For mass, I traded a ride with a friendly Episcopalian in exchange for my bass voice in his chior. After their service, I would strip out of my robe, book it to the Catholic church down the street, normally in time for the Gospel.
Without getting into too much detail, I can say that the church, the liturgy, and especially the RCIA, as presented, were not the Church "as advertised" in the books and other literature I had read (mind you, there was no internet at this point, so I couldn't make independent reference.) My RCIA teachers, modernist feminists all, and I argued for the entire year and a half about the Real Presence, the Petrine office, contraception (not an appropriate topic for a 15 year old,) and the Mass. I was already wondering why it was changed after so many years. Finally, the instructors told me, a week before my scheduled entrance into the Church, that I was not ready and would require another year of "instruction." I had to appeal to the Pastor, who overrode the harpies (God bless them they were harpies,) and on Easter Sunday, 1993, I was received into the Church. My folks gamely tried to support me, but ended up leaving the church a third of the way into the Vigil because the pews hurt. We have since naturalized the subject of religion in our family, as I am the only one of my immediate and distant relations who goes to church regularly, and I am the only one in living memory to be Catholic.
I give all the credit and thanks to God for calling me to his holy Church early in life. I can't explain how it happened, or even why, other than to say that God loved me very much.
There is much more to this story, including the death of my primary antagonist in RCIA. The details regarding RCIA are really interesting, cautionary, even lurid at times. In 1995, I told my story to Fr. Hardon, who said I should write a book or long article about it. I said I would, but I haven't made good on the promise yet. Pray God, some day.
Chris
Mine's a conversion story. The vocation pre-dates my coming into the Church. I knew I didn't belong in ministry in Protestantism, and the arrival of my wife into my life (she's named Erin) made it clear that my vocation is to be a husband and dad (though since my conversion I have had repeated thoughts about the possibility of entering the permanent diaconate, many years down the road). Here now, from my very first blog post, is my story. My blog is http://romancatholicbychoice.com.
The title of the blog is Roman Catholic by Choice. So, my conversion story:
I was born into a family that, from both sides, was Southern Baptist. The Southern Baptist Church (not really called that) is an organization with a central governing body called the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) with state sub-groups set up ( Tennessee Baptist Convention, etc.) So - it's not the independents, or the free-wills, or the primitives, or the Americans, it's Southern (An' we like it that way!) The organization is rather heavy-handed on some rather minor matters - you might remember a few years back they called on all Baptists to boycott Disney. More on how the organization played into my conversion later.
I will refer to various churches as just Baptist, because that is what the sign in front of them says. There are no American Baptist churches I'm aware of in Nashville, and so everyone calls the Southern Baptist churches "Baptist." My earliest church memories are at First Baptist Church, Goodlettsville, TN. My parents taught Sunday school - and I specifically remember my Sunday School classes in Kindergarten (my teacher also ended up being my 2nd grade school teacher.) At the age when some of the basics of theology start to gel for a kid, I realized that I should call myself a Christian. I reasoned that since I had been going to church since as long as I could remember, and I believed (at whatever level a 3rd or 4th grader can) what I was taught and all those miracles and Bible stories, I must be one. Due to disagreements of some sort (no idea of details here) we started attending First Baptist Nashville (downtown.) We attended here a few years until my grandmother passed away, and my parents decided we should attend church with my widowed grandfather, so we moved to Dalewood Baptist Church. This was a pretty strongly traditional church...no musical instrument except the holy ones (organ and piano), traditional hymns, etc. Nonetheless, I'm still a pretty traditional kind of guy. I think that Life Teen is a good thing as long as liturgical integrity is maintained, but 7/11 songs (i.e., sing the same 7 lines eleven times) just don't appeal to me. DBC was what I needed at the time - I identified with my youth pastor very closely because of similar personalities and interests. There was a close bonding there. He and I got along well, but he rubbed some youth the wrong way - mainly, just for doing his job. What I learned from him was an openness to thought and debate, which put me on a path out of the Baptist denomination.
There's another point that plays into this part of the story, though. I was attending Goodpasture Christian School , which although it claimed no affiliation, was affiliated with Madison Church of Christ. From 5th grade through 12th, I spent time every day receiving a Church of Christ indoctrination. The Church of Christ claims that every bit of their doctrine comes from the Bible. In fact - they claim that there is no Church of Christ "doctrine" because it can't be doctrine if it comes out of the Bible. One of the CoC's claims to fame is that they do not use music in worship because the Bible doesn't say anything about the early Christian Church (which they claim to be direct descendants of) using musical instruments in their worship. Apparently, in the Bible, omission excludes something. If the Bible doesn't say it, it wasn't there. I think anyone who thinks for even a moment can tear down this line of reasoning very easily (for example, Jesus doesn't say that His story of the rich man and Lazarus is a parable, but it is widely thought that it is.) Now, for the most part, Baptist and COC views are pretty close to the same, but I found a lot more of the "we're right and everyone else is wrong" attitude among these people.
As a result of this rather hostile-to-thought environment, my wits were significantly sharpened, and I developed the ability to argue (and even to play the devil's advocate just to irritate my classmates.) The COC seems to be very good at developing people with a paper-thin faith - something very superficial and easily argued into a corner. After high school it was on to college in Rome, Georgia at Berry College. Berry has a predominantly Baptist student body, with strong numbers of Methodists, Presbyterians, a few Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans. The faculty and staff are very hostile toward religion in any form (except Baha'ai or Universalism, by and large.) The religion staff especially seems to have a great time tearing down the weak faiths of many of the students who attempt to discuss religion with them. I got a job with the Chaplain's Office at Berry, running sound for the weekly campus church services (which were evangelical and nondemoninational, but fairly conservative.) I also had occasion to run sound for various other functions, including the Catholic Student Association's Explanatory Mass. I found it really interesting my Freshman year, and discovered as Father Linus explained some of the rituals, that some parts of Catholicism made sense to me. I still had far to go, but it looked to me, at least, that Catholicism was not on a totally different planet (not to say I was ever Anti-Catholic; it just seemed a little overly legalistic and ritualistic to me.)
Everything was going fine in the campus church, until I found myself in love with a Catholic girl. We had been in classes together since Freshman year, but now it was February of 2000, and we had several of our School of Education classes together. As we began seeing each other outside of classes, working together to develop units and lesson plans, our relationship developed into a personal one. We began discussing differences in our faith traditions. I remember the first thing that really clicked with me was that Catholics can't tell you the specific date that their life changed and they "acceptedjesuschristintotheirheartastheirpersonallordandsavior." I ran that together because that's how people say it. You see, as a Baptist, I never had that "date" - I didn't have a single experience of salvation. My "testimony" was as boring as watching paint dry, because I hadn't ever been a bad kid, so I couldn't "turn my life around." As I said before, I had been in church since birth. I had been learning about the faith the whole time, and although I was baptized in 7th grade, that was not the beginning of my Christian life. Erin sat across the table explaining that Catholics teach that faith formation is a lifelong process that begins with the baptism of an infant and moves through logical phases. This was an 'aha' moment for me. And, it continued from there. Piece by piece, more of Catholicism made sense to me.
But, Erin made it clear that she didn't want to force me into Catholicism - and I didn't want to push her either. We visited numerous churches in the Rome area. After we graduated from college, we got married, and we did a hybrid Catholic/Protestant wedding (not a Mass, co-officiated by Fr. Linus and a Baptist pastor,) so our marriage is recognized by the Catholic Church. After our November 2001 wedding, we pretty much continued to attend Mass at St. Mary's Catholic Church.
In the summer of 2002, I started reading Catholic Apologetics websites on my lunch breaks, and learned the logical answers to the common misconceptions and objections to Catholic teachings. After the summer camp that is a part of the organization that employs me was over, we went to Navarre Beach, FL, for a few days of R&R, and it was there that I saw EWTN for the first time - the local cable system carried it. In addition, shortly thereafter, Erin started having an adverse reaction to her birth control pills, and I started looking into alternatives. Since our marriage was conducted by Fr. Linus, it was blessed by the Church - I had already heard of Natural Family Planning, but had written it off as legalistic nonsense, due to a weak explanation at Pre-Cana. Well, call me selfish, but I didn't want my wife having weird reactions to drugs, especially in the reproductive area, so I looked into NFP. Found Couple to Couple League, ordered the CCL home study kit, and we threw out the last pack of pills.
As you can tell, I had decided that I did indeed want to join the Church. Each time I learned more, I realized that many of my beliefs are matched or closely matched Church teachings, so it seemed to only make sense for me to join the Catholic Church. I joined RCIA and 9 months later, was received into the Catholic Church, April of 2003. My life has been packed with unexpected blessings since my decision to start RCIA. When I started in the fall of 2002, we were living in a duplex. In January 2003, we began searching for a house, and found a beautiful home not far from the duplex. We put a contract on it at the point when interest rates just happened to hit their lowest level in about 50 years, and we wound up with a house payment 17 cents higher than our rent payment! Various other blessings have come to us, and I take them as an affirmation that I am in the right place right now. I know that there will be difficult times as well, but I have developed a core of friends, especially my wife, that keep me strong in the faith. My wife was a great influence toward my decision to join the Church, but she was simply a tool of the Holy Spirit toward that eventual end. Church teaching, apologetics, and conversion stories of particular individuals, such as Scott Hahn have all been great influences. Of late, I have been listening to EWTN via the web a great deal, and you'll get some of my impressions from that listening on this blog.
The title of the blog is Roman Catholic by Choice. So, my conversion story:
I was born into a family that, from both sides, was Southern Baptist. The Southern Baptist Church (not really called that) is an organization with a central governing body called the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) with state sub-groups set up ( Tennessee Baptist Convention, etc.) So - it's not the independents, or the free-wills, or the primitives, or the Americans, it's Southern (An' we like it that way!) The organization is rather heavy-handed on some rather minor matters - you might remember a few years back they called on all Baptists to boycott Disney. More on how the organization played into my conversion later.
I will refer to various churches as just Baptist, because that is what the sign in front of them says. There are no American Baptist churches I'm aware of in Nashville, and so everyone calls the Southern Baptist churches "Baptist." My earliest church memories are at First Baptist Church, Goodlettsville, TN. My parents taught Sunday school - and I specifically remember my Sunday School classes in Kindergarten (my teacher also ended up being my 2nd grade school teacher.) At the age when some of the basics of theology start to gel for a kid, I realized that I should call myself a Christian. I reasoned that since I had been going to church since as long as I could remember, and I believed (at whatever level a 3rd or 4th grader can) what I was taught and all those miracles and Bible stories, I must be one. Due to disagreements of some sort (no idea of details here) we started attending First Baptist Nashville (downtown.) We attended here a few years until my grandmother passed away, and my parents decided we should attend church with my widowed grandfather, so we moved to Dalewood Baptist Church. This was a pretty strongly traditional church...no musical instrument except the holy ones (organ and piano), traditional hymns, etc. Nonetheless, I'm still a pretty traditional kind of guy. I think that Life Teen is a good thing as long as liturgical integrity is maintained, but 7/11 songs (i.e., sing the same 7 lines eleven times) just don't appeal to me. DBC was what I needed at the time - I identified with my youth pastor very closely because of similar personalities and interests. There was a close bonding there. He and I got along well, but he rubbed some youth the wrong way - mainly, just for doing his job. What I learned from him was an openness to thought and debate, which put me on a path out of the Baptist denomination.
There's another point that plays into this part of the story, though. I was attending Goodpasture Christian School , which although it claimed no affiliation, was affiliated with Madison Church of Christ. From 5th grade through 12th, I spent time every day receiving a Church of Christ indoctrination. The Church of Christ claims that every bit of their doctrine comes from the Bible. In fact - they claim that there is no Church of Christ "doctrine" because it can't be doctrine if it comes out of the Bible. One of the CoC's claims to fame is that they do not use music in worship because the Bible doesn't say anything about the early Christian Church (which they claim to be direct descendants of) using musical instruments in their worship. Apparently, in the Bible, omission excludes something. If the Bible doesn't say it, it wasn't there. I think anyone who thinks for even a moment can tear down this line of reasoning very easily (for example, Jesus doesn't say that His story of the rich man and Lazarus is a parable, but it is widely thought that it is.) Now, for the most part, Baptist and COC views are pretty close to the same, but I found a lot more of the "we're right and everyone else is wrong" attitude among these people.
As a result of this rather hostile-to-thought environment, my wits were significantly sharpened, and I developed the ability to argue (and even to play the devil's advocate just to irritate my classmates.) The COC seems to be very good at developing people with a paper-thin faith - something very superficial and easily argued into a corner. After high school it was on to college in Rome, Georgia at Berry College. Berry has a predominantly Baptist student body, with strong numbers of Methodists, Presbyterians, a few Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans. The faculty and staff are very hostile toward religion in any form (except Baha'ai or Universalism, by and large.) The religion staff especially seems to have a great time tearing down the weak faiths of many of the students who attempt to discuss religion with them. I got a job with the Chaplain's Office at Berry, running sound for the weekly campus church services (which were evangelical and nondemoninational, but fairly conservative.) I also had occasion to run sound for various other functions, including the Catholic Student Association's Explanatory Mass. I found it really interesting my Freshman year, and discovered as Father Linus explained some of the rituals, that some parts of Catholicism made sense to me. I still had far to go, but it looked to me, at least, that Catholicism was not on a totally different planet (not to say I was ever Anti-Catholic; it just seemed a little overly legalistic and ritualistic to me.)
Everything was going fine in the campus church, until I found myself in love with a Catholic girl. We had been in classes together since Freshman year, but now it was February of 2000, and we had several of our School of Education classes together. As we began seeing each other outside of classes, working together to develop units and lesson plans, our relationship developed into a personal one. We began discussing differences in our faith traditions. I remember the first thing that really clicked with me was that Catholics can't tell you the specific date that their life changed and they "acceptedjesuschristintotheirheartastheirpersonallordandsavior." I ran that together because that's how people say it. You see, as a Baptist, I never had that "date" - I didn't have a single experience of salvation. My "testimony" was as boring as watching paint dry, because I hadn't ever been a bad kid, so I couldn't "turn my life around." As I said before, I had been in church since birth. I had been learning about the faith the whole time, and although I was baptized in 7th grade, that was not the beginning of my Christian life. Erin sat across the table explaining that Catholics teach that faith formation is a lifelong process that begins with the baptism of an infant and moves through logical phases. This was an 'aha' moment for me. And, it continued from there. Piece by piece, more of Catholicism made sense to me.
But, Erin made it clear that she didn't want to force me into Catholicism - and I didn't want to push her either. We visited numerous churches in the Rome area. After we graduated from college, we got married, and we did a hybrid Catholic/Protestant wedding (not a Mass, co-officiated by Fr. Linus and a Baptist pastor,) so our marriage is recognized by the Catholic Church. After our November 2001 wedding, we pretty much continued to attend Mass at St. Mary's Catholic Church.
In the summer of 2002, I started reading Catholic Apologetics websites on my lunch breaks, and learned the logical answers to the common misconceptions and objections to Catholic teachings. After the summer camp that is a part of the organization that employs me was over, we went to Navarre Beach, FL, for a few days of R&R, and it was there that I saw EWTN for the first time - the local cable system carried it. In addition, shortly thereafter, Erin started having an adverse reaction to her birth control pills, and I started looking into alternatives. Since our marriage was conducted by Fr. Linus, it was blessed by the Church - I had already heard of Natural Family Planning, but had written it off as legalistic nonsense, due to a weak explanation at Pre-Cana. Well, call me selfish, but I didn't want my wife having weird reactions to drugs, especially in the reproductive area, so I looked into NFP. Found Couple to Couple League, ordered the CCL home study kit, and we threw out the last pack of pills.
As you can tell, I had decided that I did indeed want to join the Church. Each time I learned more, I realized that many of my beliefs are matched or closely matched Church teachings, so it seemed to only make sense for me to join the Catholic Church. I joined RCIA and 9 months later, was received into the Catholic Church, April of 2003. My life has been packed with unexpected blessings since my decision to start RCIA. When I started in the fall of 2002, we were living in a duplex. In January 2003, we began searching for a house, and found a beautiful home not far from the duplex. We put a contract on it at the point when interest rates just happened to hit their lowest level in about 50 years, and we wound up with a house payment 17 cents higher than our rent payment! Various other blessings have come to us, and I take them as an affirmation that I am in the right place right now. I know that there will be difficult times as well, but I have developed a core of friends, especially my wife, that keep me strong in the faith. My wife was a great influence toward my decision to join the Church, but she was simply a tool of the Holy Spirit toward that eventual end. Church teaching, apologetics, and conversion stories of particular individuals, such as Scott Hahn have all been great influences. Of late, I have been listening to EWTN via the web a great deal, and you'll get some of my impressions from that listening on this blog.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Rusty
I was raised in the Oneness Pentecostal movement until I was twelve years old. My mother was more devout, and my dad had stopped attending church by the time I was around six or seven. The Oneness Pentecostals are a very, very strict sect of the Pentecostal churches. I remember when we had no television in the house, we couldn’t wear short-sleeved shirts, no make-up for the women, long hair for the women, and a myriad of other rules applicable to every facet of life. I was baptized in “Jesus’ name,” for the Oneness churches do not believe in the Trinity. I remember looking down on the poor Trinitarians. So deluded. So lost.
I spoke in tongues. I’ll never forget the night this happened. I so wanted it. Without it I was lost. With it I had power. A crowd of people, hands all over me, shouts of encouragement and pleading to God. And then these sounds came from me. Nothing like a language I’d ever heard. But those around me broke out in joyous celebration. I had been filled. I was around nine. My memory is hazy on a lot of things, but I do know that I struggled with doubt about what had happened. I was always questioning, but never disrespectfully. I truly wanted to know God and have all that He had for me.
When I was six, we got new neighbors. An Assembly of God pastor and his family moved next door. A kid my age! A kid my brother’s age! We were in heaven. But they were Trinitarians. I remember those days of adolescent theological discussions. “You believe in three Gods!” I would say. When I was around twelve, and the neighbor and I best friends, my mother had a falling out with the leadership at the Oneness church. We went to visit the Assembly of God church. It was a turning point.
I had never experienced the love of God. The Oneness church was all about ‘the letter’. Here was ‘the spirit’. We immediately fell in love with the people. Unfortunately this earned us the pity of our former church’s membership. Many never spoke to us again. Yet we had found ‘home’, and in many ways that church is still my home. I met my wife there, we were married there. I still attend with my wife on occasion.
I embraced the Trinitarian doctrine, as best as a twelve-year old can. I was re-baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I ‘truly’ was baptized in the Holy Ghost and ‘truly’ spoke in tongues - though, in truth, there was little difference in experience. The sounds were gibberish, and bore little resemblance to ‘language’ in my opinion. Over the next few years, I would struggle, as all teenagers do, with lukewarm religion - followed by periods of revival. These ‘high’ periods usually coincided with the annual Church youth camp. Oh, those were so fun. Free from the influences of the ‘the world’, hundreds of kids would gather to seek after God. If we found a girlfriend during the week, that was an added bonus.
When I was fifteen, it was at one of these camps that I entered my most fervent period. I ‘felt the call to preach’, though I kept it to myself. I was scared. When I got home, I would spend long periods of time praying in my closet - literally. I was taking God’s word seriously. I read the whole Bible through for the first time. I would wander the woods surrounding my house, praying, crying out to God, and preaching to the trees. Honestly. It was during this time that I sought God for a sign that my baptism in the Holy Ghost was not simply me producing gibberish. I wanted what came out of my lips to sound like something ‘real’. While in the woods one day, I found my new prayer language.
I began to have very intense, almost vision-like experiences. I even thought that one such vision came true. Our youth meetings had become bone dry. In prayer one day I ’saw’ the Spirit take control of the youth meeting. A message in tongues was given out. People were changed. It wasn’t long afterward that something very similar happened. I felt like God was using me. A few weeks after the fulfillment of my ‘vision’, I too gave a message out in tongues in our youth meeting. It was interpreted. I can’t even remember the ‘message’.
This period of intensity lasted for quite some time. But the fervor faded eventually. And I found myself struggling with myself. I couldn’t understand the ups and downs. I didn’t comprehend how I could be so duplicitous. So, I entered into more of the same. Hot. Then cold. Up. Then down. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster. I either wanted off or I wanted it to level out. By the time I graduated high school, I was living a double life. The good church kid at church, the know-it-all blossoming delinquent outside its walls.
When I started college, God was on the periphery. However, once again, youth camp brought me to a ‘closer walk’. I resolved this time to announce to everyone that I was ‘called to preach.’ So, I did. That was the way it was in the churches I grew up in. My pastor offered to let me preach on a Wednesday night. I took my text from Isaiah. I’ll never forget how I took an hour’s worth of material, and in my nervousness, spewed it out in fifteen minutes. But it was over. And I had ‘done well’. More opportunities arose. So, I started helping out in Sunday School. In college I joined the BSU (the token Pentecostal), and soon was the director of evangelism on the Executive Council. I was actually preaching in more Baptist churches than Pentecostal.
It was in the BSU that I first experienced theological opposition to my Pentecostal belief system. Several of us would sit around and discuss any number of topics. But the ‘pet topic’ was, of course, the nature of salvation. Most of my Baptist friends believed in ‘Once Saved Always Saved,’ and the BSU chaplain was a staunch Calvinist. Many times I would walk away from these conversations with my faith deeply rocked. I began to spend more and more time studying my faith. However, at the same time, I began to slide ever closer to giving into certain sins that I had been battling. This combination led to some very sincere questions about my faith. I began to go to the computer lab and get on the Internet, reading articles from points of view that I had never encountered. It was like I was stepping onto a new planet.
I began reading polemic works against Christianity. Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason proved to be the key to unlocking all kinds of truly unoriginal thoughts, but ones that were new to me. During this time I was still living at home, still dating the same girl, still chaffing under the pressure of a faith with which I was once again struggling. It came to a head one night at church. I was in serious conflict. My pastor’s wife could ’sense’ it, I suppose. She came and urged me to come to the front for prayer. I did not want to disappoint, so I went. Prayers went up to heaven for me, and yet I felt nothing. I didn’t want to feel anything.
I walked away that night, convinced that all that I had experienced in my life concerning religion was false. It wasn’t long afterward that my girlfriend and I broke up over these issues. I moved out of my parents’ home and began to forge a life of my own. For a while everything was a new discovery. For the last years of college, I declared myself an atheist and rejected the whole idea of religion. I was pretty vocal about it, and found myself speaking in front of Intro to Religion classes - as an example of ‘an atheist’. I thought this new ‘freedom’ was . . . well, liberating. Yet, soon I began to dabble in drugs and alcohol, and I began battling episodes of depression. It wasn’t long before I realized that life away from God was not very satisfying. I was too proud, however, to make my way back.
After graduating college, I planned to attend law school. I had a dorm lined up, loans ready to go, and I was working for a local lawyer - getting my feet wet in the world of ‘law’. I had moved back home with my parents for the summer, before heading off to law school. It was during this time that I began to be around some of my former friends from church. The peace in their lives was very convincing. My former youth pastor (and a very close friend) told me that the youth camp I had attended while younger was happening in a couple of weeks. He invited me down. I shrugged it off and went about my way. However, I was flipping channels one day and came upon TBN, and saw Deion Sanders giving his testimony. Now, I’ve never been a fan of TBN, but his testimony struck me for some reason. I began weeping. It was Thursday afternoon, and I just ‘knew’ that I had to get to Youth Camp. That the depression, the pain, the emptiness would go away if I could just get there.
I hopped in my truck. With no air conditioning, a pack of cigarettes, and emotions running high, I drove the two hours to the Camp. I’ll never forget walking into the tabernacle that night. Everyone seemed to remember me. Everyone wanted to welcome me. The love I felt was amazing. I remember seeing my former girlfriend there. She was perfect. Everything was perfect. This would be it. The end of my doubts, my confusion. I would make a commitment here. Now. I sat among some old friends and the night service began. The choir sang a song titled, “Salt Pillar,” about the wife of Job, about the consequences of turning away from God, and the rewards awaiting those who kept on the journey. I ran to the altar. I only remember pouring my heart out to God, and truly feeling that He had poured His out to me.
After the service at the youth camp, I decided to stay the rest of the week. I immediately reconnected with my former girlfriend. In many ways it felt as if I had never left. I knew that things would have to change in my life, so on my return to the ‘real world’ I called my boss, the lawyer, and announced I couldn’t come back to work. I called the university law school and withdrew. I just knew that law school wasn’t in the ‘will of God’.
My friend, my former youth pastor, was working in IT and convinced his boss to give me a shot. It worked out, and I had my first post-college job. It wasn’t long until I asked my new-old-girlfriend to marry me. I had no doubts that she was the one. Some months into the marriage I convinced myself that being in the ministry was the only way to truly be in the will of God. I confided this to my pastor. Nothing happened at first, but soon I got a strange phone call from North Carolina. My friend, the youth pastor, had moved on to be an assistant pastor in Georgia. He had received a call from a pastor looking for a school teacher/youth pastor. He recommended me (I had my license to teach). The pastor called, and I immediately said we’d drive up, meet everyone, and consider. Ten hours away from home, we arrived to find what seemed to be a vibrant church and school. This was where God wanted us to be.
When we came back home and announced our decision to move, my parents took the news hard. My mom was very distraught and told us that the time frame would never work out. We had less than two weeks to sell everything we had, move and start classes. I told her that if it all worked out it had to be the will of God. Everything worked out. We made the first day of classes in a new city, a new state, and completely cut off from the lifelines we had grown accustomed to.
We stayed in Charlotte for almost two years. The church was very different than the Assembly of God church we knew so well. There was more focus on externals - how one dressed, for example. But we quickly found ourselves adjusting, making friends and settling in. The school, however, came to be somewhat of a proving ground. The students weren’t all from the church’s families. There were constant questions about religion and about the church’s stand on many issues. I tried to focus on the subjects I was teaching, but the questions began to grate at me.
One day the assistant pastor (the pastor’s son) asked me to read something called the Church Fathers to hunt for evidence that the early church preached a standard of holiness similar to our own. The Church Fathers? I was vaguely aware of them, but I had never read them. My world was about to change. I dutifully researched (being a history major had equipped me well) and I did find several passages that buttressed our ideas, but man oh man was I surprised at the depth found in the Church Fathers. Hierarchy, Eucharist, etc. It was simply confusing. So I walked away, but I walked away rocked.
I began to have those gnawing doubts again - that all I believed was resting on a flimsy foundation. An evangelist who specialized in campus preaching came to visit our church - a great guy, really, but his tactics were quite off-putting. I took my class to see him in action one day at the UNC-Charlotte campus. I even preached a little myself. College students who were peppering me with very hard questions surrounded me. I spouted out the answers I thought I knew, but deep within I remember thinking, “Do I even believe what I’m saying?”
I tried my best to shake the familiar specter of doubt. It was like I was a teenager once again - go down to the altar, pray, repent, weep before God, ask Him to take away these questions, to help me shake the Devil off my back . . . . Days of exhilaration where I would think things were going to work - then something would happen to make me question all over again. I should be honest here and say that I was wrestling with issues that I had had since childhood. I would walk, apprehensively, in what felt like ‘victory’ - only to fall all over myself in moments of insanity. Having been raised ‘holiness’, being unable to ‘keep the faith’ was devastating.
This inability for stability has been a theme in my life. It was no different during this period. I had thought that by ‘answering the call’ - by being ‘in the will of God’ - it would somehow be the magic ticket to spiritual freedom. It wasn’t. Many nights I would finish preaching, only to find myself in the deepest depths of despair I’d ever known. Surely this was simply the Devil attacking a faithful Christian . . . right? Surely, if I prayed more, if I sought God more - it would all be fixed. I would be fixed.
But I wasn’t fixed. And I was once again living a lie. I had serious doubts about my faith; I could no longer toe the line as a youth pastor and teacher. So, I tendered my resignation. We had just had our first child, my wife was unable to work due to complications - so I used money as an excuse. We loaded all we had into another U-haul and we moved to Georgia, where I had landed a job in the IT department of a small college. The new home was close to a church that had a close relationship with our home church; so many of the faces were familiar. They were so happy to see us in Georgia! They were excited to have another ‘minister’ and they had plans to put me to work. Me? I just wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want to teach, I didn’t want to lead, I didn’t even want to sing in the choir (which has always been one of the most enjoyable aspects of church for me). But I have this ridiculous fear of disappointing others. So . . . invariably I did do all of those things. Over the course of three years in Georgia, it was simply more of the same. Up, down, etc. etc.
Going into our third year, I had entered a phase where I was simply going to give up. I told my wife of my doubts, laying out my positions, but never really getting to the heart of why. She was the rock she is, and she simply took it all in and I’m sure began to intercede to God on my behalf. It was around this time that I happened upon a little website called TheologyWeb. It was a turning point in my life - truly. I was able to challenge myself, my doubts, my questions - to really begin to see that what I had considered my faith was shallow. I was out of my depth, and I resolved to change that. I began to read more and more, trying to self-educate myself into the fray. I soon saw that I truly was empty without God, and I could never resolve to live as if God didn’t exist. So, I recommitted myself to Him - but reservedly. I knew that I shouldn’t compartmentalize myself - I had to be honest with God, and honestly seek ‘the truth’.
A few months spent searching led me to a stronger faith than I had ever held. But many questions remained. I became interested in eschatology, and spent some time trying to figure out what I could believe on the subject. This led me (once again) to read more of the early church fathers. While reading the church fathers, my interest in other subjects was soon piqued - especially the Lord’s Supper. The one passage that really caught my eye was from Justin Martyr: “For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” I began to reflect on what *I* had been taught about the Eucharist, about the early church. It didn’t add up. The popular myths about the church from the Pentecostal perspective was that it soon corrupted, was partially restored by men such as Martin Luther, and finally re-emerged in the early 20th century with the Pentecostal movements of men like Parham, et. al.
I began to develop a different sense of church history, although it was far from possessing depth. Around this time I began to participate in the Pal Talk discussions of TheologyWeb. The topics I was newly interested in came up, but rarely. So I went looking for those who would discuss them. I visited the Catholic room on Pal Talk - they were friendly, gracious, but too . . . Catholic. I then wondered into an Orthodox room. Orthodox? Huh? I was blown away. The music, the theology - it was all so new. Since I had resolved myself to an amillennialist position eschatologically, it was comforting to see that one of the oldest bodies of believers in existence agreed with me. This allowed me to be a bit more accessible to the teachings of the Orthodox Church. I began to read everything I could get my hands on. Websites, books, pamphlets, whatever - I was becoming convinced that this was Truth. One book in particular ’sealed the deal’ for me - and it wasn’t even written by an Orthodox Christian. Evangelical is Not Enough, by Thomas Howard, was the proverbial nail in the coffin for the objections I had to sacramental Christianity.
Now, how was I, in a small town in Georgia, going to find a way into the Orthodox Church? There were no churches within a reasonable driving distance, and I hadn’t exactly shared my new found interest with my wife as of yet - so I sat on it for a while. I continued the study, the interaction over the web, and began to try to live as “Orthodox” a faith as I could. A few months into all of this, I received a job opportunity that would bring me home to Mississippi. I found a parish that would be almost two hours away from our new/old home, but I was determined to attend. I corresponded with the priest and with a parishioner I had met online. Everything seemed to be fitting into to place. I talked to my wife about Orthodoxy, however, and I hit a wall. I had had hopes of her ’seeing the truth’, but she wasn’t with me on this one. Not by a long shot. So, after the move, I waited a few months - hoping that she’d become interested. Nothing. Finally, I went on my own. It was like nothing I had ever seen. Not remotely. Yet, it spoke deeply to me. I wanted more.
I started attending the Orthodox Church more frequently. It was a great time of discovery. It wasn’t long until I made the decision to become a catechumen. My priest asked me if I might wait until my wife was ready to convert. I considered the possibility remote, so he agreed to allow me to enter the catechumenate. This was late 2004.
I looked forward to becoming an Orthodox Christian, and my efforts to lead an “orthodox” life were increased. It was not easy, as I felt that my wife was very uncomfortable with me doing such things as praying before an icon. My efforts to accommodate weren’t reciprocated, and soon the accommodating began to feel a lot like sneaking around. I began to build up a wall of resentment toward my wife, which truly hampered not only my move into Orthodoxy, but my marriage as well.
As the months wore on, I was fully expecting to become Orthodox during the upcoming Easter. As the day approached, and my priest was not mentioning it, I felt like I had to ask. “Probably later this year - the Fall maybe.” This ‘maybe’ hung over my head. Would I ever be Orthodox? I was truly longing to experience the Eucharist - to participate in this sacramental theology rather than simply study it.
During this time I was continuing my study of the Church. One of my friends on TheologyWeb began a move toward the Catholic Church, and I was frenetically trying to convince him to ‘try Orthodoxy’. I was frequently involved in polemics against Catholicism. But in attacking the Catholic Church, I came to see that all that had been presented to me in my childhood and all that I learned in coming to the Orthodox Church was not what it had seemed. My views were changing, and I was quickly leaning toward a more hopeful view of Roman Catholicism.
One major push in this direction was the blog Pontifications by an Episcopal priest searching for his place in the True Church. He honestly was trying to investigate the claims of both East and West. The discussions on this blog were very helpful in forcing me to think in new ways. Ultimately, Fr. Al found his place in the Catholic Church. I still remember the profound disappointment I felt. I could be more hopeful about Catholics, but there was no way I was going to become one.
Here I was . . . a few months away from becoming Orthodox, now experiencing a bit of confusion regarding Roman Catholicism. Quite honestly I was disillusioned by the cacophony of opinions among Orthodox Christians concerning a myriad of topics - most especially ‘the West’ in general and Rome more specifically.
It was also during this time that I fell into the deepest period of darkness I’d ever known. This wasn’t due to my theological confusion, but my spiritual weakness. I allowed an old enemy to win a major battle, and the fallout was devastating - so much so that the whole war seemed over. Depression wafted over me, and I half-heartedly tried to regain my footing. Then Katrina hit. It was the perfect excuse not to make the effort to drive two hours to the Orthodox parish, so I didn’t. Soon I wasn’t attending at all. Soon I gave up and built a wall of anger out of my failure and self-loathing.
This condition lasted for months. I remember thinking when the end of the year rolled past - “I should have been Orthodox by now.” Yet I wasn’t. Not even close. My marriage, my sanity, my future - they seemed to be in the perpetual proverbial balance. Then I took a business trip. On this trip I was able to spend some time alone and think. And finally to pray. On my way home, the floodgates opened as I was pouring my heart out to God. Somewhere between Atlanta, GA and Mississippi, I found solace in God’s grace.
So, I came back home a ‘new man’. I started attending church with my wife. I was still not the ‘old Rusty’, and others could tell I still had reservations about a lot of things. However, I kept my opinions to myself and I tried my best to live a life of dedication to God and family. Yet all that I had learned, all that I had come to understand about God, the Church, history - I couldn’t shove it in some bin and forget. So, I started showing up at the daily masses held at the local Catholic parish. It really felt wonderful. I attended these quietly, not making a big deal about it to my wife or anyone else. Finally I began RCIA and entered the process of becoming Catholic.
I am four months past Easter vigil. That is the day where I finally received the body and blood of my Lord in the Eucharist. That is the day where I entered communion with Thomas Kempis, John Paul the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome of Palestine and Rome, and a great cloud of other witnesses to the glory of the Catholic faith.
Today I was at daily Mass and meant every word when I said, along with the congregation, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only speak the word and I shall be healed.”
I spoke in tongues. I’ll never forget the night this happened. I so wanted it. Without it I was lost. With it I had power. A crowd of people, hands all over me, shouts of encouragement and pleading to God. And then these sounds came from me. Nothing like a language I’d ever heard. But those around me broke out in joyous celebration. I had been filled. I was around nine. My memory is hazy on a lot of things, but I do know that I struggled with doubt about what had happened. I was always questioning, but never disrespectfully. I truly wanted to know God and have all that He had for me.
When I was six, we got new neighbors. An Assembly of God pastor and his family moved next door. A kid my age! A kid my brother’s age! We were in heaven. But they were Trinitarians. I remember those days of adolescent theological discussions. “You believe in three Gods!” I would say. When I was around twelve, and the neighbor and I best friends, my mother had a falling out with the leadership at the Oneness church. We went to visit the Assembly of God church. It was a turning point.
I had never experienced the love of God. The Oneness church was all about ‘the letter’. Here was ‘the spirit’. We immediately fell in love with the people. Unfortunately this earned us the pity of our former church’s membership. Many never spoke to us again. Yet we had found ‘home’, and in many ways that church is still my home. I met my wife there, we were married there. I still attend with my wife on occasion.
I embraced the Trinitarian doctrine, as best as a twelve-year old can. I was re-baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I ‘truly’ was baptized in the Holy Ghost and ‘truly’ spoke in tongues - though, in truth, there was little difference in experience. The sounds were gibberish, and bore little resemblance to ‘language’ in my opinion. Over the next few years, I would struggle, as all teenagers do, with lukewarm religion - followed by periods of revival. These ‘high’ periods usually coincided with the annual Church youth camp. Oh, those were so fun. Free from the influences of the ‘the world’, hundreds of kids would gather to seek after God. If we found a girlfriend during the week, that was an added bonus.
When I was fifteen, it was at one of these camps that I entered my most fervent period. I ‘felt the call to preach’, though I kept it to myself. I was scared. When I got home, I would spend long periods of time praying in my closet - literally. I was taking God’s word seriously. I read the whole Bible through for the first time. I would wander the woods surrounding my house, praying, crying out to God, and preaching to the trees. Honestly. It was during this time that I sought God for a sign that my baptism in the Holy Ghost was not simply me producing gibberish. I wanted what came out of my lips to sound like something ‘real’. While in the woods one day, I found my new prayer language.
I began to have very intense, almost vision-like experiences. I even thought that one such vision came true. Our youth meetings had become bone dry. In prayer one day I ’saw’ the Spirit take control of the youth meeting. A message in tongues was given out. People were changed. It wasn’t long afterward that something very similar happened. I felt like God was using me. A few weeks after the fulfillment of my ‘vision’, I too gave a message out in tongues in our youth meeting. It was interpreted. I can’t even remember the ‘message’.
This period of intensity lasted for quite some time. But the fervor faded eventually. And I found myself struggling with myself. I couldn’t understand the ups and downs. I didn’t comprehend how I could be so duplicitous. So, I entered into more of the same. Hot. Then cold. Up. Then down. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster. I either wanted off or I wanted it to level out. By the time I graduated high school, I was living a double life. The good church kid at church, the know-it-all blossoming delinquent outside its walls.
When I started college, God was on the periphery. However, once again, youth camp brought me to a ‘closer walk’. I resolved this time to announce to everyone that I was ‘called to preach.’ So, I did. That was the way it was in the churches I grew up in. My pastor offered to let me preach on a Wednesday night. I took my text from Isaiah. I’ll never forget how I took an hour’s worth of material, and in my nervousness, spewed it out in fifteen minutes. But it was over. And I had ‘done well’. More opportunities arose. So, I started helping out in Sunday School. In college I joined the BSU (the token Pentecostal), and soon was the director of evangelism on the Executive Council. I was actually preaching in more Baptist churches than Pentecostal.
It was in the BSU that I first experienced theological opposition to my Pentecostal belief system. Several of us would sit around and discuss any number of topics. But the ‘pet topic’ was, of course, the nature of salvation. Most of my Baptist friends believed in ‘Once Saved Always Saved,’ and the BSU chaplain was a staunch Calvinist. Many times I would walk away from these conversations with my faith deeply rocked. I began to spend more and more time studying my faith. However, at the same time, I began to slide ever closer to giving into certain sins that I had been battling. This combination led to some very sincere questions about my faith. I began to go to the computer lab and get on the Internet, reading articles from points of view that I had never encountered. It was like I was stepping onto a new planet.
I began reading polemic works against Christianity. Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason proved to be the key to unlocking all kinds of truly unoriginal thoughts, but ones that were new to me. During this time I was still living at home, still dating the same girl, still chaffing under the pressure of a faith with which I was once again struggling. It came to a head one night at church. I was in serious conflict. My pastor’s wife could ’sense’ it, I suppose. She came and urged me to come to the front for prayer. I did not want to disappoint, so I went. Prayers went up to heaven for me, and yet I felt nothing. I didn’t want to feel anything.
I walked away that night, convinced that all that I had experienced in my life concerning religion was false. It wasn’t long afterward that my girlfriend and I broke up over these issues. I moved out of my parents’ home and began to forge a life of my own. For a while everything was a new discovery. For the last years of college, I declared myself an atheist and rejected the whole idea of religion. I was pretty vocal about it, and found myself speaking in front of Intro to Religion classes - as an example of ‘an atheist’. I thought this new ‘freedom’ was . . . well, liberating. Yet, soon I began to dabble in drugs and alcohol, and I began battling episodes of depression. It wasn’t long before I realized that life away from God was not very satisfying. I was too proud, however, to make my way back.
After graduating college, I planned to attend law school. I had a dorm lined up, loans ready to go, and I was working for a local lawyer - getting my feet wet in the world of ‘law’. I had moved back home with my parents for the summer, before heading off to law school. It was during this time that I began to be around some of my former friends from church. The peace in their lives was very convincing. My former youth pastor (and a very close friend) told me that the youth camp I had attended while younger was happening in a couple of weeks. He invited me down. I shrugged it off and went about my way. However, I was flipping channels one day and came upon TBN, and saw Deion Sanders giving his testimony. Now, I’ve never been a fan of TBN, but his testimony struck me for some reason. I began weeping. It was Thursday afternoon, and I just ‘knew’ that I had to get to Youth Camp. That the depression, the pain, the emptiness would go away if I could just get there.
I hopped in my truck. With no air conditioning, a pack of cigarettes, and emotions running high, I drove the two hours to the Camp. I’ll never forget walking into the tabernacle that night. Everyone seemed to remember me. Everyone wanted to welcome me. The love I felt was amazing. I remember seeing my former girlfriend there. She was perfect. Everything was perfect. This would be it. The end of my doubts, my confusion. I would make a commitment here. Now. I sat among some old friends and the night service began. The choir sang a song titled, “Salt Pillar,” about the wife of Job, about the consequences of turning away from God, and the rewards awaiting those who kept on the journey. I ran to the altar. I only remember pouring my heart out to God, and truly feeling that He had poured His out to me.
After the service at the youth camp, I decided to stay the rest of the week. I immediately reconnected with my former girlfriend. In many ways it felt as if I had never left. I knew that things would have to change in my life, so on my return to the ‘real world’ I called my boss, the lawyer, and announced I couldn’t come back to work. I called the university law school and withdrew. I just knew that law school wasn’t in the ‘will of God’.
My friend, my former youth pastor, was working in IT and convinced his boss to give me a shot. It worked out, and I had my first post-college job. It wasn’t long until I asked my new-old-girlfriend to marry me. I had no doubts that she was the one. Some months into the marriage I convinced myself that being in the ministry was the only way to truly be in the will of God. I confided this to my pastor. Nothing happened at first, but soon I got a strange phone call from North Carolina. My friend, the youth pastor, had moved on to be an assistant pastor in Georgia. He had received a call from a pastor looking for a school teacher/youth pastor. He recommended me (I had my license to teach). The pastor called, and I immediately said we’d drive up, meet everyone, and consider. Ten hours away from home, we arrived to find what seemed to be a vibrant church and school. This was where God wanted us to be.
When we came back home and announced our decision to move, my parents took the news hard. My mom was very distraught and told us that the time frame would never work out. We had less than two weeks to sell everything we had, move and start classes. I told her that if it all worked out it had to be the will of God. Everything worked out. We made the first day of classes in a new city, a new state, and completely cut off from the lifelines we had grown accustomed to.
We stayed in Charlotte for almost two years. The church was very different than the Assembly of God church we knew so well. There was more focus on externals - how one dressed, for example. But we quickly found ourselves adjusting, making friends and settling in. The school, however, came to be somewhat of a proving ground. The students weren’t all from the church’s families. There were constant questions about religion and about the church’s stand on many issues. I tried to focus on the subjects I was teaching, but the questions began to grate at me.
One day the assistant pastor (the pastor’s son) asked me to read something called the Church Fathers to hunt for evidence that the early church preached a standard of holiness similar to our own. The Church Fathers? I was vaguely aware of them, but I had never read them. My world was about to change. I dutifully researched (being a history major had equipped me well) and I did find several passages that buttressed our ideas, but man oh man was I surprised at the depth found in the Church Fathers. Hierarchy, Eucharist, etc. It was simply confusing. So I walked away, but I walked away rocked.
I began to have those gnawing doubts again - that all I believed was resting on a flimsy foundation. An evangelist who specialized in campus preaching came to visit our church - a great guy, really, but his tactics were quite off-putting. I took my class to see him in action one day at the UNC-Charlotte campus. I even preached a little myself. College students who were peppering me with very hard questions surrounded me. I spouted out the answers I thought I knew, but deep within I remember thinking, “Do I even believe what I’m saying?”
I tried my best to shake the familiar specter of doubt. It was like I was a teenager once again - go down to the altar, pray, repent, weep before God, ask Him to take away these questions, to help me shake the Devil off my back . . . . Days of exhilaration where I would think things were going to work - then something would happen to make me question all over again. I should be honest here and say that I was wrestling with issues that I had had since childhood. I would walk, apprehensively, in what felt like ‘victory’ - only to fall all over myself in moments of insanity. Having been raised ‘holiness’, being unable to ‘keep the faith’ was devastating.
This inability for stability has been a theme in my life. It was no different during this period. I had thought that by ‘answering the call’ - by being ‘in the will of God’ - it would somehow be the magic ticket to spiritual freedom. It wasn’t. Many nights I would finish preaching, only to find myself in the deepest depths of despair I’d ever known. Surely this was simply the Devil attacking a faithful Christian . . . right? Surely, if I prayed more, if I sought God more - it would all be fixed. I would be fixed.
But I wasn’t fixed. And I was once again living a lie. I had serious doubts about my faith; I could no longer toe the line as a youth pastor and teacher. So, I tendered my resignation. We had just had our first child, my wife was unable to work due to complications - so I used money as an excuse. We loaded all we had into another U-haul and we moved to Georgia, where I had landed a job in the IT department of a small college. The new home was close to a church that had a close relationship with our home church; so many of the faces were familiar. They were so happy to see us in Georgia! They were excited to have another ‘minister’ and they had plans to put me to work. Me? I just wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want to teach, I didn’t want to lead, I didn’t even want to sing in the choir (which has always been one of the most enjoyable aspects of church for me). But I have this ridiculous fear of disappointing others. So . . . invariably I did do all of those things. Over the course of three years in Georgia, it was simply more of the same. Up, down, etc. etc.
Going into our third year, I had entered a phase where I was simply going to give up. I told my wife of my doubts, laying out my positions, but never really getting to the heart of why. She was the rock she is, and she simply took it all in and I’m sure began to intercede to God on my behalf. It was around this time that I happened upon a little website called TheologyWeb. It was a turning point in my life - truly. I was able to challenge myself, my doubts, my questions - to really begin to see that what I had considered my faith was shallow. I was out of my depth, and I resolved to change that. I began to read more and more, trying to self-educate myself into the fray. I soon saw that I truly was empty without God, and I could never resolve to live as if God didn’t exist. So, I recommitted myself to Him - but reservedly. I knew that I shouldn’t compartmentalize myself - I had to be honest with God, and honestly seek ‘the truth’.
A few months spent searching led me to a stronger faith than I had ever held. But many questions remained. I became interested in eschatology, and spent some time trying to figure out what I could believe on the subject. This led me (once again) to read more of the early church fathers. While reading the church fathers, my interest in other subjects was soon piqued - especially the Lord’s Supper. The one passage that really caught my eye was from Justin Martyr: “For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” I began to reflect on what *I* had been taught about the Eucharist, about the early church. It didn’t add up. The popular myths about the church from the Pentecostal perspective was that it soon corrupted, was partially restored by men such as Martin Luther, and finally re-emerged in the early 20th century with the Pentecostal movements of men like Parham, et. al.
I began to develop a different sense of church history, although it was far from possessing depth. Around this time I began to participate in the Pal Talk discussions of TheologyWeb. The topics I was newly interested in came up, but rarely. So I went looking for those who would discuss them. I visited the Catholic room on Pal Talk - they were friendly, gracious, but too . . . Catholic. I then wondered into an Orthodox room. Orthodox? Huh? I was blown away. The music, the theology - it was all so new. Since I had resolved myself to an amillennialist position eschatologically, it was comforting to see that one of the oldest bodies of believers in existence agreed with me. This allowed me to be a bit more accessible to the teachings of the Orthodox Church. I began to read everything I could get my hands on. Websites, books, pamphlets, whatever - I was becoming convinced that this was Truth. One book in particular ’sealed the deal’ for me - and it wasn’t even written by an Orthodox Christian. Evangelical is Not Enough, by Thomas Howard, was the proverbial nail in the coffin for the objections I had to sacramental Christianity.
Now, how was I, in a small town in Georgia, going to find a way into the Orthodox Church? There were no churches within a reasonable driving distance, and I hadn’t exactly shared my new found interest with my wife as of yet - so I sat on it for a while. I continued the study, the interaction over the web, and began to try to live as “Orthodox” a faith as I could. A few months into all of this, I received a job opportunity that would bring me home to Mississippi. I found a parish that would be almost two hours away from our new/old home, but I was determined to attend. I corresponded with the priest and with a parishioner I had met online. Everything seemed to be fitting into to place. I talked to my wife about Orthodoxy, however, and I hit a wall. I had had hopes of her ’seeing the truth’, but she wasn’t with me on this one. Not by a long shot. So, after the move, I waited a few months - hoping that she’d become interested. Nothing. Finally, I went on my own. It was like nothing I had ever seen. Not remotely. Yet, it spoke deeply to me. I wanted more.
I started attending the Orthodox Church more frequently. It was a great time of discovery. It wasn’t long until I made the decision to become a catechumen. My priest asked me if I might wait until my wife was ready to convert. I considered the possibility remote, so he agreed to allow me to enter the catechumenate. This was late 2004.
I looked forward to becoming an Orthodox Christian, and my efforts to lead an “orthodox” life were increased. It was not easy, as I felt that my wife was very uncomfortable with me doing such things as praying before an icon. My efforts to accommodate weren’t reciprocated, and soon the accommodating began to feel a lot like sneaking around. I began to build up a wall of resentment toward my wife, which truly hampered not only my move into Orthodoxy, but my marriage as well.
As the months wore on, I was fully expecting to become Orthodox during the upcoming Easter. As the day approached, and my priest was not mentioning it, I felt like I had to ask. “Probably later this year - the Fall maybe.” This ‘maybe’ hung over my head. Would I ever be Orthodox? I was truly longing to experience the Eucharist - to participate in this sacramental theology rather than simply study it.
During this time I was continuing my study of the Church. One of my friends on TheologyWeb began a move toward the Catholic Church, and I was frenetically trying to convince him to ‘try Orthodoxy’. I was frequently involved in polemics against Catholicism. But in attacking the Catholic Church, I came to see that all that had been presented to me in my childhood and all that I learned in coming to the Orthodox Church was not what it had seemed. My views were changing, and I was quickly leaning toward a more hopeful view of Roman Catholicism.
One major push in this direction was the blog Pontifications by an Episcopal priest searching for his place in the True Church. He honestly was trying to investigate the claims of both East and West. The discussions on this blog were very helpful in forcing me to think in new ways. Ultimately, Fr. Al found his place in the Catholic Church. I still remember the profound disappointment I felt. I could be more hopeful about Catholics, but there was no way I was going to become one.
Here I was . . . a few months away from becoming Orthodox, now experiencing a bit of confusion regarding Roman Catholicism. Quite honestly I was disillusioned by the cacophony of opinions among Orthodox Christians concerning a myriad of topics - most especially ‘the West’ in general and Rome more specifically.
It was also during this time that I fell into the deepest period of darkness I’d ever known. This wasn’t due to my theological confusion, but my spiritual weakness. I allowed an old enemy to win a major battle, and the fallout was devastating - so much so that the whole war seemed over. Depression wafted over me, and I half-heartedly tried to regain my footing. Then Katrina hit. It was the perfect excuse not to make the effort to drive two hours to the Orthodox parish, so I didn’t. Soon I wasn’t attending at all. Soon I gave up and built a wall of anger out of my failure and self-loathing.
This condition lasted for months. I remember thinking when the end of the year rolled past - “I should have been Orthodox by now.” Yet I wasn’t. Not even close. My marriage, my sanity, my future - they seemed to be in the perpetual proverbial balance. Then I took a business trip. On this trip I was able to spend some time alone and think. And finally to pray. On my way home, the floodgates opened as I was pouring my heart out to God. Somewhere between Atlanta, GA and Mississippi, I found solace in God’s grace.
So, I came back home a ‘new man’. I started attending church with my wife. I was still not the ‘old Rusty’, and others could tell I still had reservations about a lot of things. However, I kept my opinions to myself and I tried my best to live a life of dedication to God and family. Yet all that I had learned, all that I had come to understand about God, the Church, history - I couldn’t shove it in some bin and forget. So, I started showing up at the daily masses held at the local Catholic parish. It really felt wonderful. I attended these quietly, not making a big deal about it to my wife or anyone else. Finally I began RCIA and entered the process of becoming Catholic.
I am four months past Easter vigil. That is the day where I finally received the body and blood of my Lord in the Eucharist. That is the day where I entered communion with Thomas Kempis, John Paul the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome of Palestine and Rome, and a great cloud of other witnesses to the glory of the Catholic faith.
Today I was at daily Mass and meant every word when I said, along with the congregation, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only speak the word and I shall be healed.”
David
I was born into a nominally Jewish family, but we practiced only rarely. My parents divorced when I was about 5. I was a latch key kid and was influenced by the neighbors kids - the most stable families were Catholic. I had a "Sunday school" education where I learned all about the old testament and zero about Christianity. It was a dispassionate historical approach, very few of my classmates believed in God at all. At that time I was an agnostic, not hostile to religion, because I had no grievance against the believing world. That's not to say I wasn't angry. I had a very deeply submerged anger at my parents who told me they loved me (and I imagine they did) but always had reason to be elsewhere. I was strongly encouraged to be as independent as possible, when all I wanted was to belong. I became outsider lone wolf type , a contrarian who never quite fit in.
This attitude accelerated at college when both my parents moved out of state in my freshman year. I was an agnostic conservative at a large impersonal very liberal university steeped in PC (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). I remember the yearly "take back the night" marches by angry feminists and being asked point blank my political leanings in my german class by the teachers assistant ( I was the only conservative).
I was lonely trying to fit into whatever groups I could. I remember envying the Gays who appeared to have instant "acceptance" and "community". Did I say I was also naive? It was not as if you could tell me anything either because I was also arrogant. I knew only the popular press version of Christianity, that and what was professed by sincere door to door missionaries I spoke to once or twice. I was ignorant and I didn't know nor did I care. I had Science and Art which I thought led to Truth and Beauty. I remember the luminous Madonna and Child painting of an old Master in the campus museum, the child was so beautifully rendered he seemed to breathe. This search became my focus and I studied Zen Buddhism for a while, but as a philosophy not a religion. In my private life I was either lonely (most of the time) or in a loveless "relationship" now and then.
I graduated not knowing what to do or where to go, so I delayed the real world with graduate school. I intended to re-tool my frivolous Botany BS into an authentic career with graduate degrees. Texas A & M accepted me and I was privileged to move to a much more conservative (and less politicized) campus. I eventually began dating a Catholic Texas girl (Miss Waller County 1976) who against her better judgment agreed to marry me. We moved to California where we both had jobs and eventually got married by civil service in a trailer park (such glamor).
We lived the San Francisco Bay Area so I know the horrors of guitar masses and liturgical dancers. I didn't know any better, and since I just sat on my hands in incomprehension when see went up to communion, I never objected. These folks were the just the sweet well-meaning hippies I knew in school, or so I thought. Despite what my parents think , my wife never pushed her religion on me and I never argued against it. I didn't want any resentment between us. I knew what divorce was like (my mother has been married and divorced 3 times) and I wanted to to all I could to avoid it. Besides faith was a beautiful compelling idea. I wanted faith, but at that time I sincerely didn't believe and I could not respect a God who could not tell the difference. I wouldn't criticize it but I couldn't fully participate either. Oh don't get me wrong I had prayed now and them especially when I was truly lonely or down, but these were the weak prayers of the faithless.
We decided to get married in the Church, not that I was becoming Catholic, but because it cemented the bond and pleased her family. We went through the engaged encounter in the Church and was married in a lovely ceremony (not a full mass) by priest back in Texas.
As for my career I had landed a good post doc job at Stanford but I found myself (being pigheaded) arguing with my boss. I opened the Bible a family friend had given us at our wedding and found a random passage about pride. I recognized my failing and prayed sincerely to Jesus for the first time and asked for a sign (I told you I was arrogant). The next day my apology and my bosses charity ended the argument and I got my little sign.
Now at the time the only Gospel I knew was Matthew (written for Jews) and I always loved that part about the sparrows. How God knows of each sparrows and how we are worth many sparrows. So the next day the young Mexican janitor who's English was weak but whose smile was real found a hummingbird in the bathroom and asked me what to do with it. He Handed me the bird with an arm tattooed with an elaborate cross and I held the beautiful bird in my hand and felt it's rapid heartbeat. We got a Dixie cup with sugar water and held it up the birds beak and it sat in on my shirt pocket and drank with it's forked tongue for about 15 minutes. I took this as my sign, my dark mood lifted and I never had a argument with my boss again.
I told my wife all about it and on the Feast of the Assumption I felt moved to being RCIA. This time my wife returned the favor went with me through the RCIA process. There are a few good stories there too with a mixed group of teachers one of whom was an ex-priest (I don't know what they were thinking). The next Easter I was baptized , confirmed and received communion for the first time.
At the same time we were trying to start a family. We failed and after several miscarriages we began to look for alternatives. We investigated in vitro and was put off my the callousness of clinic. A chirpy young lady told us in all her bright eyed sincerity that if we were to get pregnant with a Downs child we could get an abortion and a refund. In retrospect that statement was a giant red flag that sent us in the opposite direction. We started the adoption process, but before we were successful my wife became pregnant. She carried to term and God gave us a healthy boy of our own.
Her there's a bit more. On the day my son was born I received a more complete sign. As sson as the midwife passed my infant son to me I felt the Spirit. I felt it physically with my heart although I couldn't see or hear it. I felt love being poured down from the ceiling on my and filling my heart and the billowing out to the whole room. I cannot do the sense of the Spirit justice. I felt the vast overabundance of love being poured out and I recognized myself as a tiny inadequate vessel that could capture only a cup of it. I've never felt anything like it and other had some sense of it as well. It lasted only a few minutes but it was indescribably joyful and overwhelming.
Today (4 years later) I'm waiting for the arrival, in October of my second son. God is Great.
This attitude accelerated at college when both my parents moved out of state in my freshman year. I was an agnostic conservative at a large impersonal very liberal university steeped in PC (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). I remember the yearly "take back the night" marches by angry feminists and being asked point blank my political leanings in my german class by the teachers assistant ( I was the only conservative).
I was lonely trying to fit into whatever groups I could. I remember envying the Gays who appeared to have instant "acceptance" and "community". Did I say I was also naive? It was not as if you could tell me anything either because I was also arrogant. I knew only the popular press version of Christianity, that and what was professed by sincere door to door missionaries I spoke to once or twice. I was ignorant and I didn't know nor did I care. I had Science and Art which I thought led to Truth and Beauty. I remember the luminous Madonna and Child painting of an old Master in the campus museum, the child was so beautifully rendered he seemed to breathe. This search became my focus and I studied Zen Buddhism for a while, but as a philosophy not a religion. In my private life I was either lonely (most of the time) or in a loveless "relationship" now and then.
I graduated not knowing what to do or where to go, so I delayed the real world with graduate school. I intended to re-tool my frivolous Botany BS into an authentic career with graduate degrees. Texas A & M accepted me and I was privileged to move to a much more conservative (and less politicized) campus. I eventually began dating a Catholic Texas girl (Miss Waller County 1976) who against her better judgment agreed to marry me. We moved to California where we both had jobs and eventually got married by civil service in a trailer park (such glamor).
We lived the San Francisco Bay Area so I know the horrors of guitar masses and liturgical dancers. I didn't know any better, and since I just sat on my hands in incomprehension when see went up to communion, I never objected. These folks were the just the sweet well-meaning hippies I knew in school, or so I thought. Despite what my parents think , my wife never pushed her religion on me and I never argued against it. I didn't want any resentment between us. I knew what divorce was like (my mother has been married and divorced 3 times) and I wanted to to all I could to avoid it. Besides faith was a beautiful compelling idea. I wanted faith, but at that time I sincerely didn't believe and I could not respect a God who could not tell the difference. I wouldn't criticize it but I couldn't fully participate either. Oh don't get me wrong I had prayed now and them especially when I was truly lonely or down, but these were the weak prayers of the faithless.
We decided to get married in the Church, not that I was becoming Catholic, but because it cemented the bond and pleased her family. We went through the engaged encounter in the Church and was married in a lovely ceremony (not a full mass) by priest back in Texas.
As for my career I had landed a good post doc job at Stanford but I found myself (being pigheaded) arguing with my boss. I opened the Bible a family friend had given us at our wedding and found a random passage about pride. I recognized my failing and prayed sincerely to Jesus for the first time and asked for a sign (I told you I was arrogant). The next day my apology and my bosses charity ended the argument and I got my little sign.
Now at the time the only Gospel I knew was Matthew (written for Jews) and I always loved that part about the sparrows. How God knows of each sparrows and how we are worth many sparrows. So the next day the young Mexican janitor who's English was weak but whose smile was real found a hummingbird in the bathroom and asked me what to do with it. He Handed me the bird with an arm tattooed with an elaborate cross and I held the beautiful bird in my hand and felt it's rapid heartbeat. We got a Dixie cup with sugar water and held it up the birds beak and it sat in on my shirt pocket and drank with it's forked tongue for about 15 minutes. I took this as my sign, my dark mood lifted and I never had a argument with my boss again.
I told my wife all about it and on the Feast of the Assumption I felt moved to being RCIA. This time my wife returned the favor went with me through the RCIA process. There are a few good stories there too with a mixed group of teachers one of whom was an ex-priest (I don't know what they were thinking). The next Easter I was baptized , confirmed and received communion for the first time.
At the same time we were trying to start a family. We failed and after several miscarriages we began to look for alternatives. We investigated in vitro and was put off my the callousness of clinic. A chirpy young lady told us in all her bright eyed sincerity that if we were to get pregnant with a Downs child we could get an abortion and a refund. In retrospect that statement was a giant red flag that sent us in the opposite direction. We started the adoption process, but before we were successful my wife became pregnant. She carried to term and God gave us a healthy boy of our own.
Her there's a bit more. On the day my son was born I received a more complete sign. As sson as the midwife passed my infant son to me I felt the Spirit. I felt it physically with my heart although I couldn't see or hear it. I felt love being poured down from the ceiling on my and filling my heart and the billowing out to the whole room. I cannot do the sense of the Spirit justice. I felt the vast overabundance of love being poured out and I recognized myself as a tiny inadequate vessel that could capture only a cup of it. I've never felt anything like it and other had some sense of it as well. It lasted only a few minutes but it was indescribably joyful and overwhelming.
Today (4 years later) I'm waiting for the arrival, in October of my second son. God is Great.
John
I started to write about how I found the Church, but that isn't what happened. The Church found me. Reached out and grabbed me as I was muddling through my life half-asleep.
Grabbed me twice, I think. There have been two times in my life when everything changed with astonishing speed. The second was this last year, the first was when I met my wife Charlene. We got married, bought a house, joined a church and had our first child, all in the year 1985! My background was Evangelical, and she was a cradle-Catholic, though long estranged from the Church. So we compromised and became Episcopalians. We happily let the beautiful liturgies wash over us. I felt like this was just right, and she was thrilled by the resemblance to the Mass of her youth.
But I see now that I was expecting something to happen. Some sort of magic, but I wasn't sure what. I won't criticize the Episcopalians; it just wasn't happening there.
Charlene started to return to The Church in 2005. Her deeply religious nature and good Catholic upbringing made this a difficult step—not like a Protestant switching denominations. Luckily a friend recommended St Dominic's Parish in San Francisco (beautifully photographed by Gerald). I tagged along with her, but at first I couldn't SEE what was around me. It just looked like Anglicanism with diversity! Remember what Chesterton wrote, about how the Church is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? I had to move a little ways inside to actually see.
What woke me up to the reality that was all around me was a homily preached by one of our Dominican brothers, Br. Bernhard Blankenhorn. (Now Father Bernhard, in, I think, Seattle.) I must explain that I've always hungered for an indescribable something, something spooky and magical, something "otherworldly." Something that I could never pin down, and which ordinary life never seemed to have enough of.
The homily was about how Mary is the Ark of the Covenant, replacing the Israelite Ark. I learned later that this is a very early Christian idea, and I'd it's guess elementary to any knowledgeable Catholic. You'll probably laugh at my naiveté, but I'd never heard anything like it, and I found it electrifying. Why? Because it wasn't a metaphor. Or an analogy, or a simile, or symbolic. He wasn't using a clever figure of speech. It was a fact. She IS the Ark. And, evidently, it was coming from a world-view where such facts were normal and expected.
To me this was like suddenly finding myself inside a fairy tale, and having trees or animals talk to me. What it was, it turns out, was the sacramental worldview, or imagination. (Catholic Encyclopedia: "...we can say that the whole world is a vast sacramental system, in that material things are unto men the signs of things spiritual and sacred, even of the Divinity.") What I had been missing in my life was the knowledge that the world, and my ordinary life, were charged with meaning. That the world was fizzy with signs, and the signs were real, not just notions. They are, you might say, metaphors that have come alive. What I was missing were sacraments. That was the spooky and mysterious something that I'd been longing for all along.
I could write LOTS more about many exciting ideas and things that have happened to me, but that's the essence of it. I became Catholic at Easter of this year, 2007. We have a superb RCIA at our parish, if anyone's looking.
(BTW, for any Protestants worried about Catholics "worshipping" Mary, it's not so. That Marian homily (sermon to you) was the only one I've heard so far. Most homilies are on the Gospel reading of the day. In fact, I find that the Church is more "Gospel" than those Gospel places.)
Grabbed me twice, I think. There have been two times in my life when everything changed with astonishing speed. The second was this last year, the first was when I met my wife Charlene. We got married, bought a house, joined a church and had our first child, all in the year 1985! My background was Evangelical, and she was a cradle-Catholic, though long estranged from the Church. So we compromised and became Episcopalians. We happily let the beautiful liturgies wash over us. I felt like this was just right, and she was thrilled by the resemblance to the Mass of her youth.
But I see now that I was expecting something to happen. Some sort of magic, but I wasn't sure what. I won't criticize the Episcopalians; it just wasn't happening there.
Charlene started to return to The Church in 2005. Her deeply religious nature and good Catholic upbringing made this a difficult step—not like a Protestant switching denominations. Luckily a friend recommended St Dominic's Parish in San Francisco (beautifully photographed by Gerald). I tagged along with her, but at first I couldn't SEE what was around me. It just looked like Anglicanism with diversity! Remember what Chesterton wrote, about how the Church is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? I had to move a little ways inside to actually see.
What woke me up to the reality that was all around me was a homily preached by one of our Dominican brothers, Br. Bernhard Blankenhorn. (Now Father Bernhard, in, I think, Seattle.) I must explain that I've always hungered for an indescribable something, something spooky and magical, something "otherworldly." Something that I could never pin down, and which ordinary life never seemed to have enough of.
The homily was about how Mary is the Ark of the Covenant, replacing the Israelite Ark. I learned later that this is a very early Christian idea, and I'd it's guess elementary to any knowledgeable Catholic. You'll probably laugh at my naiveté, but I'd never heard anything like it, and I found it electrifying. Why? Because it wasn't a metaphor. Or an analogy, or a simile, or symbolic. He wasn't using a clever figure of speech. It was a fact. She IS the Ark. And, evidently, it was coming from a world-view where such facts were normal and expected.
To me this was like suddenly finding myself inside a fairy tale, and having trees or animals talk to me. What it was, it turns out, was the sacramental worldview, or imagination. (Catholic Encyclopedia: "...we can say that the whole world is a vast sacramental system, in that material things are unto men the signs of things spiritual and sacred, even of the Divinity.") What I had been missing in my life was the knowledge that the world, and my ordinary life, were charged with meaning. That the world was fizzy with signs, and the signs were real, not just notions. They are, you might say, metaphors that have come alive. What I was missing were sacraments. That was the spooky and mysterious something that I'd been longing for all along.
I could write LOTS more about many exciting ideas and things that have happened to me, but that's the essence of it. I became Catholic at Easter of this year, 2007. We have a superb RCIA at our parish, if anyone's looking.
(BTW, for any Protestants worried about Catholics "worshipping" Mary, it's not so. That Marian homily (sermon to you) was the only one I've heard so far. Most homilies are on the Gospel reading of the day. In fact, I find that the Church is more "Gospel" than those Gospel places.)
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