Beginnings of Faith

The call to be a priest began at a tender age, even though my parents did not go to church. Although they had me baptized as a baby at the Presbyterian church in Napa, CA, where I grew up, I never attended Sunday school or worship services. Their religion was golf. Despite this, I built an altar in my bedroom with a picture of Pope Pius XII and some other odds and ends — a Bible from my grandmother and a creche I had asked for at Christmas. It was a cheap plastic nativity scene, but it meant a lot to me.

Growing up in a very Catholic town in northern California, many of my friends went to Mass each Sunday with their families. Occasionally, I was invited to attend with them. The old Latin Mass enthralled me. For my friends it was boring, but for me it was beautiful. I didn’t dare to think that, one day, I might be the priest standing at the altar, but I longed to be an altar boy like my cousins.

After graduating from high school in 1963, I joined a group of 20 graduates on a study tour of Europe. The local Rabbi, Dr. Leo Trepp, was our leader. He was one of those I recalled during my ordination. I was anxious to learn as much as I could on the trip, and a highlight of the experience was that we happened to be in Rome for the coronation of Pope Paul VI. I gloried in the many churches we visited and decided that, when I got home in September, I would become Catholic. However, my father didn’t approve.

During a “what do you want to be when you grow up” conversation with him, I mentioned that I thought I wanted to be a priest. It didn’t go well. At the end of the argument, he said, “Why don’t you go to your own church?” I responded, “Which church is that?” He said, “Your grandmother is Episcopalian.” The next Sunday, I headed to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. It was “high church” and looked Catholic, so I signed on. After confirmation, I began serving at the altar. Receiving communion was the highlight of my life.

Episcopalian Seminary, Priesthood, and Tragedy

In my junior year of college, I met an Episcopal priest who was the chaplain at Sacramento State University. I spent the summer in Sacramento taking English classes and living at Canterbury House, a small residence for Episcopalian students. Fr. Al was young and a great preacher, and I became one of his disciples. Being close at hand, I blindly followed him — he was, after all, Jesus’ man, no? Sadly, he took advantage of me and abused me, though I was not underage. For me, it was a deeply confusing time. I thought I could get closer to Jesus by being close to Fr. Al, and he assured me it was not a sin.

Many other students would have jumped at the opportunity to be in a special relationship with Fr. Al, but I was conflicted and troubled. Was there something about me that invited this? What I needed from him was for him to be a holy priest, but he had misinterpreted my devotion to him as a come-on. I remembered that incident years later, when young people would look at me as if I were Jesus; I saw how easy it could be for me to take advantage of them.

College over, I applied for seminary; the bishop sent me to Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) in Berkeley. During that year, Fr. Al moved to the East Coast, and I never saw him again. Oddly, he was one of the people who came to mind at my Catholic ordination. Even though he hurt me, he was also a factor in my call. One of the faculty at CDSP mentioned in passing that Fr. Al had given me a negative recommendation — in the language of the day, he suggested I had a “hang-up.” The professor concluded that, regardless, I really was in the right place in seminary.

In my last year of seminary, I had another very powerful, though confusing, experience. A priest gave a lecture on the charismatic renewal, and that same evening, as I knelt on the floor of my dorm, I received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. The seminary education was designed to call everything into question; it was the era of “demythologization,” and Rudolf Bultmann was our guide. He taught that anything “supernatural” was added by the early Church, and he doubted that Jesus had even existed. After my powerful and emotional encounter with Christ, I was completely undone and even more confused and troubled.

I needed to sort through my education and square it with my personal experience of Christ, so I postponed ordination and spent the next few years reading and discerning the truth of Christ. I had never read C.S. Lewis, but he became my guide during those years and helped me to sort out my faith. I was eventually ordained in the Episcopal Church in November of 1972, and began serving a small congregation outside Sacramento. In a few years, the parish had grown dramatically, and when a leader in the congregation who was grievously ill was miraculously healed, the growth exploded. (By the way, this healed man also showed up in my mind at my ordination.) Suddenly, the charisms of the Holy Spirit were flooding into the ministries as Christ drew in ever more people.

The bishop had the reputation of being very negative toward the Charismatic Renewal, and with what was happening in the parish I needed to make an appointment and tell him. After my tale of the healed man and the movement of the Spirit, I waited anxiously for the bishop to fire me. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and said “Well, praise the Lord.”

My preaching was “confirmed… by the signs that attended it” (Mark 16:20) and my faith was strong, but the enemy counterattacked. I had gotten married a couple years before, and when Kathy, my wife, gave birth to our first, the child was stillborn. My world collapsed, and many of the old conflicts and troubles resurfaced. I blamed Kathy for the death of the child; it’s a long story, but in essence she had been raised in Christian Science and feared the medical establishment, so she decided to give birth at home. The death of David, our baby, divided us, and my coping mechanism was to throw myself totally into my work. Eventually, after years of counseling, we separated. I left the parish for another one in Berkeley, while also teaching part-time at the seminary. An affluent congregation gave funds to provide full-time ministry for three years, with the idea that the Good Shepherd mission there would grow and become self-sufficient. Early on, the plan seemed to be working, but my depression increased, and I felt like I was wandering in a wasteland. It was clear to me that I needed to do something else to make a living. There were several nurses in the congregation, and they said, “Go to nursing school.” (At the time there was a terrific shortage of nurses.) So, I continued half-time at the church and went to school.

The AIDS Epidemic and Our Lady

When I started working full-time at the hospital, I resigned from the parish, and when a position came open in the AIDS unit at Kaiser San Francisco, I jumped at it. I had a desire to care for the lepers of our time, and it seemed to me that I had found a new ministry. I worked in that unit for seven years during the height of the epidemic. Little we did made any difference to our patients, who died in vast numbers. (Oddly, some of those patients who had made an impression on me were also in my mind as I prostrated myself at the altar during my Catholic ordination.) The Archdiocese of San Francisco supplied a Catholic chaplain to our unit, Sister Mercedes, who came seven days a week to see her “muchachos,” as she called them.

One day, we were both in the break room, and I asked her, “Sister, how do you find the strength to do this ministry?” She said, “Have you heard of the Virgin of Guadalupe?” I had, but I knew nothing about the apparition. She explained that the Mother of Jesus had called her to do this work in His name. That didn’t mean much to me; I believed in the virgin birth of Jesus, but Mary had never been much of a focus for my faith. I watched Sister visit with the boys; many had been raised Catholic, but because of their lifestyle, they were angry and separated from God and their families. I watched her non-judgmental approach and saw the miracle of reconciliation occur as they approached death. I perceived that something truly holy and special was occurring through her ministry.

One Sunday, after working all night and having several patients die in our unit, I went to the Episcopal church where I was resident. Church of the Advent in San Francisco is a very “high” church, and near the altar, there was a shrine to the Blessed Virgin. After the service, I knelt before it to commend the souls of those who had died to God. I felt that her arms embraced me, and in her, the arms of Jesus were opening to me, calling me.

Not long thereafter, I caught pneumonia from one of our patients and ended up in the hospital for 10 days with horrible complications. I remember waking up one night, not knowing where I was, profoundly fearful, and calling out to the Lord. He showed Himself to my mind with His arms extended, saying, “Come to me.” I saw that, while I had not abandoned my faith, I had put everything else before God.

When I was well enough to go back to church, I ended up attending the local Catholic parish. The crucifix in the front of the church, always in the past a symbol to me of Christ’s atoning sacrifice and suffering, was transformed in my mind to the living Christ, who said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). As I wept my way through the Mass that Sunday, I knew that I had a clear call to “come home.”

Conversion and a New Priesthood

I spent the next few months talking to as many priests as I could to begin the process of finally becoming Catholic. I started RCIA at a parish south of the city and was confirmed at the Easter Vigil in 1995.

At first, the call seemed to be for me to put Christ and his Church ahead of everything else, and because I had experienced enough turmoil in the ministry of the Episcopal Church, I had no interest in ordination. But my pastor kept encouraging me, so I took a long weekend retreat at the Carmelite House of Prayer in Napa Valley, praying and seeking God’s face. After the retreat, I visited my dad, and he could tell something was happening. I explained to him that I wished to move toward ordination, and he gave me his blessing. Still, there were several obstacles I needed to deal with.

First, I needed an annulment to move forward, and Kathy, my ex-wife, was dead set against it. Oddly, when the annulment was granted, not only did it open the door to seminary for me, but Kathy met someone and married. We had been separated for 13 years, but it took the healing of the annulment process to open the door for her to a new marriage. Annulment does open up old wounds and fears, but also resolves them; it is truly a healing process. In 1998, I entered St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, CA. I didn’t need to complete the whole curriculum since I had several degrees, but the faculty required two years of residence in order to give a recommendation.

I worried that it would be a miserable time and feared I might be turned down for ordination, but I felt that I had to trust Jesus’ leading and give 100 percent. Those two years were actually wonderful; I had a library at my disposal, classes I found interesting, and fellow seminarians who accepted me and made me a part of that community. Having the opportunity to go to Mass daily kept me growing. That summer, I went to Mexico to do language immersion with 17 other seminarians. During that time, four of us went to Mexico City and the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I entered the shrine more or less a skeptic, but was encountered by “la Virgencita.” As I gazed upon the image on the tilma (reed cloak) of St. Juan Diego, her hands seemed to open, and her extraordinary presence in that place brought me face to face with Jesus, her Son. After the visit, I read everything I could on Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as the other apparitions and Church teaching on Mary. Another obstacle dissipated.

The big obstacle, though, was authority. From the outside, the Catholic Church appears as a big monolith that gives little freedom to the People of God, requiring them to have blind faith. I learned, however, that this is not the way the Church actually functions. At every step along the way, I had the opportunity to question and to engage the truth. The bishops have life and death authority over seminarians, and as a part of the process of ordination, we were required to give assent to the Magisterium of the Church — that is, to the Pope and the body of bishops. Much time was spent on understanding the dogmatic teaching of the Church (Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement) and to understanding teachings such as priestly celibacy and other elements of priestly life and ministry. I was never forced to accept anything to which I didn’t freely and openly give consent. In the ordination liturgy, we are asked to give respect and obedience to the bishop and his successors. In sum, I came to understand that being docile and open to the truth made my promise of obedience something that clarified the relationship between the priest and his bishop. Along the way, I read from cover to cover the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I found reasonable, and in short, true. The documents of the Second Vatican Council were also a great help for understanding why the Church teaches as she does. After being immersed in Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxy (correct practice) in the seminary, the pieces fell into place for me as I moved toward the goal of priestly ordination.

That is not to say that I did not struggle. When I arrived at St. Patrick’s Seminary midyear, I was placed with a class that would be ordained in 2000. My ordination was held back until 2001, in order to fulfill the faculty’s obligation of completing two full academic years for a recommendation. It was painful to watch my classmates being ordained while I was not. However, with patience and trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I was ordained a transitional deacon in January of 2001, and then shortly thereafter, on February 22nd, I was ordained a priest.

On the Job

After ordination, I was assigned to St. Joachim parish in Hayward, a large multicultural parish with an excellent school and many ministries. I jumped right in with my first pastor, Fr. Sergio; there were also three newly ordained deacons and an excellent staff.

It was during the “Long Lent” of 2001, when the sexual abuse crisis erupted. The Oakland diocese had been very proactive in protecting children, but with all the pain that resulted from the revelation of the abuses, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I was also delegated by my pastor to call on and spend time with families who had suffered at the hands of a particular notorious priest who had been assigned to St. Joachim some years before. The diocese had set aside funds to enable counseling for the abuse victims, but for the most part the families did not want to deal with it. As a result of the abuse of their children, most of them were no longer practicing their faith, but there were a couple of families who were still active in the parish. While it is all too human to sweep such pain under the rug, my own experience of abuse helped me to empower those who would take advantage of the resources we had made available. By the end of the year, I felt that we had made a difference.

St. Joachim parish also gave me my first opportunities to celebrate the Mass and preach in Spanish. The faithful who worshiped in Spanish were very kind and enabled me to get comfortable with the liturgy in a second language. Because they were so welcoming, I got good experience toward my second assignment, which was as pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Concord. St. Francis had been an entirely English-speaking community. Although they permitted Spanish Masses in the church, these Masses were celebrated by priests from an organization called Concord Hispanic Ministries; they had Masses in three parishes, as well as in school auditoriums.

The bishop decided to put the Spanish speaking Catholics back into the parishes and dissolve Concord Hispanic Ministries, so the day I arrived at St. Francis, 2,400 Spanish speaking families arrived as well. It was good for an overly entitled English speaking congregation to make room for others, although there were stresses and strains along the way. Sadly, the previous pastor had a serious drinking problem that ultimately took his life, and the pastor before him had active Alzheimer’s disease for several years, and some of the staff of both school and parish had taken advantage of the leadership void, getting paid for doing nothing. All that had to be cleaned up while I lived my first year at St. Francis of Assisi, a parish that one of my brother priests described as “notoriously cranky.” Human relations is the cross of being a parish leader, but with faith and perseverance, we got through the transition, and I settled in for an anticipated long ministry there. But that was not to be.

I gave my obedience to the bishop that ordained me, but he was replaced in 2002 by Bishop Allen Vigneron (now Archbishop Vigneron of Detroit). One of the parishes out in the Delta area of California, Immaculate Heart of Mary in Brentwood, needed a new pastor, and some dozen brother priests had turned it down. Too far away, too much Spanish, and too much debt were the usual reasons given. Finally, our new bishop called in desperation and asked if I would consider it; my answer, based on obedience, was an unqualified “yes.” The parish had been without a pastor for a couple of years, and a young priest, Fr. Ken, with whom I was very close, was their temporary administrator. I called Fr. Ken and drove out to Brentwood. He showed me the church, which had been built in 2004; it was now the end of 2006. In the course of our time together, I confided in him that the bishop had asked me to be pastor. I asked if he could give me some time to spend in the church to pray and seek the Lord’s will. The new church was beautiful, thoroughly from the post-Vatican II era, but with traditional elements that made it feel like a church. I had the sense that Jesus’ arms were opening to me in that place, that He was calling me to be there. I ended up being the pastor of that parish for 10 years, and it grew from some 1,700 families to over 6,000 during my time there. Demographics drove that growth, but the parish was also alive and bursting with ministries.

For me, it is the people who make up the parish, and I quickly fell in love with them. Fortunately, they seemed to respond to me as well. The enormous debt I had inherited was paid off within a couple of years, allowing us to borrow around four million dollars to build a hall, offices, and classrooms. This new debt was also retired before I left. I asked the bishop to allow me to retire in my 70th year, partly because I had experienced a brush with cancer, but also because the day-to-day pressure on a pastor is enormous, even though most people think we only work one day a week.

Retired but Still Working for the Lord

Jesus always calls us to himself and to ongoing conversion. After retiring, I immediately got involved in ministry in the diocese of Stockton, where I moved to be near family. I hadn’t expected to be busy, but I love being a priest and doing the things that priests do. In 2022, Bishop Myron Cotta of Stockton asked that I take on a parish in crisis: St. Anthony in Manteca. The previous pastor had resigned, and the circumstances greatly divided the community. It was my task to heal those wounds, or rather be the midwife that allowed Jesus to heal them. St. Anthony is a wonderful parish with a great school and many ministries, and I was graced to be present for the transition of the parish from the loss of their previous pastor into their preparation for a new one. Behind the church’s altar stands a life-size crucifix, with Jesus inviting the faithful in with outstretched arms. I mentioned previously the verse about the Son of Man being lifted up and drawing all to Him (John 12:32) — this, coupled with the sight of such a dramatic crucifix was, and remains, a powerful image and message, not only for me personally, but definitely for the people as they returned to Mass at the end of the pandemic. It is true that Jesus continues to love us and call us. I am grateful to the Lord, who has opened His arms to me, and through my ministry, to those who have come to love Him.

My personal experience, especially with abuse, caused me more than a little heartbreak, not to mention downright confusion as to what it said about me as a priest. Abuse is not the stigma of a single church, though; it is found everywhere. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we respond. Because God was always my loving Father, Mary my loving mother, and Jesus the source of all good, by the grace of God, I did not respond with anger and hatred toward the Church and the priesthood. Perhaps my experience was less drastic than others; still, my simple faith is that, when we are faithful to God, He can use every experience in our lives to bring good out of evil, life out of death.

The post I Will Draw All People To Myself appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

In November of 1973, when I was eight years old, my parents had their sixth child, Phyllis. Tragically, she was stillborn because the umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck. My innocent mind struggled to understand how this could happen, and, understandably, it devastated our whole family. What happened next, though, puzzled me greatly. At the small funeral which was held in the hospital chapel for Phyllis, I witnessed doctors and nurses crying over our lost sibling. It was profound, but even at age eight, I wondered why these medical staff, some of whom supported or even may have participated in the newly legalized abortion of the unborn, could then cry for my sister. Didn’t those babies deserve the same dignity as my sister? A seed was planted that day, watered with the many tears of my mother.

Laying the Foundation

Over the years, my interest in the sciences, and biology in particular, grew. I went to college and completed my pre-med coursework, with plans to attend medical school. While in college, I had a few Catholic friends, and I attended Mass a couple of times with them. However, I was angry because I felt as though the Catholics thought they were better than me, denying me communion, so I defiantly went forward and received the Eucharist, thinking it was only bread. I pretty much forgot about that event until I started to contemplate the Catholic Faith many years later.

After college, I applied to medical school, but I wasn’t accepted the first time I applied. Because of this, I got a job at Johns Hopkins University developing protocols for pediatric leukemia treatments, while also working as a home health nurse aide. After a year, I changed gears and went to Colorado to join the full-time staff of Young Life, working as a counselor with troubled teens experiencing teen pregnancy and teen homelessness. I also enrolled at Fuller Theological Seminary to study Christian Family Counseling. While there, I gained important skills in working with this demographic, as well as learning how to see and love them, rather than focusing on their crimes and shortcomings.

With the dream of medicine still in my heart, though, I returned to the east coast to conduct research on Alzheimer’s Disease at Duke University while working as a physical therapy assistant. During this time, I was attending a Presbyterian church with friends, but I met this bubbly Catholic Cajun girl who had just moved up from southern Louisiana for a critical care nursing internship. I had never met a Catholic who was so dedicated to his or her beliefs. Kathleen was not a great apologist and didn’t have complete answers to many of my questions, but she had an unwavering faith. I was fascinated with this new species of Christian.

Marriage and Medical School

I had always been able to easily counter arguments in favor of Catholicism, but Kathleen had a great uncle who was a diocesan monsignor and an uncle who was a Discalced Carmelite friar; she was formed well enough to resist the basic tenets of Protestantism. As we started to spend more time together, talking about our very different lives and beliefs, we began to fall in love. I had been an avid member of Intervarsity and Campus Crusade for Christ, so I was confident I could lead her to the “truth” of the Reformation. During this time, I applied to medical school a second time and was rejected again. I was told I needed to get a master’s degree to prove I could do graduate level work. So, I decided to return to The College of William and Mary where I had earned my undergraduate degree, while Kathleen returned to Louisiana to take care of her dying grandmother.

After her grandmother’s death, Kathleen moved back to Virginia so we could continue discerning marriage together while she lived in a nearby town, working as a nurse. I earned my master’s degree in biology, but was rejected a third time to medical school. Frustrated, I decided to actually move to the medical school in Richmond, get a research job, and stay until they got tired enough of me to admit me. I researched and published on brain receptors in rats and applied a fourth time. I finally was accepted.

After applying for and receiving all the canonical approvals from the Church, Kathleen and I were married two weeks before the start of medical school in 1994. We had gone through pre-Cana (marriage preparation) classes and agreed on most topics, such as birth control, abortion, and raising the kids Catholic. However, I still thought she would become Presbyterian. I would attend Mass with her, but I was also part of a Presbyterian church. The “mission” of our marriage was “to live the broken body of Christ and strive towards unity in His Church.”

A Pro-Life Ethic

During medical school, my commitment to pro-life medicine solidified. Throughout medical school, I had to fight against instruction that promoted supporting the relativistic convictions of patients rather than helping patients ethically navigate health care decisions. Birth control, abortion, euthanasia, neglecting abstinence counseling, and many other topics were left up to the patient alone, forcing many students to practice medicine against their consciences.

Thankfully, this changed when I moved on to my residency. Kathleen and I practiced Natural Family Planning (NFP), and when we moved to begin my residency position in Family Medicine in Mobile, AL, we became a certified Sympto-Thermal Method teaching couple. My first week in residency, I was faced with a 16-year-old girl requesting birth control from me. I had to pause and pray. I told her I could not in good conscience prescribe a harmful medicine to her, especially one that would support an immoral lifestyle. As a family practitioner, I practiced medicine with a holistic approach, caring for mind, body, and soul. Following this, I approached my director and told him that I could not prescribe birth control or make referrals for procedures such as abortion or sterilization. He respected my right of conscience, and I went on to complete my residency.

During this time, I would listen to my wife teach the Rosary and the tenets of her Catholic faith to our growing family. Our third child was born during my residency. Kathleen was pregnant with our fourth child when we moved to North Carolina, where I joined an NFP-only general practice. In this new practice, we started to have many Catholics come under our care. All of the local priests came to us, as well as the many large, homeschooling Catholic families.

When our kids reached school age, we opened King of Mercy homeschool and were able to incorporate our religious beliefs into our curriculum. Kathleen was becoming stronger in her faith, while the Methodist church I was attending was becoming more progressive and deviating from my beliefs. Our local priests asked us to teach NFP to couples in marriage preparation, and they went on to have me teach sessions in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) regarding the Church’s teachings on birth control, sterilization, in vitro fertilization, and end-of-life care. I thought it was pretty progressive of these priests to allow a non-Catholic to teach in their RCIA and pre-Cana classes.

I became more interested in Catholic ethics. During our second year in North Carolina, an influential pro-life leader was coming to town, and I was asked to host him. I spent several days with this amazing man, who was wholly dedicated to the defense of the unborn. Over the next five years, my practice partner, Dr. Danny Holland, and I offered free prenatal care and delivery services to abortion-vulnerable women. We would pray outside of the abortion clinics and set up referral services through the crisis pregnancy centers to deliver free care.

In 2006, a young woman came into the office after taking the abortion pill and immediately regretting it. She wanted to reverse the abortion. God delivered an idea to me to use progesterone to do exactly that. We had progesterone in our office because Dr. Holland was a certified NaPro Fertility Consultant, having trained at the Pope Paul VI Institute in Nebraska. She received the treatment, and her baby survived. Today, that baby is a healthy 16-year-old girl.

If I had gone straight to medical school out of college, I never would have gained the experience and wisdom to understand how protein receptors worked, to understand the plight of a teenager in pregnancy, or to see this medical dilemma with a “can do” culture-of-life medical approach.

Following this, though I was still a Protestant, I became a medical advisor for Priests for Life and started working with others on delivering this protocol to more women hoping to reverse their abortions. Ultimately, I teamed up with Dr. George Delgado, who had also discovered the reversal protocol separately, and began collecting abortion reversal stories, publishing a case series of reversal treatments in 2012. Eventually, Heartbeat International took over Dr. Delgado’s call center, and they have been able to expand the network of providers able to deliver this treatment. To date, they have over 2000 providers in 86 countries, and the Abortion Pill Reversal protocol has saved over 4000 babies, with numbers growing daily as medication abortion services expand.

Surrendering My Skepticism

Meanwhile, in the midst of this work, I was struggling with my faith, trying to sort out the truths of Kathleen’s and my seemingly opposing churches. I had debated topics with multiple priests and catechists. I had attended multiple conferences. I had been to Rome and stood two feet from Pope John Paul II while searching for answers. I led Catholic medical missions to Mexico, Ghana, and Vietnam, but I still could not bring myself to accept the Catholic Faith.

One patient whom I met on a mission particularly touched me. It was a very frustrating and unorganized day in the makeshift clinic we had put together in bush country. Hundreds of patients, some of whom had walked two days to see us, were tired and hungry and needing help. I was tired and hot and second guessing this trip. I asked God to show Himself to me and convince me that I made the right decision to come. A little boy then came in to see me. He was about eight years old, dirty and malnourished. He had scaly skin and a large wound in his head, called a Buruli ulcer. This is a chronic wound that requires surgical treatment plus special antibiotic treatment. It was eating into his skull. The village children teased him and poked him in one eye with a stick, leaving him blind in that eye. His mother had abandoned him, and his grandmother was reluctantly raising him. He was seen as a curse in this village, where many still practiced animist religions. When I asked his name, his grandmother told me, “Emmanuel” — literally, “God with us.” It struck me right in the heart. My prayer was answered, and we did all we could to cure this little boy. We offered to take him to the United States for treatment, but ultimately, we could not do it. We did get him to a regional Buruli ulcer center, but sadly, he died six months later. However, this encounter gave me a real heart for the places God meets us and helped me to understand how we are to see Jesus in each of our patients and be Jesus to them.

Despite these experiences, I was still struggling with my faith. By now, I had stopped going to Protestant services and was fully integrated into the life of our parish. In fact, people were surprised when they found out that I wasn’t Catholic.

Maybe it was pride or my inborn stubbornness, but when I really examined the root issue, it came down to the Eucharist. As a scientist and medical doctor, I could not bring myself to consider it even a possibility that bread and wine could become God — so vulnerable, so physical, so present, and so seemingly inanimate.

Continuing to wrestle with my skepticism, one day, I received a call from our priest asking me to investigate a possible Eucharistic miracle. The priest said he was looking for someone who was scientifically sound, who would honestly evaluate the Host and not be tempted to be biased based on religious belief. I accepted the task and traveled to investigate a Host that had fallen to the floor, then was placed in holy water. When the priest went to properly dispose of the Host, it had a bloody and fleshy appearance. I was fascinated and took a sample to a pathologist. The first test came back positive for the possible presence of blood, but further testing revealed that it was a bacterial growth. This type of bacteria glows very red, and the Host had become puffy with the absorption of water and bacterial growth. I delivered my report to the priest, but the event made me think very deeply about my ability to believe, especially amid my other experiences with Eucharistic miracles.

I had been to Orvieto, Italy, and studied other Eucharistic miracles, where the accidents remaining after the transubstantiation had actually conformed to the physical appearance of the Body and Blood of our Lord. I saw the stained altar cloth in Orvieto and marveled at the multiple accounts of AB blood type, the universal blood type recipient found in these Eucharistic miracles. I thought how appropriate that blood type would be, given that Christ longs to receive everyone into His kingdom. I really wanted to believe, but my data collecting brain wouldn’t let me.

All of these factors made me think about the multiple times where Christ had said we must have the faith of a child to receive the kingdom of God. I had studied Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper and even gone to several of his conferences. I decided that if there is no way possible for me to believe, then I would have never gone to investigate a possible miracle in the first place. All this time I had been waiting for God to physically change bread and wine into flesh and blood, but what God changed instead was my heart. I believe my subconscious was wanting to believe, but my conscious intellect was blocking that belief.

Another shift in my faith took place when we went on mission to Vietnam. While there, we experienced a frightening incident as we were driving in the middle of the night to the leper colonies. The priest in the car started praying the Rosary while our lives were in danger, and I joined in my desperation. This was the first Rosary I actually prayed, and I felt real comfort come over me. That we were saved from an almost certain collision and death affirmed my trust in praying for the Blessed Mother’s help, and today, the Rosary is a daily devotion for me.

Prior to this, I would always sit with our family as my wife led our seven children in the Rosary, rebelliously not wanting to “pray to Mary,” but wanting to be with my family. As a Protestant, I had confused worship and prayer, not understanding the “communion of the saints,” which not only includes those on earth but also those in heaven. When I really studied the Rosary, I realized how scriptural it was and had little argument with it. If I would be honored to have Billy Graham pray for me, why wouldn’t I want the prayers of Jesus’ own mother? I started to realize I could never love Mary more than Jesus does. When praying the Rosary and meditating on the mysteries, it started to feel like the times when I would sit with my best friend’s mother and talk about her son’s adventures. But instead of seeing my friend’s antics through the eyes of an immature friend, I was able to see those same stories through the eyes of a loving mother. That was now how I was learning to pray the Rosary, seeing the passion of our Lord through the eyes of a grieving mother, or the joy of the presentation at the temple through Mary’s eyes.

A Final Spiritual Offensive

As our children were growing older, with one in college, I knew that I needed to make a decision regarding my faith. Therefore, I told my wife that I was going to attend the upcoming RCIA classes in order to truly investigate the questions I had regarding the faith. Little did I know that my wife had enlisted multiple priests to start a novena of novenas, offering 81 Masses for the intention of my conversion. At the time I told her that I was going to start RCIA, they were already 13 Masses in, but she didn’t reveal this spiritual offensive to me until after my Confirmation on Pentecost in 2015. I remember my first Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the first sin off of my lips was that of pride. The second was receiving our Lord in the Eucharist while I was in college without recognizing that it was actually the Lord Himself. Now that I knew that specific sin was grave, it weighed heavily on my heart until I confessed it. Wow! It was such a relief, and I could finally know and acknowledge His presence in the Eucharist!

It was after this that I came into full communion with the Church through the Sacrament of Confirmation in the Traditional Latin Rite, a stark contrast from my prior faith. I chose the saint that I had only stood a few feet from as my confirmation saint: Pope St. John Paul II. Not many can say they have met their confirmation saint!

That same year, my son decided to attend college seminary and discern a call to the priesthood. He is scheduled to be ordained in June of this year (2024), and a second son will be starting his first year of major seminary in the Fall. Since the time of my reception into the Church, my faith has only grown. I truly feel that my faith is complete in the celebration of the Mass.

I am eternally grateful for the wonderful Christian upbringing of my parents and extended family. They gave me such a strong foundation in faith and Scripture. They love my wife and family very much. In fact, my wife has broken many of their stereotypes about Catholics. Even though they do not agree with us theologically, they remain continually supportive and loving, for which I am truly grateful.

I still feel like a baby Catholic and am looking forward to the spiritual journey ahead. Thinking back on the road that led me into the Church, I invite any Protestants who are considering the Catholic faith but are held back by fears to just relax and rest in the Lord. Take a deep dive into the history of our Christian faith and read the early fathers. Go and sit and attend a Mass and observe. Sit in an adoration chapel and just ask the Lord to guide you into His will.

The post Finding Life in the Catholic Church appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Throughout my entire childhood, I witnessed my dad’s even-handed mockery of anything religious and my mom’s rather eclectic interest in everything religious. This polarity of perspectives shaped in me both suspicion and curiosity about religion. When I conversed about religion with my parents, who had adopted me when I was eight months old, they would always tell me, “Your biological parents were Catholic, but rather than having you baptized as a Catholic, we feel that when you are old enough, you should decide for yourself what you want to believe.”

My First Bible: Conspiracy and Curiosity

When I was in elementary school, my parents did allow my siblings and me to ride the neighborhood Sunday school bus that stopped on the street in our small Denver neighborhood every Sunday on its way to the local Baptist church. For some reason, my parents, who were not on the same page about their own religious convictions, also thought that they should put a Bible in my Easter basket when I was eight years old.

It was a Sunday morning in April of 1977, and there it was, nestled in the basket between the candy eggs and jellybeans, the green plastic grass, and the paddle-ball toy—a small white gift-and- award King James Bible. I grabbed it right out of the basket and stared at it in awe. My very own Bible! I knew it was an important book, but had no idea why, so I asked my mom to give me the scoop. She announced, in a conspiratorial tone of voice, that the Bible was “an ancient religious book written by a group of men whose goal was to control the masses through religion.”

My young brain wondered why she would want to give me such a book, but I was still curious about what it contained, so I set out to read it. I got to Genesis chapter six or seven, lost interest, and put it on the shelf. As I got older, I would go through this exercise repeatedly, occasionally thumbing through the shiny pictures inside, scanning the chapters toward the end that had red letters in four of the books, but never really figuring out what I was reading. Well into my late teens, the Bible remained a mysterious book for me.

“Mormon Cindy,” Confusion, and a Crisis

My family moved from Denver to Salt Lake City when I was nine years old, and my parents allowed me to attend the Lutheran church with my cousin. This didn’t mean their attitude toward religion had changed. I still remember my dad mocking my Sunday School class’s performance of a Bible song and having it become a standard family joke because we all found it funny, even into adulthood.

Despite these experiences at home, living in Utah opened my eyes to the reality that religion could permeate an entire culture. In Utah, discussions about God, Jesus, the Bible, and innumerable related topics were as normal as talking about one’s favorite sports team or television program. This further awakened my curiosity and openness to religious dialogue.

When I entered junior high, many of my Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) friends began attending religious instruction at a nearby LDS seminary during school hours. I saw them carry their Bibles and other religious books with them, eager to learn about their faith.

During my junior year of high school, I began dating a beautiful LDS girl named Cindy who, upon discovering that I wasn’t a Mormon, asked me to attend a series of discussions with the Mormon missionaries in her home. When I told my mother about it, to my surprise she exhorted, “Just be sure that if you read the Book of Mormon, you give the Bible equal time.”

I had also begun taking a karate class from a man who talked about being a “born again Christian.” He insisted that Mormonism was not “historic, orthodox Christianity.” I had no idea what that meant, but right away, I went from my crush on “Mormon Cindy” to a crisis. My pretty LDS girlfriend, her family, and all my Mormon friends at school were telling me their faith was the fullness of the truth, yet one of my mentors was telling me that not only was it not true, it wasn’t even Christianity! Again, my mother reminded me that I needed to make up my own mind, and my dad reminded me that no matter what decision I made, I’d still be landing in someone’s version of religious idiocy.

Born Again

During those days of crisis, my motives shifted dramatically from wanting to please my girlfriend, my karate teacher, and even my parents, to wanting answers in the simplest of terms: how could I know the truth, and how could I be sure I would end up in heaven when I died? On the evening of Thursday, July 24, 1986, I loaded up all the materials I had been collecting and took them with me to the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake City to talk with the missionaries there. I found a temple missionary and asked him a simple question; “How can I know Mormonism is true, and how can I be sure I’ll go to heaven when I die?” He replied, “Many are called, but few are chosen,” then smiled and walked away.

Confused and discouraged, I left too. As I left the temple square, I was immediately drawn to the sound of singing coming from a group of people marching up the street behind a man carrying a huge wooden cross. I couldn’t believe it! I ran over to the group and asked the first guy I met what they were doing. A young “surfer dude” from California, David, smiled as he said, “We’re taking this city for Jesus Christ! What are you doing here?” I opened my bag of books and blurted out, “I’m looking for God!” We stared at each other for a minute in excited disbelief; then, he asked me to step aside and sit with him on a bench in front of one of the buildings.

I told David about my experience with the LDS missionary and asked him the same questions: “How can I know the truth, and how can I know I’ll go to heaven when I die?” David took out his Bible and a small notepad and wrote down John 3:3 (“…you must be born again…”), John 3:16 (“…for God so loved the World…”), John 14:6 (“I am the way…truth…life”), and Romans 10:9 (“If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”). He said, “The simple answer is that you can know the truth by reading the Bible, and to be sure you’ll go to heaven you simply need to believe in and follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” Then he asked, “Would you like to pray and do that now?” I told him that I knew it was what I needed to do, but remembering my mom’s often-repeated words from my childhood, “You need to decide for yourself what you believe,” this was something I wanted to do alone.

The next night, after telling my parents and Cindy what had happened to me, I went to my karate teacher’s house to share the news with him. I had decided to be a “born again Christian.” I walked back to my car, and while sitting on the hood of my car in front of his house, I stared up into the night sky, praying aloud, “God I believe in you. I believe in Jesus. I want to serve you with my whole life. Please save me!” And then, like a flash flood, tears and joy filled me up, and I knew I would never be the same. In fact, that night, I knew my whole life had changed, and that I needed to serve God with my entire life. You could say that it was then that I first felt a call to ministry.

“Ignorance On Fire”

After my dramatic “born again” experience, I developed a ravenous appetite for theology, Christian preaching and teaching, and apologetics. I also began to listen to a daily radio program called The Bible Answer Man, hosted by the late Dr. Walter Martin. In this program, I “learned” that Mormons were wrong, Jehovah’s Witnesses were wrong, Seventh Day Adventists were wrong, and especially— CATHOLICS WERE WRONG!

What began as a deeply sincere quest for truth turned into what all my friends called my season of “ignorance on fire.” I attacked everything and everyone with whom I disagreed. I became an expert at tearing down the religious beliefs of others, and I learned that under no circumstances could I ever become Catholic. Catholicism, they taught me, was an apostate version of Christianity that had been corrected and restored to its original pristine doctrine and practice in the 1500s by men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many others. Though this sounded curiously like the “restorationist” claims of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, I believed the people who were helping me, concluding that, like Mormonism, Catholicism was not Christianity, and that most Catholics were not Christians. This was something I heard repeatedly and eventually taught from my own pulpit when I later became a pastor.

The conflict with my family and most friendships became so intense and constant that my parents forbade me to keep a Bible in the house, listen to Christian music or any kind of preaching/teaching on the radio inside the house (even with headphones on), or attend church. They further forbade me to be baptized until I turned 18. Even my karate teacher told me on many occasions that my way of talking and “sharing my faith” was actually driving people away. I interpreted it all as persecution, and the day after my 18th birthday, I moved out of the house.

Baptism and the Navy

Like many young men in the late 1980s, after watching Top Gun, I rushed to the local Navy recruitment office. I signed up for the delayed entry program and was told to report to boot camp in San Diego, California, on July 6th, 1987.

I moved into a friend’s house on June 5th—the day after I turned 18 and graduated from high school—and spent the month preceding my enlistment attending a local Vineyard Christian Fellowship. I visited my parents on the 4th of July, asked my mom to shave my head, and then asked her and my dad to come to church the next morning to watch me get baptized. They agreed. I was baptized in water, and the following morning, I flew to San Diego. By evening, I was finishing my first day of boot camp.

The Wild West of Evangelicalism

When I joined the Navy in 1987, I began what was an exciting time of discovering all the different kinds of Evangelical and Protestant churches out there, as it often is for many young new Christians. It seemed that so long as a person believed that the Bible was the Word of God, believed in the Trinity, believed that Jesus was divine and “the only way to God,” there were innumerable possibilities with respect to just about every other kind of belief that a Christian could embrace.

During the year that my parents would not allow me to go to church, I simply didn’t have an opportunity to know much about “church life” as a new Christian. Once I left home and discovered I could visit a different church every Sunday, I initially felt like a kid in a candy store. There were churches that believed in the rapture (and others that didn’t), churches that believed in speaking in tongues (and others that didn’t), churches that believed in ordaining women (and others that didn’t), churches that believed you could lose your salvation (and others that didn’t), churches that believed in baptismal regeneration (and others that didn’t), and on and on. For every “true Christian church” that believed one thing, I could find another “true Christian church” in the same zip code that believed the exact opposite. All of these “Christianities,” as I came to see them, claimed to believe that the Bible alone was the sole infallible source of truth, and that their particular version of biblical truth was the most correct one. I also fell into that mindset.

In practical terms, my sense was that Evangelical Protestantism was basically an exercise in trying to get the most correct understanding of the Bible, and then finding a church or denomination that agreed with me (and the biblical teachers, authors, and commentators who I preferred to listen to and read).

From my understanding of the Bible, gifts of the Holy Spirit like prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues were still available and operating in the lives of Christians, just as they were in the Bible. So, I found my theological home among Charismatics and Pentecostals. The problem was that many of my fellow Pentecostals and Charismatics disagreed wildly about how these gifts became available to people, how to use them, and how to determine their legitimacy. Over time, my initial excitement began to feel more like I was a lone gunman in the wild west! It was me, Jesus, and my Bible (or rather, my interpretation of it).

Marriage, Ministry, and More Anti-Catholicism

Toward the end of my six-year enlistment in the Navy, I met my wife, MaryJo, on the island of Okinawa. I was serving on a Marine Corps base, and she, a pastor’s daughter, was a missionary at the Youth With A Mission base. When we began our relationship, we both felt a call to be together and to devote our lives to ministry.

During my final year of naval service, I began taking extension courses from Moody Bible Institute. Just over a year after leaving the Navy, MaryJo and I moved back to Salt Lake City and began attending the church that had brought those “March for Jesus” missionaries to town that I had met back in 1986. At the age of twenty-four, I became an associate pastor in that church, remaining in full-time pastoral work in three different congregations for the next twenty years. The lead pastor of that Assemblies of God church often spoke out against both Mormonism and Catholicism in his sermons. He himself was a fallen-away Catholic who “got truly saved” and discovered what he called real Christianity after watching a movie about the rapture at a local Evangelical youth group when he was a teen. His sermons often contained what I eventually called “hint of lime anti-Catholicism,” because there was always a hint of anti-Catholic rhetoric in almost every bite. This reinforced my own anti-Catholic bias and gave me even more ammunition when trying to get Catholics out of their religion and into ours. I also discovered, in every congregation I served, that many of the members had grown up in nominally Catholic families, “found Jesus” in a Protestant church, and ultimately became anti-Catholic.

In hindsight, I found that much of my own anti-Catholic sentiments and understanding of Catholicism came from listening to their stories.

Leaving the Mayhem—Three Watershed Moments

In 2010, nine years into my twelve-year tenure as the lead pastor of our Foursquare Gospel Church in central California, I had the opportunity to attend a biblical seminary at no cost. Three things happened to me during that time in seminary that would change the whole course of my spiritual life, and ultimately, set the stage for my conversion to the Catholic Church.

The first happened when I received my international ordination. During the ordination service, surrounded by fellow Foursquare ministers and an elder in our church who were laying hands on me, I began to think, “What right do these men have to lay hands on me and ordain me to the ministry? What does ordination even mean? Where do they get their authority to do this? Who gave it to them, and to those who laid hands on them?” The question slipped into a kind of infinite regress, and as I stood there to receive the highest level of ordination possible in my denomination, I could not bring myself to believe that any of these men had any legitimate authority to ordain anyone!

The second occurred in my New Testament program in seminary when, during one of his lectures, my professor remarked, “Of course, we know before the New Testament was formally canonized in the fourth century, there was a fully functional, evangelizing, and growing Church that was spreading all over the world. In fact, it was not until after the council of Nicaea that there was universal agreement about which books should be included in the New Testament.”

While I already knew this was true, I had honestly never sat still long enough to think through the implications. I wanted to be a “Bible teaching pastor” because I thought that was the ideal. But what I learned was that, for hundreds of years, there was no universal agreement among Christians about which books even went into the Bible. In fact, many Christian communities were growing, flourishing, and spreading the good news of Jesus before they ever had access to many of the books of the Bible that I took for granted; many Christians in the first generations of the Church’s existence never even knew that some of the New Testament books existed! How was this possible, not just during the time of the first apostles, but for over two centuries after the last apostle had died? Something else had to be holding the Church together. But what was it?

The final thing took place during my course in the book of Acts in my last year of seminary. I had decided to study the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, and as one of my questions for further dialogue at the end of my study, I asked if the Church in Acts 15—the one that could speak definitively about issues of doctrine and heresy, and which had the power to bind all Christians to the same doctrine and practice—was still present in the world today.

My professors and most of my friends and colleagues all had the same answer—no. It was up to each congregation, each denomination, and ultimately, up to each Christian to determine for themselves what the Bible taught, and to do their best to find fellowship with other believers who shared those same convictions. In that moment, I saw Evangelicalism and Protestantism as a shattered pane of glass—irreparably broken into a million disparate pieces. I resigned from pastoring and left evangelical Christianity just before my final semester of seminary in November 2013. I was, however, not yet Catholic.

The “Four L’s” of my Catholic Conversion

It wasn’t until five years after I had left pastoral ministry altogether, and several years of wandering through varied church involvement, that I experienced what I now call the “four L’s” of my conversion to Catholicism.

The first “L” is LOCUTION. That’s a Catholic word that, when translated into Pentecostal terminology, means “a word from the Lord.” While I was coming home from a trip to the beach near my home in Virginia in 2018, I drove by St. John the Apostle Catholic Church. As I drove by and noticed it was a Catholic church, I very clearly heard the Lord issue a simple command: “Go to that Catholic church.” I could not deny that it was the Lord, but I had no idea why I was supposed to go there. With my many anti-Catholic beliefs, I was not considering becoming Catholic. All the same, I knew I was supposed to go. I shared this with my wife, and she asked to go with me. The next Saturday evening, we went to Mass together. While I was somewhat lost in the liturgy, I could tell something powerful was happening. I just didn’t have a frame of reference to make sense of it.

A friend of mine who had converted to the Catholic Church heard about my visit and encouraged me to read Scott Hahn’s book, The Lamb’s Supper, before going to Mass again. I ordered it, read it in four days, and the next time I went to Mass, I wept all the way through it. I felt like a color-blind person who had gotten his special glasses—“Mass Glasses”—and I could see what, just a few days earlier, had been hidden from me. As I drove away from Mass the second week in a row, I had two thoughts. First, “I need to become Catholic!” But second, “Oh no! Oh God! How can I become Catholic?! I don’t believe in Catholicism!”

The second “L”—LEARNING—happened in the months that followed that initial experience of the Mass. I discovered that I had learned nearly everything I knew about Catholicism from anti-Catholic apologists, former Catholic and anti-Catholic ministers, and former Catholic and anti-Catholic congregants. I needed to learn what the Catholic Church taught and believed in her own language and on her own terms, without the baggage that so often accompanied the perspectives of non-Catholics. I spent the next several months reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and innumerable Catholic theology books, listening to hours of teachings and lectures by trusted Catholic voices, and attending RCIA classes at St. John the Apostle parish.

The third “L”—LISTENING—happened as I discovered the innumerable conversion stories that had been written by dozens of people just like me—seminary-trained Evangelical Protestants of every stripe who had left it all and joined the Catholic Church. I read their stories of conversion, of sorting through their theological difficulties, and of letting go of their claims of personal infallibility, finally trusting that Jesus had founded a Church—the Catholic Church—which, I discovered, was the very same Church I had wondered about during my study of Acts 15. To my joy, I discovered that this Church was, indeed, still in the world after 2,000 years!

The fourth and final “L” is something I never dreamed would be possible: “LOVE.” I have come to love the Catholic Church. This is because I have heard God’s voice call me to enter into worship with the Catholic Church. I have learned, from the Church herself, what she really believes and teaches, and I have listened to others who have made the same journey home to full communion. In fact, I regularly tell people that, although I was a Christian before, following Jesus and walking in as much light as the Lord had given me, the Catholic Church has told me the truth in the best way I have ever heard it told. Speaking of love for the Catholic Church, I’ll end with a quote that I have come to treasure from G.K. Chesterton who, when explaining his own conversion to Catholicism, observed: “It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it, they feel a tug toward 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.”

The post “L” is for Love. . . appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

You might consider us “COVID converts.” Looking back on all that led to us leaving our deep-rooted Pentecostal heritage for something we knew absolutely nothing about can only be described as a gift— an outpouring of grace during one of the most troubling and isolating years most of us will ever experience.

During the pandemic, people were scared and living in hopelessness; yet God was at work within our lives. In the middle of the chaos, we would decide to leave the familiarity of our religious heritages, our families, and our friends for the truth we had found in the Catholic Church. It all started with a corpulent early 20th century author from England and a wonderful literary society that wasn’t afraid to shine a light in the darkest of times.

Born Under the Pew

My wife Valiree and I were both “born under the pew” in the Assemblies of God, a charismatic Pentecostal denomination, in which our families have extremely deep roots. We both have aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws who are pastors and missionaries; grandparents and great-grand parents who were preachers and missionaries— with my great-grandfather being one of the first Pentecostal evangelists in Norway. Other family members serve as teachers, musicians and worship ministers, church board members and dedicated lay people. I even ended up marrying a pastor’s daughter! In other words, our families are deeply Christian and very Pentecostal.

Growing up, there were many things my family and the Assemblies of God taught me were important to the life of a Pentecostal Evangelical, always backed up by Scripture: the importance of Baptism (of the Holy Spirit and of water), worship, Scripture, prayer, being a part of a church community, serving in the church, and holy communion (though it was viewed as entirely symbolic). Our childhoods were profoundly Christ-centered and ministry- centered, and our relationship with Jesus and dedication to church shaped absolutely everything we did. I thank God often for the blessing of growing up in such a religious, Bible- based, and Spirit-filled heritage.

It was never a matter of if you would use your spiritual talents and gifts for the church and evangelization, but how and where. Being of a strongly musical family (many of whom could sing every song in the hymnal by heart), and like so many others my age who cut their teeth during the star- studded wonderment that was 90’s Christian Contemporary Music, serving in worship ministry has always been a part of me. I loved it. I felt, and still feel, that God blessed me with that particular gift of service. To live out Psalm 95, playing guitar and singing at every opportunity, was my ministry and calling. Not only did it bring me closer to God through worship, but it also led me to my wife. Valiree and I met on the church stage (she plays piano), and we served together in Las Vegas, Nevada, as worship and youth leaders for many years as part of her father’s pastorate in my childhood church.

Fragmented

A few years into our marriage, Valiree and I left her father’s church in search of our own ministry opportunities. We spent time in many different churches and even other charismatic denominations outside of the Assemblies of God in worship ministry, serving in leadership roles across Las Vegas during our first 15 years of marriage. Being in a town that’s obsessed with showmanship, we were part of a very hip, modern worship scene with rocking music and first-class musicians. We would serve where we were needed, from youth ministries to conferences, new church plants, and Bible study groups. We were raised and wired to serve wherever and whenever we could.

Between 2006 and 2017, we served in seven different churches, all in the same city, all with different interpretations of how to “do church.” The idea that something was wrong with this model started to penetrate me. I witnessed firsthand the type of division that seemed so deeply rooted in the Protestant culture: church splits and dissension over styles of music, styles of preaching, or even styles of management. If you didn’t agree with something, you would simply leave for another church or start your own.

In 2018, we started attending a non-denominational church, refreshed by the verse-by-verse Bible preaching and the focus on the cross, salvation, and winning souls for Christ, which seemed a positive departure from what we had experienced previously. It certainly checked all the boxes for us, and we saw many opportunities for growth and use of our musical talents and leadership from spending all those years in worship ministry.

It didn’t take long, though, for the same issues that plagued other churches in the Las Vegas valley to make their way there as well. Things modernized, got louder, bigger, and “better,” like so many other “seeker friendly” churches. The cross, normally located behind us on stage, was eventually taken down and replaced with black painted walls and new lighting—an attempt at making sure the experience was flashy, but not too offensive to “seekers,” as many Christian symbols can be.

Unsettled by this, 2018 brought about much prayer and personal study to help fill in some of the gaps. We took matters into our own hands, and my wife started homeschooling both our kids more intensively, with a purposeful Christ-centered focus. I remember, during this time, having a distinct longing to study how historical Christianity would view some of these big questions we had about ministry, the church, and our roles in spreading and sharing the love of Jesus through the modern worship experience. What was Christianity even like before the electric guitar?

An Englishman In Las Vegas

Whenever these questions of Christian identity crept into my mind, I would revisit a core group of authors who always had a positive impact on me, from modern influences like John Eldridge and Francis Chan, to spiritual giants like C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and my personal favorite, G.K. Chesterton. I discovered Chesterton when I was just starting out as a freshman majoring in English at the local university in Las Vegas, while flipping through an English 101 book and landing on a short poem called The Donkey. I started looking into who this Chesterton fellow was and discovered that C. S. Lewis was tremendously influenced by him. I was hooked, and I began searching for more Chesterton wherever I could find him. Whenever I felt numb to the modern church experience and needed intellectual reasoning behind my core beliefs as a Christian, I would visit Chesterton to see what he had to say about things. In fact, the first book I gifted my wife before we were even engaged was a copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. “Read this,” I said, “it’s the best book on Christianity I’ve ever read.” God bless her, she did read it. It wasn’t until much later that I would realize the role Orthodoxy played in our lives, or the blessing of having a wife so open to her husband’s bouts of zealously sharing what he’d recently discovered about our Christian faith.

Being quite the proud and bookish English major, I followed the American Chesterton Society, regularly visiting the Society’s website over the years. But it was during these challenging times at church I would fondly remember all those late nights I had spent in college, watching a show called The Apostle of Common Sense on a cable TV channel I’d randomly stumbled upon. It was during these years that I found myself longing for those expositions that Dale Ahlquist gave of Chesterton’s common-sense Christianity. There had to be something more to the way we “did church.” My curiosity about how Chesterton saw the world finally got the better of me, and I became a card-carrying member of the Society in March of 2019, receiving my first Gilbert! Magazine and starting to follow the group more intently on social media.

Setting The Stage

2019 was also significant for my ministerial career as a guitar player and worship leader. Not only did I have opportunities to play various conferences and concerts and help in recording original worship songs, but in March of 2019, I was able to travel with the worship team to Mexico City for a large outreach event featuring some big names in the Christian music industr y. I was humbled by the opportunity to minister at such a large event and genuinely moved as thousands of people came down to the stage to ask Jesus to be their Lord and Savior, while thousands of Bibles were passed out to new believers during the altar call. This was what we in worship ministry lived for—a chance to impact people through praise and worship music. Yet something gnawed at my heart as I watched the outreach service end and all those people made their way out of the stadium and back to their homes, never to be seen by us again. Was this all just a flash in the pan? Where will those people go to church tomorrow?

What Am I Protesting?

That same month, the Chesterton Society started posting a Chesterton Academy school trip to Rome on Instagram, asking for prayers to be prayed by all the students who were there in Rome visiting some of the most ancient and sacred places of our Christian faith. The thought of this was difficult for me to grasp. People I didn’t even know, praying for me? No secret handshakes? No “if you’re Catholic, we will pray”? No “us vs. them,” but unity—real Christian unity—something I had never felt before in my hyper-localized, competitive turf-wars church reality. I remember responding with a simple request for prayer, and just knowing that members of the Society were praying halfway around the globe for me was unbearably humbling.

If being a charismatic Evangelical taught us anything, it’s how we got it right, and how lost Catholics are, living in the shadows of empty cathedrals now serving as museums. Yet here was a very alive, very Catholic group of young people extending their hand in prayer and fellowship while meeting with other energetic, Christ-filled Catholics in Rome (how many of them are there?!), surrounded by unimaginably beautiful art and historic places. For the first time ever, I felt a real connection to those places as a Christian. Also for the first time, I asked myself, “If I am a Protestant, then what, exactly, am I protesting?” This was the same Jesus that we followed, right? As a Christian, isn’t this part of my history? In those moments, Christendom became real and universal and big—but somehow closer than ever before, and suddenly, everywhere.

Throughout the rest of 2019, I surveyed the Catholic Church, but from a distance. I would research Catholic vs. Protestant, finding as many documentaries as I could about Church history or the Reformation and looking up Christian apologists I admired for their take on Catholicism. I searched with the hope of them possibly talking me off this dangerous ledge, this secret little hobby of mine of being a member of the Chesterton Society, which I now realized happened to be very Catholic—and me suddenly ready to defend their being Catholic. The gap between how we “did church” versus what I was discovering about how Catholics lived the faith continued to grow, and I started questioning more and more why we believed what we did as Protestants.

The Show Must Go On

Then, like a crash of frying pans, a global pandemic hit in March of 2020. Everything screeched to a halt, including our normal worship and music routine. During the chaos of the shutdown, I was called upon quite often from various contacts to help fill in with playing guitar and singing while churches scrambled, deciding who was more at risk or what services would be kept and which would go fully online. Streaming and production quality were now of utmost importance. We had a show to do, after all.

Around that time, the Chesterton Society sent out an update, saying they were going to start streaming the Mass on their YouTube channel from a local parish in Minnesota, as all in-person gatherings were prohibited across the country. Intrigued, I tuned in to watch one day, and what I saw changed my life.

No studio-quality sound, no multi-camera shots and production lighting. It looked like someone was holding up a phone, and live-streaming the event. I had never even seen a Mass before, but it was most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The reverence and care taken, especially while preparing Communion, the beauty of what was unfolding, is hard to put into words even now. I just remember tears falling down my face, wondering what I had witnessed. Was that what actually happened at a Mass?

Suddenly, attending church became important. Being there became important. I wanted to be there! The preaching (I didn’t even know it was called a homily) cut through me because of its absolute hopefulness. I immediately rewatched the whole thing with my wife Valiree, saying, “You need to watch this.” Her reaction was the same as mine: tears filled her eyes.

We couldn’t get enough. Ever y opportunity we had and ever y posting on the Chesterton YouTube channel, we watched—Daily Mass, choir concerts, Easter Vigil, everything. One morning, I remember watching Mass early, and my son, then 5 years old, came down and started watching it with me. He asked why there was a cross, and why Jesus was on it. It broke my heart! We had a wonderful moment talking through the meaning of the sacrifice made for us on the cross. If anyone needs an example of why having a crucifix in church is important, this is it.

What Did We Just See?

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed and surprised at the reaction we had to everything we were seeing, I did what any responsible Protestant would do: I immediately purchased a copy of the Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul’s Are We Together?: A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism. There must have been something I was missing, something that would show me why we weren’t all Catholics, and I was looking to Sproul to help identify it. This project did not have the desired effect. I would read passages from that book out loud to Valiree and ask her, “Do you agree with that?” “Of course I do,” would mostly be her response, to which I would emphatically say, “That’s Catholic!” It seemed like almost everything we learned through reading our Bibles and growing up in the Assemblies of God was in line with what I was reading about Catholicism.
We researched as a family and continued to watch Mass online. While I continued to lead worship and play guitar at our church every Sunday, something didn’t seem right anymore. Something had changed, and it scared me to death.

I Can’t Be a Catholic!

Still skeptical, I thought maybe there was something in the Catholic Catechism that would be my “Gotcha!” moment to dispel these beliefs. What a mistake that was! Not only was I agreeing with Catholicism as outlined in the Catechism, I found myself mentally defending their beliefs when I compared it with things I would hear or read regarding things like the “whore of Babylon” or a lack of a “personal relationship” with Jesus. I knew it wasn’t true, because I was actually reading what Catholics believe. I also knew what I had read in the Bible, and those two things lined up!

As I continued to research, enthusiastically sharing everything I was learning with my wife, I kept thinking over and over, “But we can’t be Catholic.” Who has ever heard of such a thing—Pentecostal, spirit-filled believers leaving the religion of their family and giving up all they’ve ever known? I remembered Chesterton and The Apostle of Common Sense show I used to watch. What channel was it? Some religious one with a nun. Maybe I can get my fill of Catholic teaching on the side, tuning in occasionally to fill in some of the gaps I was feeling with our own church.

Then, after work one day, in the late spring of 2020, I tuned in to EWTN on satellite radio, just to see if the content was similar to that of the Chesterton show I used to watch. As if on cue, I joined in the middle of a program called The Journey Home. “Wait,” I thought, “Did they just mention they were former Protestants who converted to Catholicism?!” I wish now I could remember who it was that was being interviewed, but I was floored. These people do exist! Converts from Protestantism do exist! It became a normal dinnertime listen on Monday nights for months as my wife and I talked through, and related to, the interviews of others who had “crossed over the Tiber.”

We continued opening the door a little more. Over the summer, we would watch Mass as much as we could online, and like any good virtual parishioner, signed up for Catholic content providers like FORMED and others, using our “virtual parish” to sign up. All the kids wanted was to be part of it. They begged us to be baptized and to receive real Communion like they saw others doing during online Mass. They hungered for it, and I envied them. What was once the simplest and most forgotten part of my church experience had now become the one thing they wanted most at church.

I Will Be Catholic No Matter What!

It was then we realized that to be a Catholic was to be fully Christian. How could we not do this? We needed to do something about it. I tried to recall what that Catholic parish it was that we used to drive by when I was a kid, when we’d joke about all the Catholics trying to hurry to get to Mass, causing a traffic jam at the stop sign. We looked it up online, and I found the priest’s email address. If anything, the process of discovering Catholicism and becoming increasingly excited about finding this “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45–46) does make you bold—bold enough to knock on every door you can find.

During this time of COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2020, churches were just starting to open back up with extremely limited reservations-only style online ticketing, with temperature checks at the door. Though the website said it was restricting in-person attendance to current parishioners only, we didn’t care. We had to see a Catholic Mass in person, and I would register us as quickly as slots became available for that week so we would not miss out. I emailed the priests (all of them on the contact list; I didn’t know the differences or why there was more than one at this point), explained our situation a bit, and asked for a meeting.

What we heard back was not entirely encouraging: “Please call the office to schedule a meeting.” Upon calling, the main priest had availability a week or so later, so we put that on the calendar. In the meantime, we kept attending in person as much as possible, and we began observing all that was around us: why do they kneel? When do they kneel? Googling “What to do at your first Catholic Mass,” we mostly sat toward the back to not look too out of place.

When the time came for our first meeting with the priest, we shared our story…and he hesitated. He said, “I’ve heard of people like you, but I’ve never actually met one. Why would you want to be a Catholic now? Are you sure you want to do this? You’ll create absolute chaos in your family!” I responded quickly, “Because it’s the truth!” I’m sure my face said, “Duh!” Unfortunately, this was one of many encounters on our journey over the years with priests that didn’t quite know how to handle us or the situation we found ourselves in. We were somewhat demoralized, but this was counterbalanced by a wonderful RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) instructor who had heard about us and would sneak us into Mass whether we had a reservation or not. We wanted it so badly, and she knew it. She was more than happy to go out of her way for the four of us.

After a few months of RCIA and absorbing everything we could, Valiree and I were confirmed in the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday (the Sunday following Easter), April 11, 2021. My kids, eager to move past just receiving a blessing in the Communion line to fully receiving the Eucharist themselves, asked us both with excitement and wonder after we received our first Holy Communion, “What was it like?” “Home,” I said. It tasted like I’d come home.

Our kids finished up RCIC (Rite of Christian Initiation for Children) while Valiree and I both served in the RCIA class helping other converts learn about the Church. We also began volunteering in various other ministries at our parish, helping out wherever we could. Then, on Easter Vigil in 2022, my son and daughter were both baptized, confirmed, and received their first Holy Communion, something they both were anxiously awaiting.

His Ways Are Higher

For many, the pandemic brought out the worst in people. But even years before, something much darker was making its way through charismatic Protestant circles. Genuine men and women of God were starting to turn their backs on their faith in large numbers as praise and worship artists, Christian authors, and popular pastors we grew up with and learned Christianity from in the 90s were suddenly renouncing their faith. This startling trend was made worse by the church shutdowns of 2020, and sadly, to this day I still hear of those I served with who haven’t returned since, their disenchantment with religion reaching a boiling point.

Yet here we were, somehow able to find the deeper truth instead of abandoning it. It has been incredible to reflect on the people and the connections God has sent us along this journey, and how everything unfolded over the last few years. There were challenges, and I had my apprehensions, wondering to myself many times, “How could this be?” But here we were.

During our first RCIA classes in the midst of the pandemic, only a few of us met together, masked up and six feet apart. After one session, I went up to our instructor (who knew our background at that point) and asked him fervently, and maybe even with a little bit of fear, “Why me? Why my family? Why now?” He then looked me in the eyes, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Because you listened.”

Even now, as I reflect on the circumstances that led to our conversion, I am in awe at the hand of God gently guiding me, nudging me, and showing me a closeness to Him and His Son that, even growing up in a very charismatic tradition, I had never felt before. For us, it wasn’t about leaving anything. It was about entering into the fullness of Christianity—the same Christianity that was handed down to me from my parents and grandparents, just made complete in the Catholic Church.

The post Chesterton, COVID, and the Catholic Church appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

*****

I wrote this essay over a decade ago when I was in a very different phase of life. I’d given up my position as the pastor of a lovely little church on Cape Cod and relocated with my wife and three children to St. Louis. Here, we were received into the Church, and I began the process of being ordained to the priesthood. Even then, I was still feeling my way into the Catholic Church. At the time this essay was published at the website Called To Communion, it garnered a number of responses, one of which was the question of how I might feel in the future about the words I had written. Would I still feel happy to be Catholic?

I have to say, I feel the exact same today. I still find myself, even if I’m older and wearier in some ways, standing in wonder and awe before Christ and his Church. If anything, the enchantment has only increased. I’ve fallen even more in love with Christ. The only explanation for this spiritual growth is that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has pried open a door in my heart. I peer through and the world beyond is timeless and wide, filled with the glory of God. In some way, even though I’m still lingering somewhere between, as it were, the porch and the altar; and even though none of us will be home until we finally meet God face to face, at the Mass, embraced by the communion of saints, I am somehow, nevertheless, home.

“Hear yet my paradox: Love, when all is given, To see Thee I must see Thee, to love, love;
I must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven. If I shall overtake Thee at last above.
You have your wish; enter these walls, one said: He is with you in the breaking of the bread.”

– From The Half-Way House by Gerard Manley Hopkins

At Yale, there used to be an auxiliary library buried underneath the green in front of the Sterling Memorial Library. One fine fall day, I happened to find myself not out amongst the foliage but rather tucked away below the sunshine and the sod, reading a book. I suppose it was an odd choice. This was the ugliest space I know of on an otherwise beautiful campus. So ugly, in fact, that it was targeted for a remodel and is now gone. But there I was, and perhaps even more odd, I, a good Anglican- priest-in-training, was reading Cardinal Newman. Not the good parts that we Anglicans agreed with; the parts about the Oxford movement and the Church Fathers. No, I was reading the Apologia; the story of his conversion to the Catholic Church. I was particularly bothered by one specific bit. I was at the part where Newman makes his point that, fundamentally, there is no difference whatsoever between Arianism and Anglicanism. One is reviled and discredited, the other respectable and vital. But look closer, Newman argued, look underneath. What is there? Rebellion. There, buried beneath the sartorial splendor, the monarchy, the gorgeous liturgy, the incense, the polyphonic chant, and the prestige of Oxford was a group of Christians steeped in the bitter throes of willfulness. Yes, it is wrapped up in the respectable sounding doctrine of the Via Media, but of course, the Via Media is the last refuge of all theological scoundrels. Newman got to me that day, blinking in the fluorescent lights of a now disappeared world. My own world, comfortable as it had been, began to slip away as well.

Or perhaps it really slipped away the day I read the story of another convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is the Hopkins who I am convinced could convert the world through his poetry if only we gave him our attention. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” indeed. But for Hopkins, this only became the case through his own participation in the mystical life of the Church. His poetry before his conversion he came to consider vain; worthy only of being burned (yes, he actually did burn all of his poetry). While still at Oxford, Hopkins saw the beauty of the Catholic Church and became determined to convert. In the intervening period, as all his friends and sometime prospective employers tried to talk him out of it, he wrote in his journal that he felt “like an exile.” I read those words and the Holy Spirit did His work and I understood that until I converted, I too would feel the pain of exile.

It had taken me a good bit of time to work my way to this point. I grew up a free-church Pentecostal of sorts. I never thought of myself as anti-Catholic. But in retrospect, goodness, was I anti-Catholic! The problem with Catholics, everybody knew, was that they worshiped statues. Nothing could be more clear. As a child, I simply assumed this to be the case. There were statues in their churches, none in mine, prima facie idolatry.

Sadly, this manner of thinking is implicit in Protestantism. I suppose it is the blindness that comes with rebellion; like Adam hiding from God in the garden because he had lost sight of the true Good. It isn’t necessarily our place to blame our separated brethren. After all, most didn’t choose to be born Protestants and be indoctrinated in the habit of divisiveness; but it certainly is our place to be patient with them and to pray for them, and when the occasion calls for it, to attest steadfastly to the truth of the teachings of the ancient Church.

I bring all this up because this was the position in which I found myself as a young college student. Dissatisfied with my own brand of the Christian religion which denied it was a religion and my own inherited tradition which denied it was a tradition, I thought briefly about Catholicism. I even went to Mass a few times. It was fascinating. I was attracted to it. I felt something solid about it, comforting, and yet, I knew for a fact that these people worshiped statues! Okay, with age, my critique became a bit more subtle. But in the long run, aren’t all our arguments against the Church just as silly and vain? She outlasts us all. We can kick and scream and throw tantrums; legislate against her, slander her, outlaw her priests and persecute her children: the Church still prevails. She fears nothing. And because of this, she is able to be generous and patient.

The greatest novel of all time (no one argue with me on this) is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. In it, Waugh describes a family who keep their country seat at Brideshead in the ancestral home. The family itself is a mixed lot—a father living abroad in sin, a domineering mother, a son who is a flamboyant dandy, a worldly daughter, and an overly-childlike daughter. Waugh describes the slow decline of Brideshead as the family disintegrates and scatters. This dissipation works itself out universally in the advent of the Great War, which finally swallows up all of England and turns Brideshead into quarters for Army command. In the end, though, we are left with a scene in the house’s private chapel, where the altar lamp is still lit and a lone priest says Mass for an old woman. I am a lot like that family. Many of us probably are.

You see, conversion is a gift. Mother Mary holds her Son for us, patiently suffering at the foot of the Cross. We can ignore her, go our own way, rebel—it doesn’t matter. Hanging on the Cross, Christ says to each and every one of us, “Behold your Mother.” She is here still. Waiting. We may be elsewhere, doing God knows what, but above the altar the candle still flickers. This is the light by which, in time, we find our way home.

As a young Pentecostal, I wasn’t yet ready for the Church, but She is patient. And so my story continues.

I became an Anglican. This was a place that seemed to have it all: dignity, beauty, wonderful music, good order, tradition, and of course, they didn’t worship statues. I don’t like the idea of tearing into the Anglican tradition as far as specifics go, so let’s be content with Newman’s fundamental insight. As nice as my sojourn in Anglicanism was, I began to feel a lack. It was like the Nothingness from Never-Ending Story (the scariest movie of all time, don’t fight me on this). It’s hard to explain; I just know that after a while my heart wasn’t in it. I was still wrestling every single, little belief I held. There was never any rest.

What was worse, having been taught that a good follower of Jesus always goes to His Holy Word for life-giving truth, I could not help but notice that the word of God speaks of something called “The Body of Christ.” This Body is identifiable; it consists of those who have been united with Christ through Baptism and have received the Holy Spirit for purposes of holiness and witness. It is ordered by the governance of Bishops, thus allowing orthodoxy to flourish and the ancient Gospel truth to be defended; as Paul advises Timothy, the Church is the “pillar and foundation of the faith.” (1Tim 3:15 NIV) The Body of Christ is the Church, visibly united, gathered around the crucified and risen Lord, and fed by Him in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This is the way in which Christ is present to His people. He is, of course, not confined to simply being present in the Communion feast but this is His chosen way, a marked moment, if you will, by which all other moments are defined. If Christ is potentially present in this world in any place, it is because He is first present in the Eucharist. This is why He says “unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you have no life in you.” He is our sustenance. He is our all. So, as Church, we are called to visibly gather around the Lord’s altar to give thanks and to be fed. This is not just a mysterious, ancient rite. It is the redemption of the world.

You can see the problem here, right? I was on the outside looking in.

In a real sense the Church has become fractured. We no longer gather around the table as the One Body. To me, this means much more than an organizational difficulty. This means that we have presented to the world a scandal. We have divided up the Body of Christ. We have protested against each other, separated ourselves, held our doing God knows own judgment up against that of the Spirit-inspired Church. A close reader of the Bible will come to the conclusion that what, but above Christ and his Church, the Head and the the altar the candle Body, are inseparable. And yet, in our practice, we pretend that this is not the case.

It is a big deal, a really big deal, for Christians to hold themselves apart from visible communion. We might all protest from our various theological kingdoms that we aren’t the ones who have gotten it wrong. We are not to blame. Perhaps not. Or perhaps all of us in every corner of Christendom are to blame. No one gets off easy with this one.

Ultimately, my goal is not to point the finger at others but to examine my own conscience. Had I held myself apart from visible communion with the Catholic Church because I thought I knew better? The answer is, yes, I had. My journey towards the Catholic faith has not, at its core, been a journey of personal enlightenment or one in which I have held up the Church to my own opinions and finally found it acceptable. This would be to make the Church too small, and as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the Church is ever so much larger on the inside than it seems from the outside. Mine has been a journey towards faith. I have learned to believe first so that I might later begin to understand, rather than understand so that I might then believe. My intellect simply isn’t up to the challenge that the latter option presents. I trust that when Jesus breathed His Holy Spirit into His disciples He was anointing His Church to be, among other things, the guardian of the sacred and simple truth of the Gospel.

I have learned to rest in the truth that the Church teaches. I do not make my own salvation through knowledge or emotional experiences, through following this teacher or that. Whether I realize it or not, God is doing a great work in me. It was begun at the Cross, is sustained by the Holy Spirit, and will be completed at the final judgment.

I borrow this analogy from the English poet and convert John Dryden, but it fits me. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes about an encounter that Aeneas has in the forest outside of Carthage. He has wandered there after losing many of his men at sea during a storm. In the forest, a woman approaches him, falls into conversation with him, and comforts him in the midst of his troubles. It is only after she turns and walks away that he recognizes her. It is his mother. He recognizes her by the way that she walks.

I am sure that I could put up a good fight on all of the various theological and biblical reasons why I believe in the Catholic Church, but I would really prefer to say simply that the visible, undivided Church, the Church that Jesus prayed for in His last moments with His disciples, the Church that is the Mother of us all not on her own merits but because she holds Christ within her womb; this I have recognized by the way that she walks.

Even though I’m making a bit of an attempt, this is not the kind of thing that one explains between the soup and dessert course while at dinner. At least this is what Newman once said when asked “why become Catholic?” It is a deeply personal and intimate spiritual journey. It is the search for one’s mother. In this case, she has been here all along.

I can say this—in turning to the Catholic Church I do not turn to something foreign and alien to Anglicans or Evangelicals. I turned, rather, to the Catholic Church in order to become more fully what I already was. I have been raised to expect joyfully the activity of the Holy Spirit in my life; I expect Him all the more. I have come to understand the beauty of the English liturgy, the patterns that are formed through Common Prayer, the primacy of Scripture, and salvation through Christ alone apart from my own efforts; I believe in those all the more.

I have decided to give what I am to God, which means to take my place in his Body here on earth. My hope in Christ is that my gift given and carried along by the work of the Cross will be acceptable and pleasing to God, and that the promise to those who die to the old life is that they will have new life more abundantly.

I would like to quote from the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, also a convert to the Church, who spoke these words to his parishioners. I too spoke these words to my parishioners during a tearful farewell. I wish I had written them, but I will make these words mine: “To those of you with whom I have traveled in the past, know that we travel together still. In the mystery of Christ and His Church nothing is lost, and the broken will be mended. If, as I am persuaded, my communion with Christ’s Church is now the fuller, then it follows that my unity with all who are in Christ is now the stronger. We travel together still.”

This wouldn’t be a conversion narrative if I didn’t make note of the fact that on October 16th, 2011, my wife and I publicly professed our faith to be that of the Catholic Church and were given the sacrament of confirmation by the Most Rev. Robert Carlson, Archbishop of St. Louis. This was the best day of our lives .

*****

An earlier version of this story first appeared on the website Called to Communion on October 26, 2011. Reprinted with permission. 

The post Into the Half-Way House: The Story of an Episcopal Priest appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

As the opening line of the Rule of St. Benedict states, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” I’m writing this on the Memorial of St. Benedict, a fitting time to reflect and be thankful. So get ready for “lift-off” as my journey home into the fullness of the faith and service in the Catholic Church takes flight.

The Early Years

I was born in 1957, at the dawn of the “space-age,” when the Russian satellite Sputnik set the Space Race in motion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Just south of Seattle, WA, where my brother, sister, and I were born, my father was employed as a Boeing engineer working in Space and Defense. This meant he worked on many projects related to Cold War issues and directly on the Saturn V main stage rocket, which eventually sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon and safely home. Because of my father’s work, we moved wherever Boeing sent us — from Seattle to Huntsville, back to Seattle, down to Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, and then back to Seattle for good. My childhood was shaped by NASA and Boeing, interest in beauty and the arts, and the great outdoors. This background would help shape an unexpected pilgrimage into a strange, yet beautiful, world of grace, love, and wonder for me as an ex-Evangelical Protestant pastor, for my wife Diane, and our two teenage girls.

My memories of church life during my early childhood, mostly at a small Missouri Synod Lutheran Church in Huntsville, AL, are vague but important memories of loving people who treated both my siblings and my mother with kindness. (My father rarely attended.) My mother did a good job giving us a knowledge of God’s existence and basic Christian morality formed from the Ten Commandments. Flannel graphics were a favorite of mine, especially before Sunday school classes began depicting rocket launches and safe re-entry instead of religious principles. One significant event from this time occurred on a Sunday after church, as I was watching a weekly program on a Christian television station. I remember this episode had to do with a family tragedy, and as I watched the program, the thought ran through my mind that, as an adult, I would like to be helping families with hardships and challenges. This experience still guides me.

As I grew older and began high school, my family’s involvement in church waned. I became enthralled with the NFL and Sunday football. In short, we soon became “Christmas and Easter Christians” and neglected church life in general. If I had to describe where I was in my spiritual life at that time, I would say that I was a believer in God but didn’t see how God could be interested in my life. I did believe Jesus was the Son of God, but I had no concept of what that meant or why it mattered. As for the Holy Spirit, somehow, He was part of this, but how, I had no clue. In fact, my life after high school was rather confused and unguided. I had no idea where I was going or how to formulate a plan to get anywhere. Boeing and engineering didn’t interest me; working at Boeing in any capacity didn’t interest me; a career in business didn’t interest me either.

For the first time in my life, I began to search for a purpose, a deeper meaning in life, and goals to pursue. College sounded like it could help provide an answer to these questions, so I effectively rolled the dice and wound up at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. I had no idea what I was going to study, but I was drawn to psychology and sociology.

Ora et Labora — Prayer and Work

In 1978, I arrived at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, just south of the Canadian border and north of Seattle, in the afterglow of the “Jesus Movement” of the late 60s and early 70s. I quickly became involved in campus ministry, previously unaware that such a thing even existed on college campuses. In the dormitories were numerous posters recruiting students to any number of secular and religious group meetings. One of those was for Campus Crusade for Christ, which I visited and became involved in for a short time with a friend I met on the crew team. Here I was introduced to the Four Spiritual Laws, and even helped my teammate lead people to Christ. One day, this same friend asked if I had ever visited a monastery. I had not, so he invited me to visit a Benedictine Abbey, just across the border in Mission, British Columbia, Canada, named Westminster Abbey. Here, I was introduced to a new world of beauty, peace, and prayer which would begin my long journey deeper into Jesus’ heart and eventually into the Catholic Church.

The beauty of the monastery was stunning. Overlooking the Fraser River, with a north side view of Mt. Baker in Washington State, bald eagles flying overhead, and big timber all around, the impact of this first visit still remains with me many years later.

In fact, I have visited this monastery many times over the years and have brought groups up for retreats and study. Yet it was the beauty and artistry of one of the monks’ works displayed in the chapel and around the monastery that focused my attention on God’s creativity through human genius. The monk’s name was Father Dunstan Massey, OSB, and he was quite well known as an artist around the Fraser River Valley. He specialized in concrete reliefs and frescos, and his artistry speaks to me of God’s wonder. Indeed, his work was his prayer.

Father Dunstan, the grandeur of creation, and other encounters with God through beauty became a gentle path deeper into His love and compassion, which would prove to be of immense consolation in the storms of life to come. The Benedictine Rule would become a huge influence on my life. St. Benedict’s 12 Steps of Humility and their impact on the shaping of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous became patterns within the development of my ministry over the years. The Benedictine motto, “Ora et Labora” (prayer and work), is a simple and profound way to live and learn a life of prayer and devotion “one day at a time.”

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and learned that, while I had become a good listener and loved to minister on the streets, in jails, and occasionally on campus, this was not the most employable degree. As a result, I spent a year doing carpentry with a friend. After this time, I was invited to intern with an Assemblies of God campus ministry (Chi Alpha) with the hope of being equipped enough to pioneer a campus group on a college campus that had a supporting church nearby desiring a new chapter. We studied from well-known works of Protestant Evangelical theologians, occasionally mixed with an Anglican and, very rarely, a Catholic spiritual perspective. We conducted street dramas, traveled to different parts of the western United States to help other campus ministries, led small groups, raised our own funds, and generally became confident that we could pioneer a campus group anywhere we were called. Soon, I would indeed be called upon to begin a new campus ministry, but I needed a partner to go on this adventure with me. Diane would become that partner.

Diane and I met when we were both college students. I didn’t know her well in those years, but during this year of internship, our relationship began to flower. I admired her faith in Jesus, her prayer life, and her willingness to step out of her comfort zone in teaching, street ministry/drama, and planning outreach. Of course, I also thought she was cute.

At the end of our internship year, we were teamed up to start a campus group in Kearney, Nebraska at what was then known as Kearney State College. We set out on a cross-country adventure to another culture amidst the cornfields and hog farms of south-central Nebraska, right along the Platte River. Here, our relationship would be tried in the difficult circumstances of a new culture, an unfamiliar land with intense winters and springs, and of a longing for the big timber, mountains, and flowing water of the Pacific Northwest. Despite the difficulties, our two years spent in Nebraska were fruitful. The campus ministry grew, and Diane and I grew closer. We were engaged in Kearney. Then we said good-bye to our Nebraska friends and headed back to the Evergreen State to start our new life as a married couple.

During our time in Nebraska, we had become acquainted with many campus pastors from different denominations, all of whom were very helpful to us. What Diane and I quickly discovered, however, was that our internship in campus ministry fell short in equipping us to converse with them in matters of church history, theology, and much of pastoral ministry. As a result, I desired to go to seminary and learn about these different subjects. We needed to earn money for that to happen, though, so off we went to Alaska and Yukon to drive tour buses in the Great White North for two seasons before I took the plunge into seminary.

I began my studies at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, an interdenominational seminary begun by two Anglican Professors from England — J.I. Packer and James Houston. This was a marvelous place to learn (and I must say that many themes introduced to us here eventually found their fulfillment in the Catholic Church). Over a four-year period, we learned about Church History, Christian Spirituality, Systematic Theology, Preaching, Pastoral Care, Greek, Hebrew, and most important to our journey, the Early Church Fathers and beauty. The Early Church Fathers introduced to us an intriguing world of commitment to the Eucharist, prayer, and tradition, aspects of the Church we would later come to understand in a truly Catholic perspective instead of a curious, but still Protestant, worldview. All this we received as God’s gifts in our lives. It was a wonderful time of reception — a time of filling.

Memento Mori — Remember that You Will Die

As I worked toward the completion of my Master’s Degree in Theological Studies, I concentrated on Pastoral Care and Family Ministries. At this time, I was working in an addiction recovery center for adults and teens, helping families deal with recovery issues and treatment plans. Diane was working at a local nursing home and caring for a neglected population of elderly people. After graduation from seminary, I was eventually hired as an associate pastor with a large, local Assemblies of God church which functioned more like an Evangelical community church. This was the same church that sponsored the college campus group where Diane and I had interned. It was quite familiar to us and was an honor to serve on staff. My duties included running counseling services and recovery groups, developing internships in pastoral care, expanding our local food pantry into a food bank, and partnering with community services in the county to help families. I enjoyed this work and felt called to care for people in distress. However, during the 16 years I worked at the church, there were three experiences, all having to do with personal trauma and loss, which drew us into a search for consolation and care which only the Catholic Church was able to provide.

The first of these experiences was the discovery of our infertility as a couple. Anyone who has been part of this journey knows what a loss and burden it can be for a couple totally open to children and wanting to raise a family. In this struggle, we found there really was nowhere we could turn to find comfort or solace. We knew of no groups, no people to talk with, and no support. We were alone, and our church had no resources to help us. Diane and I spent five years praying for God’s direction amid this suffering. Were we to have children? Should we utilize artificial means to conceive? Is adoption for us? Where and how do we proceed with adoption? How are children to be part of our lives? These questions drove us deeper into prayer and into intense listening for God’s guidance.

The Lord did indeed guide us and grant us comfort during these difficult years. We came to the firm conviction that the Lord wanted us to pursue adoption overseas in China. We were in the early wave of North Americans adopting Chinese orphans. Due to the one-child policy instituted by the Communist government, many “unwanted” female babies were either aborted, victims of infanticide, or sent to crowded orphanages where they were cared for as well as they could be by the staff. Describing the adventures of this adoption experience would require an additional story; suffice it to say we traveled to China without a child and two weeks later came back with our eight-month-old daughter, Amy. Two years later, we would head to Vladivostok, Russia, to adopt our youngest daughter, Anna, also eight months old. As we settled into life as a new family of four, we were surprised that the pain of infertility was overwhelmed by the joy of adopting our children. Every family is a miracle; ours is no exception.

As the years passed, we nurtured our family and our ministry, building a community of care and outreach in the church. In time, the mission of the church became obscured, and growing a church in numbers became the top priority. In the midst of this change, the second of three losses occurred in our lives — the sudden death of my mother due to cancer. She was the hub of the family, and her death brought about profound changes in my extended family. This was a time of confusion and deep grief. Coupled with the changes in the church, we found ourselves longing once again for solace and community, but found none. We were searching intently for a deeper meaning and purpose of the people of God and church worship.

This search steered me into a doctoral program in urban leadership and spiritual formation at Bakke Graduate University (based in Seattle at the time, now based in Dallas). In this program, we learned more about the spirituality and leadership of serving the needs of the poor in urban settings, of creating communities of care and outreach, and of diving into the mystery and majesty of human interaction in the act of ministering care in God’s compassion. I would often pray in the St. Ignatius chapel at Seattle University and found this space compelling, drawing me toward beauty and prayer. Here, I discovered many more contemporary Catholic authors and people who became heroes to me. Diane and I were also drawn to Celtic Catholic spirituality and the “thin places” of the world, those places where heaven and earth are thinly veiled to one another. We had no idea that this would be the perfect description of the Catholic Mass, but the journey was beginning to take on new dimensions for us. It was also here that I came across a wonderful quote from G.K. Chesterton in his masterpiece, Orthodoxy, giving us insight to the Christian life.

“Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.… Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. p. 239.)

In 2007, I graduated with a Doctor of Ministry in Transformation Leadership and Spiritual Formation and soon after discerned that my time at the Assemblies of God church was coming to an end. Through a series of many staff changes and circumstances, Diane and I knew that our hearts were being pulled somewhere else, though where that would be, we did not know. We knew our view of the Communion service was changing, that the Lord was somehow present in ways we couldn’t articulate.

Our view of Mary was changing also. We knew that Protestants didn’t understand her or her role in salvation history. They could not help us answer the question of what her role was, and what our relationship with her ought to be. We knew it had to be more than a casual appreciation for her at Christmas.

One final issue that we could not resolve was the issue of authority. With so many opinions about Holy Scripture, what or whom were we to trust, and why should we trust them?

I resigned my position, which for a career pastor can be devastating, with the loss of income, an uncertain future, the disappearance of community and friends, and vanishing support networks. This was the third of the losses that would send us into a “desert wandering” for five years, until one Christmas Eve when our world was turned upside down.

My family loves Christmas. As part of our Christmas tradition, we would attend a Christmas Eve service somewhere in the county. Diane thought we needed a new experience of Christmas Eve as a family, so in her wisdom and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, she suggested we attend Children’s Mass at Sacred Heart Parish, just up the hill from the church where I used to be employed. This sounded like a good idea to me, since I had been in the parish church occasionally to pray and look at the beauty of the sanctuary, statues, and candles. So, off we went to Children’s Mass. We had no idea what to expect, but knew the kids would be cute, Christmas carols would be sung, and hopefully English (and very little Latin) would be spoken. We were right! The kids were cute, Christmas carols that we knew were sung, everything in the church was decorated beautifully, and very little Latin was used. We were stunned!

We left that Mass wondering what the Lord was doing. While there, my eyes became fixed on the crucifix in the front of the church. It seemed that Jesus was speaking directly to me, saying that He knew the pains and sorrows of humanity, and more than that, the pains and sorrows my family and I had endured. He was saying that here, in the Mass, in the Catholic Church, our search for deeper meaning and purpose would find its answers. Here, Mary would be our Blessed Mother. Here, living water would finally quench our thirst.

We stayed away from the church, and from Mass, for two weeks trying to sort it out. We were a bit numb, but Diane and I were convinced that God was ushering us into full communion with the Catholic Church. We asked the girls if they desired to attend with us, and even if they desired to explore the possibility of becoming Catholic; they were game to try. So that we could become better prepared for this further adventure, we felt the need to find out more about the Church, if we could. We went to our local Barnes & Noble and found a book which became incredibly helpful to us, Catholicism for Dummies. We still refer to this book from time to time! Eventually, we were introduced to the parish priest. We invited him over to our house to pepper him with questions, attended RCIA, and prepared to enter the Church at the Easter Vigil in 2012.

Entering into full communion with the Church has been an oasis for us. Our journey has not been so much a wrestling with doctrine and tradition as it has been discovering where consolation, beauty, and joy manifest Jesus’ love on earth in the most deeply personal and authentic way. We have been overwhelmed by Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist, the love of our Triune God and our Blessed Mother, and the wonder and beauty of the Church unfolding before us.

Why enter the Church in this time of trial and scandal? Perhaps it was precisely because of these wounds that the Lord led us here, to help tend to a Church that needs renewal, strength, and care.

A few years after our entrance into the Church, I started inquiring into the Diaconate upon the encouragement of our parish staff, not knowing what that entailed. It was a whole new world of potential pastoral involvement, and I wasn’t quite sure if I was up to the challenge. I told Diane, my wife, that unless someone approached me at coffee and donuts after Mass, I would forgo the honor. As I sat enjoying my donut and coffee after Mass, our parish priest made a beeline to me, telling me I needed to apply. I felt this was the Lord’s prompting! So I applied, was interviewed, along with Diane, and entered the formation process, which was quite challenging on every level.

In the second year of formation, we were graced with attending a Coming Home Network retreat at the Archbishop Brunett Retreat Center in Federal Way, WA, which was our home for formation throughout the years. The retreat was wonderful and life-giving, thanks to Jim Anderson, Ken Hensley, and Monsignor Steenson! On December 19, 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I was ordained a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church. It had been quite a journey!

In the years since my ordination, I have been impressed with the immense prayerfulness of God’s people and gained a growing love of the saints, especially St. Joseph and our Blessed Mother. I am filled with wonder as I serve the Mass and am thankful for the Divine Office, praying for the profound needs of the Church worldwide. I have also become a regular follower of On the Journey with Matt, Ken, and Kenny on the CHNetwork website, finding their insights helpful in the challenges of the diaconate.

Greater than those challenges, though, the diaconate has brought me fulfillment. Along with preparing and preaching homilies at Mass, it is one of my joys to pray for those who have died and to help those who struggle with loss to find a way home. My current role offers many opportunities to minister to bereaved families and pray for the souls of the dead as they are committed to God’s good earth, one of the corporal acts of mercy. This work brings me back to St. Benedict. One of the disciplines of the Benedictine Rule is to remember that we all will die, Memento Mori. It is not a morbid preoccupation with death, but a daily discipline to remind ourselves that our lives are short and need to be filled by the Holy Spirit with virtue, humility, and fortitude — the love of God.

Blessings to you on your own journey home! Kyrie Eleison!

The post Kyrie Eleison – Lord Have Mercy appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

The post Letters from Home – A Former Anglican Priest Shares appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

By the time I was a teenager, I had no interest in going to church, but during my sophomore year of high school, the Lord used the circumstances of friends and the ups and downs of life to start drawing me to Himself. The high school scene was filled with partying, and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this. As I watched friends wholeheartedly embrace the party scene, I began to feel alone, and on a deeper level, unknown.

I started going to Young Life, an Evangelical ministry to teenagers. At Young Life’s weekly meeting, I met college age leaders, who built relationships with me. I will forever remember walking down the stairs after school one day and hearing someone call out my name. It was a Young Life leader, Kathy, whom I had only met on one previous occasion. I couldn’t believe she remembered my name! There was something different about Kathy — a deep joy and contentment. I wanted that too. I felt like I had what most teens wanted: good grades, a stable home life, and friends. But there was something missing. The more that I went to Young Life and spent time with Kathy, the more I suspected that it had something to do with God. My developing relationship with God was very transactional. I made deals with God constantly — “Help me get through with these tests and this track meet this week, and I won’t ask you for anything ever again” — only to find myself praying the same prayer the next week.

A Personal Relationship

In June of 1991, when I was 16, I went to a week long summer camp with Young Life. I went looking for answers to questions like “How can I know God?” and “How can I have Him in my life?” Every night of that week, a speaker shared who Jesus was. I learned that Jesus was God with skin on, and that he came to earth and experienced everything humans experience — everything that I was experiencing. He knew what it was like to struggle and have difficulty and be betrayed by friends. Feeling so unknown, it was very appealing to think that Jesus knew the real me, understood me, and yet still loved me. I knew that sin separated me from God and understood that Jesus’ death on the cross was what made it possible for me to have a personal relationship with God. I asked Jesus for forgiveness for my sins and for him to live in my heart on June 21, 1991 and “became a Christian” that night. I remember having such peace and knowing that somehow “everything was going to be okay,” because the Lord was close and intimate — in my heart, not distant and uninvolved.

While the Young Life leaders and friends were happy for me and there was much excitement over a new believer, I remember thinking it strange that something so significant as becoming a new creation, crossing over from death to life, and going from condemned to forgiven could occur without any tangible expression of it. I was told that the angels were rejoicing, but it wasn’t tangible. There was no sign or symbol or anything outward, and I found myself wishing there was.

After high school, I went to Miami University, knowing that I needed to find a faith community. I landed in Campus Crusade for Christ, known today as Cru, and its athletic ministry, Athletes in Action, because I ran track and cross country. God provided friends and mentors during those years. I learned how to study the Bible and how to apply it better to my life. There were many “mountaintop experiences” through Cru’s ministry. My faith was strengthened through Bible studies, personal discipleship, retreats, conferences, and Spring Break trips.

While at Miami, I took a History of Architecture class. We examined and learned about structures from primitive times to the modern day in this class. I was surprised by how many churches were included. It was the first time I was exposed to the idea that a space can be used to draw people to God and that our physical surroundings can aid our faith. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I recognize that these were Catholic churches using architecture as a way to express invisible realities. The class left a lasting impression on me.

Up to this point, the only Catholics I knew were ex-Catholics who had left the Church to become Protestant, or Catholics who were not practicing their faith. What I knew of Catholicism was what I had been taught by Protestants. These ideas included that Catholics relied on the traditions of men rather than God’s word, that they added books to the Bible, and that they had to work for their salvation.

After graduating from Miami and then Physical Therapy school, I began attending an Evangelical church in the Dayton area that had an active young adult ministry. I met Steve at this church, and we began dating. When I met him, Steve was a divorced dad with a six year old son. We dated for a year, then got married. I worked full time as a physical therapist until we welcomed a son in 2005, then another son in 2006.

When I was pregnant with our first son, I knew in my depths that motherhood was God’s call on my life. The primitive prayer for my son that I prayed for many years was that God would be “real” to him. I wanted God to be part of my boys’ everyday life and tangible to them, not distant and detached. I realize now that as I prayed that for my sons, this was also a prayer for myself. When I discovered “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), this became my prayer for my sons. It perfectly expressed what I meant for God to be “real” to them. Little did I know how much this verse would come to mean to me, too.

An Unwelcome Development

Around 2013, it felt like the ground shifted beneath me. By that, I mean that the things that had brought me joy and fulfillment, such as studying the Bible, serving in church, and learning about God, became flat and stagnant. I was unmotivated to do anything religious. I couldn’t even make myself do those things.

This was deeply disturbing for me. From out of nowhere, I felt like I was losing my faith. What was once so effortless now felt impossible. I questioned myself constantly: Did I not believe in God any more? Why was everything so flat, so dark? Why did I feel dead inside? Was this a denominational difference? Was I not evangelical any more? What had I done wrong? What was wrong with me? Why was I in a relationship with a God who felt so absent to me? What was the point of it? What was supposed to sustain faith? As I read back through my journal from this time, I am struck by my uncertainty about my standing with God. As a Protestant, there was no means of objective certainty in your standing with God, only your own faith and belief in your standing.

Because this was so foreign, and being a rather reserved person, I did not share with anyone what I was going through. I didn’t know anyone who had gone through such an experience, and I was embarrassed that it was happening to me. Furthermore, I knew what the response would be if I shared my experience at my church. I had sat under the teaching of my pastor long enough to know that I would be told this experience was essentially my fault. I expected to be told that I hadn’t studied enough, hadn’t prayed enough, hadn’t served enough, hadn’t given enough, or hadn’t been in fellowship enough. I know that I’m imperfect, but I had not willfully gone looking for things other than God. I couldn’t bear to be told to try harder. So while everything on the outside of my life looked good, I felt like I was withering and dying on the inside. That combination was unsustainable. I needed the outside and inside of me to match up, and I needed to not have to care about what anyone thought of me.

A New Direction

I had read about the practice of spiritual direction, which initially sounded offensive to me. Why would I let another person direct me in my relationship with God? Wasn’t the Holy Spirit supposed to do that? I was extremely uncertain if this practice was considered acceptable, or if it would expose me to false teachings. But I was so desperate that I searched through the Evangelical Spiritual Director’s website and reached out to one in another state. She agreed to meet with me over Skype. We began meeting in 2015, and I wept through the first several sessions as I recounted my faith history and spiritual difficulties. In spiritual direction, I drank from a deep well of grace. The director taught me about the ideas of consolation and desolation, that my desire for connection with God was from Him, that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that my desire for God pleased Him. She introduced me to other spiritual disciplines like lectio divina, visio divina, silent prayer, the daily examen, and fixed hour prayer (Liturgy of the Hours). God worked through these practices. I was experiencing Him in more ways than just through studying the Bible and in the type of prayer where I did all the talking.

I wondered why I had never heard about Spiritual Disciplines before. A pastor from my church had told me that, in the Reformation, when it came to these spiritual practices, the Protestants “threw the baby out with the bath water.” I didn’t really know what he meant because I had not studied Church history. But the more I learned about these practices, the more I recognized that they had origins in the Catholic Church — but of course, becoming Catholic had not crossed my mind.

As my faith was slowly recovering and evolving with spiritual direction, I was still having a hard time going to church, because it seemed to me that the Evangelical message was that you should believe in God because He will make your life better and you will be happy. On some level that may be true, but the Christian life seemed to be about a lot more than that when I considered the life of Jesus. Our family had gone to the same church for 19 years, and I thought maybe it was time to move on. During “worship,” I watched semi-professional musicians sing and play instruments on a black stage with screens and lights, where anything from a concert to a lecture to a theatrical production could be performed. I then received information from the sermon to apply to my life so that I could improve it.

While I know that God can be present in any environment, I longed for a space that encouraged a sacred sense. I wanted a space that drew my senses to God and aided a holy encounter. I began to look for another church and attended several different denominations. While some things were different, there was a core similarity to them that told me that, eventually, I would be feeling the same way there as I did at my current church. So I resigned myself to feeling stuck. It was becoming so difficult to worship in this environment, I started watching the online service at home on our couch, because I couldn’t bring myself to go in person.

In the summer of 2019, I read an article related to a current event by Leah Libresco Sargent. Her short bio caught my attention when it said she recently converted to Catholicism. I thought, “Why would you do that?” I watched a video of her speaking about her conversion on YouTube, and it struck me that she appeared to only consider Catholicism. No Protestant denomination was proposed as an option. I knew vaguely that the Catholic Church believed itself to be the Church that Jesus founded. I also knew that there was a book called the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Wanting to understand why Catholics believed this, I began to read it. 

I was astounded with the reverence for Christ I found in the Catechism, and how Christ-centered it was. From there, I started reading about Church history and the writings of the early Church Fathers. I discovered that the history I was presented with as a Protestant was incomplete and inaccurate. I found writings, which, while not inspired like Scripture, were by faithful men who left a record of the Church’s practices and beliefs, concerning such things as Baptism and the Eucharist. These were the beliefs and practices of Christians from the beginning, not distortions that sprang up hundreds of years later. As I read, I became convinced that the Catholic Church was the Church that Jesus founded.

Prior to reading about Catholicism, I was not aware of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Ultimately, this is what solidified my desire to become Catholic. Through this sacrament, the invitation to commune with God in objective certainty was offered to me. This was the tangible way to experience Jesus and participate with more than just my head and emotions. How had I not taken Jesus at his word when He said, “For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me” (John 6:55–57)? This was the fulfillment of “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), which I had so desperately longed to experience.

Despite this deep attraction, there were some issues that I needed to understand better. The first was Catholic teaching on justification. As a Protestant, I was taught that a person is saved by grace alone through faith alone in a moment, when you acknowledge your sinfulness and ask Jesus to come into your heart to be your savior. This moment was like flipping a switch. It provided instant justification before God and a declaration of righteousness, but not actual righteousness. The words “salvation” and “justification” were also used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it was evident that they were being used in a different sense. Rather than a singular moment in which justification and salvation were completed, a progressive process in which we are made righteous in a lifelong transformation was described. Stephen Wood’s Grace and Justification: An Evangelical’s Guide to Catholic Beliefs (Family Life Center Publications, 2017) helped me to understand how Catholics see the relationship of grace, justification, and sanctification. Acknowledging that initial justification is by grace, justification actually makes us inwardly righteous. Catholics view sanctification as part of the process of justification and not a distinct period after justification. I began to internalize a salvation that was not just “going to heaven when you die to spend eternity with God,” but one of a moral transformation as I cooperated with God to make me fit for heaven.

Additionally, I wanted to understand the role of Sacred Tradition. As a Protestant, the Bible was my sole rule of faith. I accepted this “truth” as self-evident. Was the Tradition of the Catholic Church man-made and an accretion to the simple gospel that Jesus preached, as I had been taught? Christian Smith’s book How To Go From Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (Cascade Books, 2011) challenged me to consider Tradition in a new way. These ideas from the book included that Jesus did not write books or manuscripts and that Scripture does not say that Jesus instructed his disciples to write down his teachings. “And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18–20). Smith points out that Jesus seemed content to convey his message orally. “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you” (St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:23) and “I would rather not use paper and ink; instead I hope to come to you and talk with you face to face” (2 John 12). St. Paul and St. John reveal that they were teaching people, in person, what they had learned from the Lord. Smith notes that the early Church grew and functioned effectively through relying on authoritative, apostolic oral Tradition. As I considered the information from the book, that there was no way to mass produce the Bible until the 1500s and that most people were illiterate, Tradition began to seem plausible, given the rapid spread of Christianity in those times. Not to mention, how did I even know which ancient writings were Scripture? How did I know that 1 Thessalonians was inspired but the First Epistle of Clement was not? I realized that I was already relying on Catholic Tradition whenever I quoted Scripture, because it was the Catholic Church which defined the canon of the Bible through Church councils.

When I became curious and asked a question of the Catholic Church about her beliefs on an issue, such as the Marian dogmas or praying to the Saints, she had an answer for me in her documents and great minds throughout the centuries. Soon, I saw that history, reason, and theology sided with the Catholic Church’s position.

However, even though the Catholic faith was good in theory and on paper, as a practical matter, I did not know a single Catholic devoted to his faith. I prayed that God would bring a faith-filled Catholic across my path. That fall, Megan, a speech therapist, began working at the same school where I worked. When I learned that she was getting married, I looked up her wedding website and read the story of how she met her fiancé. They had met at something called Eucharistic Adoration. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded very Catholic. I could tell that she and her fiancé were very devout. Soon afterwards, I was able to speak with Megan privately. I shared that I thought God was leading me to the Catholic Church and asked if I could talk to her more about it. She agreed. We spent lunches during the next two school years discussing questions about Catholicism — everything from what a Feast Day is (and that there’s no actual food formally involved) to different Religious Orders. Megan listened and offered her perspective. I was able to catch a glimpse of what practicing the Catholic faith was like. I was so thankful that God had brought a Catholic who loved her faith into my life. Megan will always be a reminder of God’s faithfulness to me.

Coming Home

At this point, I knew that I wanted to be Catholic, but it wasn’t a straightforward path into the Church. My husband, Steve, had observed my faith struggle over the years and supported me in my exploration, but he did not have the same convictions. I was prepared to continue to go to the Evangelical church with Steve in addition to attending Mass on the weekends. Over time, as I shared what I was learning, Steve began to warm up to the Catholic faith and began attending Mass with me. When it came time for RCIA to begin, he agreed to go so that he could learn more and decide for himself. Ultimately, Steve decided that he also wanted to become Catholic. This was one of the most meaningful gifts he has given to me. I will forever be thankful to God for working in Steve in this way. Shifting a faith paradigm is difficult and unexpected in a marriage. I realize that it does not work out this way for all couples and am deeply appreciative of where we are now.

The last issue to be resolved was the matter of Steve’s divorce. For us to become Catholic, he needed a Decree of Nullity for his first “marriage.” He completed the paperwork, and we began RCIA in the fall of 2020.

Waiting for the Tribunal’s decision was difficult. Despite the anxiety of this time period, I appreciated the Church’s willingness to determine the validity of her members’ marriages. I had lost a Protestant friend at the time of our marriage 20 years earlier, because I was marrying a divorced person. I had been told by other Protestants that my husband should not have married again and instead continued to try to reconcile the previous relationship. I had also been denied leadership positions in Christian groups because I was married to a divorced person. Around that time, I read the guidelines regarding remarriage according to our Evangelical church. It seemed that our circumstances did not fall under their conditions for remarriage. The question came to mind: Why had our Protestant pastor married us when we didn’t meet these conditions? I sent an email to ask him and shared my concerns, but received no response. I did not pursue it further because, in some ways, I was afraid to know the answer. Because of these incidents over the years, I had lived with uncertainty about my marriage’s acceptance before God, despite the fact that we loved and were committed to one another and our family.

With this lingering uncertainty in the background of my mind over the years, there was relief in knowing that the Tribunal would look into the facts and conditions of Steve’s first relationship to determine if a valid marriage had occurred. The Easter Vigil came and went, while we watched the rest of our RCIA class enter the Church and we waited for a decision. In May of 2021, we received the letter from the Tribunal declaring Steve’s first marriage null, and we were free to enter the Church. We convalidated our marriage and were confirmed at a Wedding Mass held just for us, which happily coincided around the time of our 20th Wedding Anniversary. I was finally home.

As I write this, it has been almost two years that I have been Catholic. I continue to learn more about Catholic teaching and partake regularly in the sacraments. I never want to leave the Church where Jesus is present to me in a substantial way. And if, by God’s will, I would go through another period of desolation, I now have a rich history of Saints who have gone before me and experienced the same thing. They are a source of inspiration and consolation to draw upon, and they will pray for me! The Lord has provided everything we need in His Church to truly taste and see that He is good.

The post Taste and See: My Journey to the Catholic Church appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

My passion for evangelization and mission had started in the summer of 2003, when as a seventh-grade boy, I traveled from Little Rock, Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee for a week-long mission trip. During that time, I had the opportunity to put on Vacation Bible School for children in inner city housing projects, pray with families in hospital waiting rooms, and feed the homeless. I was even volunteered to preach to two hundred homeless men! I was too nervous to remember any of what I said, but it ended with thunderous applause and the intoxicating feeling that I had been used by God to aid people in their belief that Jesus is able and willing to save them, no matter what they are going through.

I rode the van from Memphis back to Little Rock with my Bible across my lap, praying that God would allow me to serve him like that for the rest of my life. More than anything, I wanted to live a life of evangelical commitment — obeying and proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. Never in my life had I experienced the sense of joy and purpose that I did while serving others in Jesus’ name. I desperately hoped that God would allow me to serve him for the rest of my life and that he would use me to bring others into communion with him.

As a college student, my adolescent dream to be an evangelist and missionary began to find fulfillment. Clayton and I discussed our shared studies in Bible, theology, and missions, as well as our similar experiences in the Andes. To my left in the van, I noticed a pretty blond girl, eyes beaming with excitement as she discussed her recent return from Niger in Africa, where she, too, had been a foreign missionary. In less than a year, that college senior, Lauren, would become my wife. We had a mutual passion for Jesus Christ, the Gospel, the Scriptures, and evangelism, so it was easy to fall in love, believing that God had a purpose and calling for our new life together. Excited to join in His mission, we had no idea that this desire would eventually draw us into the Catholic Church.

My ten-week missionary endeavors did not result in the expected church-plant. The experience was, nonetheless, invaluable for my own formation. My ambition for the salvation of the people there revealed gaps in my theological formation. I had been raised to bring people into the “Church,” yet I had very little theological clarity as to what the “Church” was. Secondly, what are the boundaries of theological belief that determine whether or not a body of believers is actually Christian? Third, I realized that, although my background had laid much emphasis on initial conversion, it had less emphasis on ongoing conversion. I had pastoral intentions, yet very little pastoral training for helping people follow Christ across the long journey of life.

Returning to college, I put myself in the shoes of the people that I had attempted to evangelize. They were frequently proselytized by Evangelicals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they had cultural ties to Catholicism. If I were a villager in Peru, how would I adjudicate the competing claims to orthodoxy between these churches? My senior year, I took a course in American Christianity and was astounded by the proliferation, not only of varying denominations, but even cults in America. Having trained for foreign missions, I was deeply sensitive to religious syncretism. Indeed, even in the Old Testament, the people of God had attempted to blend Judaism with Canaanite practices (God was not impressed, as the prophets told them). I now looked at Christianity within my own cultural context and wondered if, as a foreign missionary, I was not a pot calling the kettle black. How much of Christianity in America was distinctly Christian and how much was just my own cultural values with a bit of Christianity sprinkled on top?

There were two axes that I could measure my own Christian upbringing against: history and universality. How did my understanding of the Bible and my own practice of the Christian life compare to that of Christians in other places and other times? Since Christianity proclaims the incarnation of God in time and space, it locates itself within history as an actual reality, accessible by faith. If the Church is the Body of Christ in time and space, then surely the Church as a recognizable, apostolic body did not vanish following the last chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

From Newman to Early Church Fathers

At the time, I had no inkling that I was looking for “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” (I had not at this time even encountered the ancient Nicene Creed), nor was I aware of the conclusion that I would eventually share with Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman: “And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this” (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,1). I had, however, decided, that if I discovered something that had been consistently true of Christianity in the past, then I would conform myself to that norm, rather than stubbornly clinging to my own familiar expectations. Setting out on a grand adventure for theological truth, my wife, Lauren, and I moved in 2013 from Arkadelphia, Arkansas to Birmingham, Alabama, where I would begin studies at Beeson Divinity School.

Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical Divinity School with a strong emphasis on the Protestant Reformation. I thoroughly enjoyed the academic rigor and ecumenical camaraderie of Beeson. There I was given the opportunity to learn from Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Lutherans and observe how their theological beliefs translated into pastoral praxis. I was introduced to the early Church Fathers, and my mind was blown. I was overwhelmed by the beauty, integrity, and profundity of the theology and devotion of the early Church.

Exposure to Justin Martyr, a second century Christian apologist, demonstrated to me that the Church had a common liturgy, centering on the Eucharist. While still at Ouachita Baptist University, it had struck me that, if the Scriptures were a grand, epic narrative of salvation, then our Sunday gathering should be some type of liturgical reenactment, rather than a mere assortment of songs. The rich symbolism and imagery of Scripture, especially the book of Revelation, had convinced me that the Church’s worship on earth should pattern itself off the heavenly liturgy of the angels and saints. Through Justin Martyr, I discovered that the early Church had such a liturgy, which was rooted in the Scriptures and centered in the Eucharist. Testifying to the Eucharistic liturgy that the Church observed on every “Lord’s Day” (Sunday), he writes:

We call this food Eucharist; and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and regeneration, and is thereby living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nourished, is both the flesh and blood of that incarnated Jesus. (First Apology, 66)

The early Church witnessed to a reality even greater than what I had hoped for. I longed for a liturgy that presented the redemptive work of God in Christ, according to the Scriptures. They offered a liturgy that presented the saving mystery of Christ because it actually participated in that mystery. The Eucharist was no mere symbol, but the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (see John 6:51–58; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17).

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a second century bishop, who was taught by St. Polycarp, who in turn was taught by the Apostle John, built upon what I discovered from St. Justin Martyr. If Justin Martyr introduced me to the early Church’s worship, then Irenaeus introduced me to the apostolic harmony between Church governance, worship, and faith, according to the Scriptures. He writes:

“The true knowledge is the doctrine of the Apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which successions the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere; and the very complete tradition of the Scriptures[.]” (Against Heresies, 4, 33, 8)

I was discovering a church whose witness, worship, and design were inherited from the Apostles, overflowing with beauty, and crowned with the glory of the martyrs. This Church could trace its origin to the Apostles themselves through this line of bishops. The Church that I discovered was intellectual yet devotional, speculative yet dogmatic, diverse yet unified, and organic yet organized.

Let the Little Children Come to Me

I was like a newborn child, filled with wonder and drinking deeply of the early Church’s young, deep faith. In the midst of this joy, my wife and I discovered another joy: her pregnancy with our first son, Ezekiel.

Space does not permit to share the full story of how and why Lauren and I knew before we met that we would have a son named Ezekiel. The fact that we did, and the meaning of the Hebrew prophet’s name — “God is my strength” — suggested to us that God had a special purpose for this boy. We wondered what future adversity called for such a strong name.

The imminent arrival of my firstborn son increased the urgency of the baptism question: should babies be baptized or not? My education in biblical theology taught me not to discount the many biblical depictions of water, Spirit, and rebirth (see Exodus 14, 2 Kings 5, Ezekiel 36:25–26, John 3, Romans 6, Titus 3:5). I began to see and understand the early Church’s belief that baptism is a sacrament, through which God grants us new life, incorporating us into Christ. As Christian parents, it was our joy and duty to present Ezekiel for baptism.

Being convinced that Baptism, the Eucharist, and Holy Orders were sacraments, Lauren and I joined the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). We fell in love with the Anglican patrimony and its liturgical celebrations of the Christian year. During our second year in the Anglican Church, tragedy struck when I received a phone call from my son’s pediatrician. I was informed that my son was being admitted to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital in Birmingham, and that we were needed there as soon as possible. Hospital staff hovered over my thirteen-month-old son, poking him with IVs in the attempt to prevent diabetic coma. Feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders, I felt a strong voice saying, “Don’t worry; that’s my son.” From that moment, the adoption that we receive in Baptism became a source of deep comfort to me.

In 2017, my wife and I left Birmingham, Alabama, with two healthy sons and a bright future. I had received my Master of Divinity degree from Beeson Divinity School and had been ordained a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. We drove south to Panama City Beach, Florida, where I would serve as a curate for church-planting. As a way to get to know and serve my community, I also became a police chaplain for the Panama City Beach Police Department. Church-planting brought everything we loved about evangelization and missions into a more historic form of Christianity. However, one of the darker chapters of my life was just beginning.

As a police chaplain, I rode along with police officers to provide spiritual accompaniment, pastoral care, and a listening ear. One fateful night, a man arrived at the police station, after hours, at the same moment that I arrived for a scheduled ride along. When the officer asked the troubled man what we could do for him, with haunted eyes and constricted voice, he explained that he was having difficulty breathing because of the demons that had just entered him through his and his uncle’s voodoo curses on each other.

The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Here I was, a Christian minister with increasingly Catholic beliefs, educated in a Protestant Divinity School. I had never had a class on exorcism. Yet in my classes, I saw very clearly that Jesus exorcized demons frequently. As a priest, I had the duty and honor of representing Christ in his compassion to deliver. Training or not, I had faith (and, so I thought, priestly authority)! With no explicit formula, I prayed with the man as best as I knew how and laid my hands on him. He improved, but I did not.

The police officers marveled at the demoniac man’s inexplicable transformation of psychological state. I, however, was plunged for months into paranormal activity that I did not understand. My senior pastor was concerned for my well-being and attempted to help me. My Anglican friends back in Birmingham were connected with the SSPI (Society for Special Pastoral Intervention) in the ACNA and said that I need to train with them in spiritual deliverance and exorcisms. I drove up to Birmingham, Alabama, for training in spiritual warfare.

I experienced much relief and am profoundly grateful for the care and compassion of the Anglican clergy who prayed with and for me. I was also deeply startled to hear from Anglican exorcists that demons were “triggered” by the Hail Mary and feared her intercession. This struck me as odd. Why were we Protestant Christians unsure of doing something that makes hell perpetually nervous? Just a year ago, I had received a beautiful Benedictine prayer book, but had shied away from praying the Hail Mary prayer in it. If, however, the demons actually feared the Virgin Mary, and if the blessing of her name was a perpetual reminder of that moment when the Word was made flesh in her womb, beginning the salvation of mankind, then maybe it was time to join St. Gabriel and proclaim the Virgin’s praises.

Part of my training at the SSPI was to study the spiritual gifts more and to discern what my personal spiritual gift might be. One of the discernment tools was a thought experiment: if I could have any three Christians of any time mentor me, who would they be? As an Anglican church-planter, I remembered the three British missionary bishops that I admired the most: St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Columba of Iona, and St. Boniface of Mainz. I prayed that God would show me which saint to study and emulate. Two weeks later, an experience convinced me that St. Boniface of Mainz was with me. I was so overwhelmed and confused that, while I did not address Boniface, I did ask God to please use that saint’s example to guide me. I then sensed God saying to me, “You feel comfortable here. Don’t get used to it.” Twenty-four hours later, I learned that Hurricane Michael was turning towards the Florida panhandle. In the dark of the night, my wife and I, with our three boys, fled back to Birmingham. Hours later, we learned that the hurricane had hit the part of Bay County in which we were planning to plant a church.

My diocesan bishop graciously released me from that assignment. Through a series of dramatic occurrences with clear messaging, my wife and I discerned a call to an Anglican church plant in western Montana. In 2019, we moved to Missoula. We loved Montana, yet ministry was difficult. My vision of pastoral ministry was different from that of my colleague. During this time, I asked St. Boniface of Mainz to pray for me. I learned that Boniface, like myself, had discovered a desire to be a foreign missionary at the age of twelve. Like me, he was shaped by Benedictine spirituality. Like me, he experienced disappointment and pain in his conflict with fellow missionaries, who claimed the Celtic missionary legacy, yet lacked sound discipline. Like me, Boniface’s first missionary effort was unsuccessful. Boniface’s solution? To unite more closely with Rome, so that his mission would be not of his own authority, but that of Christ’s vicar on earth — the Pope.

Schooled by Saints

I did what I could to ignore the striking difference between Saint Boniface and myself — unity with the Bishop of Rome. If Christ had actually set apart Peter as the prince of the apostles, then the apostolic succession in which I located my priestly authority was not what I thought. If the Catholic Church’s claims about the Petrine office were correct, then it would require me to pursue reconciliation with the chair of Peter, even at the expense of my ministerial office.

I connected with someone who I expected to be an ally against reunion with Rome, an Orthodox priest. As I spoke with Fr. Daniel Kirk, he and I both had the same anxieties. As pastors, we felt that our parishioners faced grave challenges, not only against chastity and sexual morality, but against human dignity itself, and that our respective traditions were powerless to provide sufficient solutions to people in the pews. Our churches had stopped “developing” doctrine since our respective communions broke with Rome. We had sixteenth and eleventh century answers for twenty-first century problems. Though not Catholic (yet), we were both looking to Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body for guidance to modern man’s most pressing questions about identity, love, and desire. The fact that we were looking to the papacy for answers made us think more deeply about the Catholic Church’s claims that the papacy is a divine institution of Christ, rather than a political invention of the medieval Church. We also discussed the famous work of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which he wrote during his own journey to the Catholic Church. Father Daniel, recognizing that I was asking the same questions he was, took a risk and invited me to a Catholic men’s group.

When I attended this group, I encountered men from a variety of trades and backgrounds, engaging at various levels with a discussion from St. Thomas Aquinas, praying the Divine Office of the Church, and singing beautiful Marian hymns. Here was a group where nothing had to be held back. Meanwhile, as I was planting an Anglican Church, I faced resistance from certain parishioners, who pitted my Catholic interpretation of Anglican theology against the Anglican Church’s own formularies of belief (the Thirty-Nine Articles).

My parishioners did not cause me to doubt my Catholic beliefs. They did, however, cause me to doubt the integrity or consistency of holding Catholic beliefs in the Anglican Church. As I became increasingly convinced of Catholic views on the Sacraments, of the Communion of Saints, and of the divine institution of the Papal office, I realized that two roads lay before me: I could either maintain my ordained office as an Anglican priest, all the while requesting my parishioners to trust my private judgment over their denomination’s teachings, or I could resign my position and submit to the teaching authority and institutional unity of the Catholic Church.

Joining the Catholic Church would be not only financially disastrous, but it would also be, in effect, burning to ashes my singular childhood dream: to be a preacher of the Gospel. After months of prayer, study, consultation, and discernment, I embraced the painful truth that I could either throw my vocation and livelihood at the feet of Christ or place my office above obedience to Christ’s call for unity — a call made possible by the unity of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I chose obedience, in the faith that God accepts our sacrifices and can raise life from ashes.

The choice was not easy. Lauren was understandably leery about throwing our expected future away for a belief that Jesus chose Peter as the head of the Apostles. However, our Catholic priest in town suggested that she ask St. Joseph for prayer. Lauren was not sure about this whole invocation-of-the-saints thing. But she knew that her husband was becoming a full-blown papist, so desperate times called for desperate measures. She asked Saint Joseph that very night to pray for our finances, given the gravity of the situation. The church-plant received a donation on our behalf for several thousand dollars the next day.

On April 3rd, 2021, my wife and I, along with our four sons, were received into the Catholic Church. Saint Boniface sponsored my entrance into the Church and St. Joseph sponsored my wife’s arrival. Surrendering my childhood dream of the pastorate was painful, but whatever plans God had for me were only attainable through obedience to revealed truth, not despite it. Lauren expresses gratitude on a weekly basis that we were brought into the Catholic Church. We both believe that we have finally come home.

Although I had stepped down from the priesthood, I did not step away from the mission field. On the contrary, I entered a “new evangelization.” Weeks after being confirmed, I was hired as the Director of Religious Education for Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church in Kalispell, Montana. I began my journey within the Church by teaching religion class to middle schoolers, boys and girls who are at that stage of life where I first discovered that my life could only find fulfillment through an adventure of obedience to Jesus Christ.

During my tenure at Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church, I was invited by Divine Mercy Academy in Belgrade, Montana, to become the head of the school. Divine Mercy Academy is both Catholic and classical and is deeply committed to Pope John Paul II’s vision of Christian humanism. Serving as the head of Divine Mercy Academy allows me to prepare young evangelists for a life-long vocation of witness in a modern world. Only God could weave together the various chapters of my family’s life into this integrated calling. The journey home to the Catholic Church has brought my entire family into a New Evangelization.

The post Deep Theology, Deep Grace appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

From Birth Through High School

I was born Lawrence Michael Alderson to George W. Alderson and Audrey Ann Alderson (née Morin). My mother was in nurse’s training at the beginning of 1948. In those days, the trainees were expected to train in every aspect of nursing, including the operating theater. This turned out to be too much for her to handle. She needed to get away from it all to take stock of her life. (Years later, however, she became an LPN.)

She and my father “went away” for a couple of weeks. When my grandfather found out about it, he insisted that they get married. His oldest daughter was a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and his oldest son was a Jesuit who had been a POW in a Japanese prison camp. Both were highly regarded in the community. The embarrassment my mother’s situation presented was more than he could handle.

They married in late January of that year. I was born a couple of weeks early, a breech birth, in late November of the same year. The doctor who assisted in the delivery was shocked to discover this. In those days, there were no instant anesthetics, which made for a tricky delivery.

My father, who had been born in 1925, was a former Marine, having served in World War II. I imagine the war experience was a bit much for him, because later he had difficulty holding down a job. In order to make ends meet, my mother also worked.

My brother, Robert, was born in late December of 1952. I have a memory of living with my paternal grandparents during the weeks that my mother was in recovery. There was one day, when I was alone with my brother, and I noticed that he needed his diaper changed. When my mother came home, she was shocked to discover the situation, because I had tried to handle the dilemma, but I was too young to do it correctly. I’m guessing this was the last straw for my overworked and unsupported mother, and my parents separated. Shortly after that incident, my mother, brother, and I moved in with my maternal grandparents.

I was enrolled in kindergarten at St. Eulalia in Maywood, Illinois. In the middle of my fifth year, my mother’s younger sister, Joan, separated from her husband. At that point, my mother and her sister decided (perhaps with some urging from my grandparents) to get an apartment together.

Growing up, I loved to investigate things. One year, around the 4th of July, I bought a road flare. Out of curiosity, I ignited it in the apartment. I wasn’t wise enough to figure out how to put it out in a safe manner, and I ended up burning a hole in the living room rug. The apartment owner was, of course, upset, and we found ourselves moving again.

I remember living in an apartment in Franklin Park, where we lived next door to my future cousins. They told my mother about Elmer John Gearhart, who was shy and unmarried. My mother took it to heart, and shortly after that, the two were married. In 1961, Elmer adopted Bob and me. This is how I came to have the last name of Gearhart. From that point on, we lived in his house in Elmwood Park. At first, I went to St. Cyprian School in River Grove. But after juggling expenses, I was transferred to Elmwood School in the middle of seventh grade. It was there that I began to show unusual ability in mathematics.

The July after our move, my brother John Elmer was born. Around that time, I took entrance exams for Holy Cross High School and Elmwood Park High School. In the latter, I tried to figure out the formula for the volume of a sphere. I ended up also doing well in English and science.

I joined the wrestling team in my freshman year, as well as the freshman boys’ chorus. In a school of about 900 students, I was only 5 feet 2 inches in height and third string in wrestling. In my sophomore year, my voice was changing, so I was not accepted into sophomore chorus. In place of that, I decided to take a typing class. I also set aside wrestling for chess club.

Around this time, my parents’ marriage was failing. My father had a drinking problem, and I was asked by my mother’s lawyer to testify in court. I said I could not say he was an alcoholic, which I understood to mean that he had an addiction. I couldn’t go so far as to say that. Anyway, they divorced in the middle of my junior year.

My mother, brothers, and I moved to Northlake, and I was transferred to Proviso West High School in Hillside, a larger school of about 3,600 students. Around that time, I experienced a growth spurt, and by my senior year I was 6 feet 2 inches tall.

While attending this new school, our college prep English class read Milton’s Paradise Lost. That book challenged me to think about free will. I had taken classes in chemistry and physics, and I could find no reason to believe that free will was a reality, since my understanding seemed to imply that all motion was either determined or random. Life so far seemed to concur, and I could not see how a soul would be an exception, much less a body-soul combination.

From Junior College to Ph.D. and Assistant Professorship

I attended Triton Jr. College, where I studied English Rhetoric, Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, Humanities, and Calculus. I financed it all by working summers at the National Tea Potato Packing Plant.

Meanwhile, I decided to stop attending Mass.

At the end of those two years at Triton, I was surprised to receive a tuition scholarship to study math education. I decided to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago (then referred to as the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle). In the last quarter of my senior year, I did student teaching. There, I became frustrated that I could not motivate seniors (who were afflicted with senioritis) to pay attention in calculus class. I was so upset that I didn’t bother to attend graduation ceremonies. I got my B.S. degree but did not apply for certification.

When I graduated, our country was at war. But I drew a high lottery number, and thus avoided being drafted into the Army. Instead, I got a job working for UPS while I tried to sort things out. I have a highly technical background and have had an abiding interest in physics, psychology, philosophy, major literature, and history ever since high school. Later in life, I developed a practical interest in biology, especially as it relates to human welfare, both physical and moral.

As a sort of “renaissance man,” I had developed a great interest in many things, including literature and philosophy. During this time, I became fascinated by Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and Why I Am Not a Christian.

Then, in 1971, I took the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) and scored in the 98th percentile in mathematics. In my first year, I was one of the top students. The following year, I became a teaching assistant in the math department, and thanks to that, I was able to finance the remainder of my education through the doctorate level.

I investigated several options for connecting with a thesis advisor, including inquiries about their areas of specialization. I finally settled on working with Prof. James Moeller. (Jim was a Lutheran who decided not to challenge my free-will theory. As it happens, he later happily wrote a letter of commendation to Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary, where I applied for entry in 1997.) While working with Jim, I was given the problem of determining the relationship of the spectrum of a unilateral shift operator (also referred to as a translation semigroup) of infinite multiplicity to that of its infinitesimal generator. I derived that result somewhat late in the academic year, yet earlier than had been anticipated, so that I was given a job as a visiting lecturer (the bottom rung of professional titles) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During that year, I was able to use a theory of harmonic analysis of operators on Hilbert space to discover and prove an important version of what came to be called (at least initially) Gearhart’s spectral mapping theorem.

My first job elsewhere was as a visiting professor at Wright State University in Fairborn, Ohio. There, I was able to submit my first major publication to the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. That paper has been cited more than 200 times in the mathematical and physical sciences (especially chemistry and physics) literature.

My Conversion Process

It was during that three-year period at Wright State University when I connected with Center Stage in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and participated in a few Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. In 1979, after my three-year term was up, I began working for defense industry contractors. My involvement with Center Stage continued. After one of these productions, I dated a fan who was a few months older than me, and with whom I had an affair lasting several months. She had a teenage son. I proposed marriage to her, but she declined it. After that rejection, I became seriously depressed and attempted to deal with it by using pornography.

Finally, in 1987, the year my maternal grandmother died, I had a major conversion experience one night while I slept. I believe my grandmother’s prayers played a major role in my being given that gift. In the dream, God showed me where my life was headed, the consequences to many souls who would have been adversely affected, and a taste of the result—my separation from God for all eternity. That experience shook me up so much that, when I woke up, I got down on my knees and begged God for forgiveness. The only consolation I got was that I was not yet damned, and recognized that I needed to change.

My first change was to get rid of all the pornography in my possession. I began thinking more responsibly about my life and my job. But I still didn’t have a sense of the truth of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It was a confusing time, and I tried marriage—which ultimately ended after about seven months. My wife was from Illinois as well, so I applied to Bell Labs in Naperville, a job from which 2,000 engineers, including me, were eventually laid off.

In the months after this fiasco, I sought employment and connected with a lady who was a parishioner at a Catholic church in St. Charles, Illinois. She was in their choir, and I was interested in participating. I heard the pastor speak about the Christ Renews His Parish program (colloquially referred to as “CHiRP”), which was sponsoring a weekend retreat. I consulted him about joining that retreat, and he referred me to Fr. Steve, the pastor at Holy Cross in Batavia, where I lived. I talked to Fr. Steve, who was very busy, but I had an impulse to ask him to hear my confession anyway.

That weekend blew me away. Another retreatant that weekend was a guy my age, whom I knew, who had also attended St. Eulalia’s and lived on the same block as I did in Maywood back in the 50s. At that meeting, I spoke about my recent return to the sacraments, and my newfound conversion. (Another coincidence: I sat at the St. Paul table.) The guys there were all impressed, including one fellow at our table who was entering the seminary the next year. That retreat was an important part of my journey back to the Catholic Church, and ultimately to my vocation.

In the summer of 1992, I moved back to my old home in Elmwood Park and spent the next three years under spiritual direction. Thanks to some local contacts, I managed to find work as an adjunct professor at colleges in the area.

My mother insisted we go to St. Vincent Ferrer parish for Mass, even though we had been going to St. Cyprian years before. After a couple of months there, I heard that Fr. Benjamin Russell, the pastor, was available to provide spiritual direction. It was only later that I recognized the significance of consulting with a man whose first name was the same as that of my maternal grandfather and my Jesuit uncle, and whose last name was the same as my previous intellectual hero, Bertrand Russell.

Fr. Russell helped me to put things into perspective. I had some wild questions to ask him, like: “What if there is intelligent life on other planets?” More importantly, we explored the question of what God was calling me to do. I kept praying about this, and even met with a vocation director at the local priory. The night before I got the news that I wasn’t accepted, I had a dream that I was on a train. The conductor came to me and asked me for my tickets. I only had one. I simply had to figure out what vocation the “ticket” was for.

That three-year period of discernment ended in 1995. I was running out of options to support myself. Out of the blue, I got a call from an old employer in the Dayton area, asking if I was available for work.

Mary, Help of Even This Christian!

I moved back to Fairborn and discovered that I was within the Mary, Help of Christians parish boundaries. I registered as a parishioner and soon joined the Stephen Ministry, which works with people going through difficult times in their lives. I had some hard cases and learned a lot from the experience. When I inquired about whom I might seek as a spiritual director, I was sent to Fr. Joseph Goetz, the pastor of St. Paul Church in Yellow Springs. He suggested I begin to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. He was surprised how determined I was to keep praying the Liturgy of the Hours, as well as consistently receiving spiritual direction.

In my second year there, I served on the parish council. Management was never my strong suit, so I was not involved beyond that. I was, however, knowledgeable in psychology, and I was learning a lot of history and theology. Coming from the Chicago area, I had visited the Cathedral there a few times to pray, and I learned that Joseph Bernardin was the Cardinal Archbishop, and that he had previously been the Archbishop of Cincinnati. I volunteered to give a presentation on him, and when I completed it, the lady who directed the ministry asked me, “When are you going to become a priest?” She urged me to meet with the pastor, Fr. Joe Raudabaugh.

When I met with him, I said I was interested in becoming a deacon. He asked me, “Is there any reason you would not study to become a priest?” I had no answer. Was this the “one ticket” that God had for me?

I attended a ministry weekend at Mount St. Mary’s in Cincinnati. The rector at that time was Fr. Jerry Haemmerle. He found me gazing at a painting outside of the chapel. It’s a picture painted by Benjamin Robert Haydon, entitled “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” Fr. Jerry explained that two of the figures in it were modeled on Isaac Newton (a mathematician and physicist) and Voltaire (an atheist). It seemed like I was being given a life-line by Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician: choose faith over no faith. That clinched my decision to enter the seminary in the fall of 1997.

When I told my brother, Bob, about my decision, he responded, “Whatever floats your boat!” I entered the seminary at Mt. St. Mary’s in Cincinnati in 1997 and was ordained as a priest in 2003.

I was 48 years old, the oldest in my seminary class. The next oldest was John Daniel Schuh (Dan). When people asked me how old I was, I would answer that I was two years older than Grandpa (a humorous reference to Dan). When we were ordained (May 24, 2003, the feast of Mary, Help of Christians), as we were leaving the Cathedral (now a minor basilica), one of his grandchildren spotted him and yelled out “Grandpa!” That’s how he got his nickname.

My mother, brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins attended the ordination. At the dinner following the ceremony, two of my uncles roasted each other. Everyone had a great time.

The next day, I celebrated Mass at Mary, Help of Christians. A week later, I said Mass at St. Eulalia’s in Maywood. Two ordinands a year ahead of me eventually went on further than I did. One is the current rector of the Seminary, Fr. Anthony Brausch, and the other now leads the diocese of Columbus, Bishop Earl Fernandez.

Prior to my serving as parochial vicar for the Springfield Deanery (beginning in July of 2017), I was the pastor of the four small Catholic parishes in Champaign County, Ohio: St. Michael in Mechanicsburg and Immaculate Conception in North Lewisburg (since July 1, 2006) and, more recently (since July 1, 2013), St. Mary in Urbana and Sacred Heart in St. Paris. St. Mary’s is small by U.S. Catholic standards, and each of the other three parishes is small enough to be considered “small faith communities” by biblical standards. Accordingly, they have been able to live something close to the ideal of small faith communities. Everyone knows everyone else and feels comfortable engaging in serious conversation.

Since November of 2020, I have been a priest living in retirement. Today, I am a retired priest in residence at St. Teresa of the Child Jesus parish in Springfield, Ohio. My duties include daily Mass, hearing confessions, responding to sick calls (anointings, hearing confessions and general pastoral care), and presiding at baptisms, weddings, and funerals. As previously, I remain a “circuit rider” in the sense that I may be called upon to substitute for a priest on vacation or some other form of leave. I have come to realize that God is more loving, forgiving, and (as Einstein said) subtle than I ever imagined. His grace is often like a soft flute, leading the soul onward. That subtlety certainly played out in surprising ways in my own journey home and into the priesthood. Indeed, it led me all the way back home, to where my vocation and Jesus Christ were waiting.

The post From Cradle Catholic to Agnostic to the Priesthood appeared first on The Coming Home Network.