I mentioned this in the previous post, but this journey deserves its own post at length. As I said, we have been officially attending the Catholic church since August of 2020 - that is when we sat down with the leadership of our evangelical church and informed them of our decision. But that event was only after a long journey, and it wasn't the end - there's still journeying ahead for us, not least for Mr. as he is doing RCIA for the year with the hope of being received into the Church this coming Easter.
 |
| Celebrating the children's first Baptism anniversary on 10th October |
This is only my story, not Mr.'s - his will be different, of course.
I grew up in a Catholic country, was baptised and had my First Holy Communion and my Confirmation at 14: all without ever believing in God. It was just culture, and I was an atheist from a very young age. My father was an atheist, too. My mother, although she prayed every night as she went to sleep (quietly, the only way I knew about it was because she would cross herself before and after), never told me about God or about her faith. So I thought of the whole Christianity thing as not much different from fairy tales: part of our cultural heritage we should know about, no more. I will say, that was the way I was taught about it as well, in school generally and even in religious education at school. No one ever told me this was, or even might be, true.
There was a Christian girl in my class in the last two years of high school, but apart from thinking she was a bit odd and quaint, I never gave her faith a second thought. It was only when I was 21, at a summer job, that I first met an articulate, intelligent and passionate Christian who chose to engage with me and my atheist arguments! She first introduced me to the idea that it might all be true, she invited me (over and over) to her church, and eventually I went and I converted within her Bible-only church. I've written about my initial conversion to Christianity here.
In this post, I shared how I grew from there - from the initial conversion from atheist to believer, to becoming rooted and established in Christ; and the difference it made to my life in another post.
My conversion and faith were never based on emotion or philosophical arguments in the first instance: I had to have facts, I had to have history. Did Jesus really live, as a historical figure? Did he say what he said, what's the evidence of that, and did he really die and rise again from the dead - how good is the evidence for that? I took ages to get there because I read deeply into those subjects, both for and against, because I could not decide to walk away from truth. As I said to my home group leader when I first became a Christian: my preference might be that something isn't true, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. For example, the Holocaust - I hate that it happened, but I can't be a Holocaust denier because clearly it is historically a fact. Along the same lines, my feelings about the resurrection of Jesus are irrelevant if it really happened: truth is truth.
And my feelings have followed after my head. I didn't like the truths I found about Jesus' resurrection at first (that's the understatement of the day), but once I accepted it as true, my feelings changed. As AA so aptly states, feelings aren't facts! They are changeable, and that is why I generally prefer to build my life on facts rather than feelings.
This is also why I dove into Bible study - having become convinced of the truth of the resurrection, it followed that Jesus actually was who he claimed to be, so it was worth studying what he said and did. And the context of all this, which is the entirety of the Bible. I spent the next ten years or so, learning what the Bible actually said and how it applied to me today. This was in churches and home groups and study groups of various Protestant shades, never Catholic; to me, Catholicism was my past, a dead shell of a faith, a place of ritual and superstition and going through the motions.
Imagine my surprise, then, when after years of Bible study I once again delved into history: this time, to learn more about how the Church grew after the Bible record finishes with Acts and the letters. I was astonished to find a Church that looked nothing like the non-denominational churches I was part of and thought were practicing Biblical Christianity, like the original apostles! The Church I found in the Didache and in the writings of the very first successors of the Apostles who had been taught and discipled by the Apostles themselves - Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, several others - believed in the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist, it had clear authority structures, bishops and priests, a liturgy (Justin Martyr describes the Mass more or less exactly as it is celebrated in the Catholic Church to this day!), a laity, Traditions with a capital T, it had relics (!) and - gasp! - it had no Bible! How did all those believers, for the first 300+ years, keep a faith that they died for in huge numbers, without the authoritative Bible that I had been led to believe was the sole foundation of our faith?
I was aghast.
That was not what I had been taught.
I knew of course that the Bible canon was authoritatively decided upon in the 300's, but I hadn't thought this through. There had always been this nebulous belief, that no one had ever taught systematically in the Protestant churches that I was part of (but it was nevertheless an "accepted truth") that Constantine in the 400's somehow messed up the Biblical faith by making Christianity a state religion and therefore inviting those who were seeking status or wealth rather than looking to follow Christ to take over the Church. That it was at this point that the Church became an institution, rather than an informal group of people living by faith, "the priesthood of all believers".
I had never critically examined these assumptions before. Great books I read about this were "The Apostasy that Wasn't" by Rod Bennet, and "Bearing False Witness" by Rodney Stark who significantly isn't a Catholic, but a historian who criticises the many false narratives aimed at undermining the Catholic Church throughout history.
Let's stick to my story, though: it was in about 2010/11 that I officially decided to reinstate my Catholic status - I had left the Church when I turned 18, had officially requested my entry in the Baptismal Register to be deleted, because at that time I was very much an atheist and didn't see why I should contribute to an institution I didn't believe in (via Church Tax, which is still a thing in Austria). So upon returning to the Church, a priest here in the UK had to write to my Austrian parish to reinstate me in the Baptismal Register, and I had completed the circle back to Catholicism.
But had I?
The story doesn't end there.
At the end of 2011, I met Mr. and he wasn't a Christian. We very quickly knew we wanted to get to know each other better, but I couldn't take the risk of falling in love with someone who didn't love Jesus - but I also didn't have faith in the Catholic Church, which had failed me so abysmally in my own formation, to welcome and teach him about how relevant and important Jesus is to our lives today. So I defaulted back to what worked for me: I asked Mr. if he'd like to do an Alpha Course at a young, non-denominational church where I knew he'd meet lots of people from similar walks of life, who were on fire for Jesus.
Long story short, he went, and there was no resistance - so different to my own story, as I came into the faith almost against my own will - he heard what it was all about and immediately said, yes I need this, I need Jesus. I was overjoyed and married him not long after that, and I had firmly put my Catholicism on the back burner. As long as we loved Jesus, it didn't matter that much, did it?
For a while, I left it be. Mr. grew in his own faith. That was important. We started a family and I was busy, too busy to think too deeply.
But towards the end of 2018,, I found myself again with such a hunger for truth, for the fullness of truth. Lots was happening in the church we were part of - and the more I saw and learned as part of the leadership team, the more I saw how difficult it is to lead a people who take no leadership except what each as their own Pope decided to see in the Bible (sola scriptura, the Bible is our authority! but what does scriptura say on whatever the topic at hand is? Everyone's cherry picking their own favourites and backing their views up with whatever theologians they find that agree with that view...), where there is no living authority of the Magisterium, where there is no Tradition, and where at the end of the day church is just about getting together in fellowship. Which is nice, but - I was hungry for Jesus! And while we sang all the songs of longing ("Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see you!") we never saw the longing fulfilled in a concrete way; not the way it is fulfilled every single day at a Catholic Mass, the true and real living presence of Christ himself.
I longed for the fullness of the faith. For all the ways in which Christ reveals himself - physically, not just mentally and spiritually; I longed to hear, with my own physical ears, that I was forgiven after Reconciliation; I longed to be filled with Christ not just spiritually but also physically, eating his body and drinking his blood - I found myself recoiling at that physical picture just as the Jews around Jesus did, and digging into that particular passage (John 6) I saw that Jesus didn't stop them walking away from such a disgusting picture: in fact, he said the same thing again and made the language even stronger, to something akin to "gnawing" on his flesh like dogs would! And that's when so many people walked away. And he didn't call them back saying never mind, you misunderstood what I meant, I'm only talking figuratively here! He wasn't, he was telling the plain truth. And I wanted it, all of it, any and all things he wanted to give. I wanted him.
That's when it became unbearable for me to remain in the non-denominational church we were in, and I finally had a conversation with Mr. whom I have to admit I had not taken along with me on this journey at all. He knew I had visited monasteries before we met, for retreats and such, but I had never really spoken to him about Catholicism... and so when I said I could no longer carry on with any integrity in the non-denominational church, it came out of the blue for him. That was at the end of 2019. He said he needed time to process this, and I respected that. He asked me to keep this to myself for the moment so he could process in peace, and learn about it all, and I respected that too.
Finally, in August 2020, he was ready and we moved. We have lost friends - people we thought of as friends - because we no longer walk the same road. That has caused us grief, but the joy I have now outweighs all that. I am home. Thanks be to God!
Comments
Post a Comment