Sense of An Ending . . . and a beginning

I read something yesterday in Fr. James Martin’s Jesus: A Pilgrimage. It made me think of conversion and Lent and even a little something from my days as a graduate student at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

“The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos, the tick-tock chronological time that we are more familiar with; and kairos, the right or opportune moment. We also know what these kairos moments are like: tired and dissatisfied with our lives, we’re waiting for someone to say that it is okay to change. For the fishermen on the shore, this was their kairos moment” (Martin 140).

All the talk of chronos and kairos reminded me of The Sense of an Ending - required reading for M.A. comps. Not that I wrote anything profound that awful, awful day. I received a B on my comprehensive exams though I had trended toward A’s throughout graduate school. I choose to blame my performance on the migraine that rendered the experience a nightmarish blur. No hyperbole. I began the day with a shot of Imitrex which worked no better than a couple of Tic Tacs.

I remember three writers from the long list of required reading. Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. The Writing Life and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. And Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending.

I might have known that I was headed for a massive conversion –for I forgot most of the other things I read in the months of preparation for comps, but the things that remained and took up residency in my long term memory were Annie Dillard, T.S.  Eliot and Frank Kermode. If you took Pilgrim, Writing Life, Four Quartets and Sense of an Ending and ground them up with a mortar and pestle, you might end up with words like Catholic and mystery and contemplative and writer.

It is where I was headed – though I, myself, had no idea.

But there is something about the notion of kairos. A time for each thing. A season. A changing over and rendering up. Dropping nets to follow. Or abandoning the now for the unexpected call. The sense of an ending. And of a beginning.

When you talk about such things, others stare. They don’t get it. Aren’t privy to the crook of God’s finger. The hook of the Shepherd’s staff. My walking papers. My mandate to go. To follow. To pick up a pen. Or a cross. Or both.

There is something beautiful-and painful-in accepting the call one receives in these kairos moments.

You try to get others to understand, but there is no way they truly can– not being in your skin.
Not having walked in your moccasins.

The most one can hope for is for one’s spiritual director to affirm the call.
It’s enough. A nod from him and a nod from grace– that’ll do.

Kairos. The changing time.

A blank page.

It’s not that anything is possible. It is only that His Will awaits. And somehow, you know it. You begin to perceive it.

The words on the blank page are written in invisible ink – the kind of ink that fills God’s pen. And your spirit is the secret decoder that unlocks the hidden script. You see the words.

And you get to say–

Ok. Let’s do it.

So be it. Amen.

You drop your nets and walk away from what was to embrace what is to come.

It is the moment you are ready for God’s plan for you.

Kairos.

Sense of An Ending . . . and a beginning

Like Seabiscuit

I can vividly remember two Christmas presents from December 2003. My daughter gave my father a plastic horse. Jennifer turned five right before Christmas that year, and she was determined that she would pick out and purchase a gift for everyone in the family. She didn’t want money or opinions from anyone. It was her year to be a giver. She chose a plastic horse at the dollar store and declared, “This one’s for Grandpa.”

I guess that Christmas was the Year of the Horse, because one of my older children received the movie Seabiscuit. On December 28^th, we finished the evening meal and sat down to watch the movie as a family. The phone rang in the middle of our movie night, and I went to the bedroom to listen to the message as it recorded. It was my sister. She was calling to say that our dad had just passed away.

We turned off the movie, and we never went back to finish it. My mother gave Jennifer the plastic horse. “Here. Grandpa would want you to have it,” She said. Jennifer received the horse with a heavy heart.

This summer I am taking a class on social justice through the Paul VI Institute in St. Louis. Today, the instructor showed us a clip of a movie. Mr. Kraus reminded us that our lives mirror the theme of the movie: we have risen from broken lives to discover what we were meant to be – who we are meant to be. Sometimes, we are pretty beat up by the world. We are so screwed up, sometimes, that we have forgotten that we have human dignity. We don’t remember that we are made in the likeness of God. And we fail to realize that our neighbor is God’s special creation as well.

And then he pressed play. The movie was Seabiscuit.

I swallowed hard and permitted the images and lines to wash over me. This was the movie I had refused to watch for nearly a decade. God seemed to say, it’s okay. You’re ready, and you know it.

This amazing line hit me. “I just can’t help feeling they got him so screwed up, running in circles, that he’s forgotten what he was born to do. He just needs to learn how to be a horse again.”

There was a peace in my spirit as I listened. Denise, you are Seabiscuit. The world did its number on you and you got pretty screwed up. God needed to get your attention, and that was painful. But there was an important lesson to be learned in the dying and brokenness. You needed to learn how to be the one I created you to be. You had forgotten who you are.

I was created in the image and likeness of God! There is a dignity there. I am not created for sin or bitterness or confusion or anger or selfishness or exploitation by anybody. I am made to be Christ to the world. To be His mercy. His love. His joy!

I carry the mark of the risen Christ!

But I had forgotten that.

I am an oblation. An offering back to my God. I am a libation. A pouring out of self for another.

In that same scene, Seabiscuit takes off and runs with such beauty and grace and strength that the jockey (Tobey McGuire) yells out, “You are an amazing animal!”

It’s been almost ten years since we paused the movie and began a season of grieving. In time, that grief turned to conversion. And conversion awakened me to my calling.

I remembered how to run with grace.

I can hear my Jockey sometimes. He says, “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.” And, like Tobey McGuire, He laughs then and throws back His head, shouting with joy. “You are an amazing creation!”

Like Seabiscuit, there is a sweet release in each one of us when we realize that we are being healed. We run faster than we ever believed we could. Isaiah says it best in chapter 61. I proclaim a year of favor from the Lord. This is your vindication by your God. He will give you the oil of gladness. . . a mantle instead of a faint spirit. . . the planting of the Lord to show his glory.

Okay, so let’s see what you’ve got. It’s time to remember who you are. Giddy-up.

Like Seabiscuit

Amen, and again I say Amen!

You have to read this article! If you pray for Church unity, if you long to see fallen away Catholics come Home, if you have friends and family members who were raised in other faith traditions and that grieves you. . . you have to read this article!

Here's a teaser:

Pope Benedict’s ‘Impelling Duty’ is to rebuild the full and visible unity of this Church. It will be forged through orthodoxy (right teaching) and orthopraxy (right practice) but it will be lived within a legitimate diversity of expression within the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. What happened last week is just the beginning.

Full article by Deacon Keith Fournier on 10/24/09 found at Catholic.org

Amen, and again I say Amen!

My Thorn in the Flesh - one among many

My family moved from northern Iowa to the southwest corner of the state during the summer before my senior year of high school.

I was angry with my parents for most of the 1981-82 school year. And that wasn't the only attitude problem I had that year.

I was one of three new students at Manning High School. The other two were two foreign exchange students from Kenya and Germany (as I recall).

Manning had a tradition. Foreign exchange students were featured in the school paper, encouraged to join every extracurricular activity, and they were automatically on the Homecoming Queen/King Court.

Students who moved to the Manning school district from another Iowa school district didn't receive the same treatment.

And I was green with envy.

I tried out for the flag team and made it. I auditioned for the school play and made it. But nothing could appease my jealousy. I was angry that I had to work for new friendships - not an easy task when one enters a new school as a senior. Friendships take time. Effort. But the student body laid down the welcoming mat for exchange students. Everyone wanted to be their friend.

It was a classic case of jealousy.

There are moments when I still wrestle with this emotion. Oh, I'm not as immature about it. I recognize the attitude when it comes along, and I offer my weakness up. I get on my knees and let the Holy Spirit get me rightly ordered before I have a chance to mess up the good thing He has going in me.

What is it that tempts me? Who are the foreign exchange students in my adult world? And what's the name of the school I've transferred to?

The school is the Catholic faith. The foreign exchange students are the former Protestant clergy and their wives who are featured on Catholic radio and television. The red carpet of Catholic publishing spreads out before them. As Catholic speakers, they are in high demand.

Protestant preachers' daughters and ex-wives of Protestant ministers . . . not so much.

I am ashamed of myself when these emotions enter my spiritual journey like a virus. I remind myself that it is not the temptation that is sinful . . . it is what I choose to do with it. It can be a moment of grace. Or it can be a sin against grace.

With God's help, I let it be an opportunity to identify with the little ones who live the Catholic faith with quiet, hidden tenacity and a heart for those who are even smaller and weaker and poorer. My heart finds this longing sweet with no bitter aftertaste.

That's when I realize that God has given me precisely the right amount of exposure. Just enough to use my talents. And no more, lest I forget the author of the journey and lose all that He has done.

My Thorn in the Flesh - one among many

Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow?

(originally published in diocesan papers in 2006)

I have the space all picked out. It’s a little nook around back where the cellar door forms a right angle with the exterior wall of the house. That’s where I want it. My Marian Garden.

I have the clipping torn out of a magazine. The roses in the pictures are beautiful. I’ve made a mental note to order the bushes soon.

The whole thing was a joke when I was still in my college days. Dubuque is a strong Catholic town, and Mary’s little gardens were everywhere. We Protestants thought it looked like the Catholics just liked to keep Mary in a bathtub.

We simply didn’t understand. I realize now that there was a lot about Catholic theology that we didn’t understand – especially when it came to the Mother of God.

Unable to discern a difference between worship and veneration, we thought Catholics worshipped Mary. Confused by the term “Immaculate,” we thought Catholics were trying to put the Virgin Mother on the same level as the Divine Son. Unclear about the meaning of the Communion of Saints, we just didn’t understand that Mary wanted to intercede for us.

We had no idea she was Our Mother and loved us with a mother’s heart.

Some of those old prejudices make me feel ashamed, but not my misconception about a Marian garden. I just didn’t know what it was all about. I wasn’t being anti-Catholic, just a bit ignorant. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with my new Mother, and I didn’t understand the hunger to have a place set aside, somewhere beautiful just for her. I’ve always loved roses – especially white roses, but I didn’t make any connection between roses and Mary. I didn’t sense Our Mother at my side, so how could I have understood devotion to her?

With a gentleness that is so characteristic of Our Lady, she has carefully and lovingly revealed her love for me. She has shown me that devotion to her has one purpose and that is to lead me to her Son. She doesn’t eclipse the Son; she reveals the Son. She doesn’t answer my petitions to her, she asks her Son to answer them. Like changing water into wine at the wedding at Cana, Jesus Christ responds to his mother’s voice, especially when we are willing to do whatever He tells us. She teaches us to suffer and to carry our own crosses, even as she suffered when her Son died for our sins. I just didn’t understand.

Simple ignorance has been replaced by simple love. Amazing how that changes things.

So when spring comes this year, Mary will have her rose garden.

And I’ll eat a little crow.

Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow?

Inside, Outside, Upside Down - and becoming Catholic

As a child, I read this book a hundred times. It isn't just a collection of prepositional phrases and cute pictures by Stan and Jan Berenstain. It summarizes the disorienting experience of going into a new environment and having everything turned upside down.

In short, it's a little like entering the Church. A bit disorienting at first, and everything is turned upside down, and then you realize that you have just had the greatest ride of your life.

Joy to those on the journey. . .

Inside, Outside, Upside Down - and becoming Catholic

The Great Flip-Flopper

We ridicule our leaders for doing it. But conversion almost always requires it. What is it? A change of heart. Totally rethinking one’s thinking. A grand-scale flip-flop. (Of course, we usually suspect our leaders of changing for selfish gain and we know that true conversion comes from a conviction of heart that is far from selfish.)

Inevitably, conversion brings change. God rarely shares with us the endgame strategy. We simply couldn’t take it.

It’s tough enough to open one’s heart to the beauty of the Catholic Church. The totality of conversion comes slowly. This renewing of one’s mind is not an easy or simplistic thing.

The phrase “rightly ordered” has begun to have practical meaning. I find myself wanting to help the poor. At first, it was some high ideal, but then it started to hit me in real ways. I couldn’t justify eating out four to six times a week when those I cared about never have that luxury.

I’ve started having doubts about things I assumed were right, like the death penalty.

I’ve become more compassionate in my thinking about illegal immigrants, which so often is lost in the rhetoric against illegal immigration. It is almost as though Our Lady of Guadalupe is teaching my soul something my mind can’t quite explain yet.

My position on artificial contraception and in vitro fertilization has changed 180 degrees.

I have become passionately pro-life. The thought of even one unborn child dying needlessly really disturbs me.

I quit charging for freelance articles. Sure, I can think of a thousand ways to spend the compensation, and sometimes a paper will pay me even though I don’t ask for money. But it’s the asking that seems wrong. God knows what I need.

Everything is being scooped up and rendered.

Life doesn’t fit in a neat little box anymore. And even that seems to be the byproduct of becoming rightly ordered. I don’t fit anywhere perfectly – except in the arms of Mother Church.

The one thing I must remember is that, while change can be a very good thing, I can’t look back once I put my hand to the plow. In short, I must be malleable in His Hands, but once something in me is well-formed, I must hold tight to what I have learned.

The Great Flip-Flopper

Lunch with Preachers' Daughters

I had a conversation last summer with another Protestant preacher’s daughter. The two of us talked like two teenagers over our sandwiches and salads. I had traveled to Oklahoma from St. Louis to give my conversion story to her parish and found a kindred spirit in this new convert. It is a long and unlikely journey from the parsonage (pastor’s house) to the doors of the Catholic Church, but we shared from mutual joy as we reflected on our journeys to a home we never knew existed.

The Catholic Church is the last place I would have guessed I would call home. But this Church is Home. All the good I saw in so many denominations as a child is all gathered into one place that we call the fullness of the faith.

When I was a young girl, my father was a Wesleyan minister. I remember those days fondly. How we would gather for prayer meetings, and the adults would be on their knees. How people would share testimonies of God’s grace, and how powerful and personal the Lord Jesus Christ was in their lives. How they longed to be sanctified and to walk in grace.

I loved being Wesleyan. But then my dad changed denominations, and my siblings and I became Presbyterian preacher’s kids.

It took awhile to adapt to the denominational changes, but we learned a new prayer called the Lord’s Prayer (the Our Father), and the confirmation students had to memorize something called the Apostle’s Creed. There was a wonderful sense of kinship that welled up inside me when we recited it together and affirmed that we all believed these things and that we held them as sacred and holy and truth with a capital T.

It was about this time that my Assembly of God cousins began receiving the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Wesleyans and Presbyterians didn’t want to talk much about being baptized in the Holy Spirit. The gifts of speaking in tongues and prophecy were seen as either divisive (because so many denominations had suffered from splits when a handful of parishioners experienced this outpouring and wanted to pass it on to others), or the gifts were seen as holy whoopla of human origin. The Wesleyans voted to prohibit such nonsense. The Presbyterians simply didn’t talk about it.

I suppose it was about this time that I began to wonder, like Pontius Pilate, what is truth? I loved kneeling in church, but Presbyterians didn’t do that. I loved the creed and the prayers, but Wesleyans didn’t say them. I could see the excitement in my cousin’s faces when they told me about their new joy – and how they said I would be blessed by experiencing this outpouring for myself. But neither the Wesleyans nor the Presbyterians believed the charismatic reading of Holy Scripture was accurate.

So what is truth?

I did what most children do. I tried to gain spiritual ballast by listening to my dad. After all, he was the most godly man I knew.

That worked for about forty years. And then my dad died. My version of the pope was gone. Let’s face it. We all have a spiritual go-to guy and for me, that was dad. But he was no longer there to answer my questions and point me to the Truth. It is ironic that his death pointed me toward the fullness of Truth as I began a journey for answers to the great question of suffering servants.

The rest of the journey is a gift of grace. I cannot claim any credit for it, except perhaps to say that I said yes to every door that opened before me. It has been four years since I first stepped through the doors of a Catholic Church and asked what I had to do to become Catholic. I have come to realize that there is much more to Our Lord’s Church than I ever thought.

That’s what my new friend and I were talking about in the sandwich shop in Oklahoma just hours after we met. Sure, there are spiritual gems of the Christian faith scattered to the four winds. She had experienced many of them for herself. I had as well. Every Christian denomination has a few pieces of the fullness in which to boast.

I can drive through the city where I live (St. Louis) and see a church on one corner, where I know they recite the prayers of the ancient faith and have some understanding of the sacramental life. I know that another church just down the street is hearing a sermon on sanctification. And a member of the church across the street has been blessed by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and she has been changed forever.

And yet, none of those parishioners will find all spiritual gems in their faith tradition, because there is only one place that has the fullness, all that I was seeking and more. Kneeling. Sanctification. The Creed. The Our Father. Sacraments. All biblical teaching, even solid teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Social Justice. Contemplation. Theology of the Body. Right to Life. Church history from “upon this rock” to the year 2009. More scripture reading in every Mass than many Protestants read in a week – maybe even a month. Don’t get me started on the lives of the saints.

I am amazed that I have access to all the pieces. Every last gem of the faith. And I know that I am home.

My friend has her own story. Like me, she has sojourned through many faith communities, and finally found Mother Church.

We are not alone. The mystery of conversion happens every year. There are men and women in RCIA classes this year. They are waiting, anticipating with a hunger that I remember very well, to receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Say a prayer for them this year. And join us in thanking God for continuing to call hearts to conversion.

Lunch with Preachers' Daughters

When Jesus Prays, He Prays for Unity

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus Christ said a very important prayer. Many Christians don’t remember it. I didn’t anyway, and as the daughter of a Protestant minister and former wife of a United Methodist minister, it should have been a memorable part of my faith formation. But if someone had asked me what one thing Jesus prayed for on the night of the Last Supper, the night he was betrayed, and the night of his arrest, I would have had to answer, “I don’t know.”

In the Gospel of John chapter 17, Our Lord prays to the Heavenly Father, proclaiming that the hour has come, and then He prays for His fledgling Church, saying:

I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me. John 17: 20-23

What did our Lord pray for on the night of his betrayal? He prayed that we would be one. That the people gathered in that room would be one, and that all who came after them would be one.
When I reread this passage a couple of years ago, I found myself wondering what that kind of unity would look like? If we could fully understand our Lord’s deepest desires as He prayed this prayer, what would the fulfillment of the prayer be?

Is there even a possibility that our Lord would be content with the way things have turned out? I wondered. Could we read between the lines of His prayer and infer that He meant for His Church to be a loosely connected set of people who call themselves Christians – and that it in no way bothered Him that they had divided into more than 33,000 denominations (according to David B. Barett, World Christian Encyclopedia) and had reached a point where they couldn’t seem to agree on any set of spiritual truths?

Is there even a remote possibility that our Lord’s prayer for unity would resemble the state of the “union” as it appears today? I had my doubts.

And if that isn’t quite what He had in mind, I said to myself, what would it look like? By “one” did Jesus mean for all of us to be Methodist? Assembly of God? Congregational? Was it even possible for all the Protestant denominations to abandon their separate branches of the faith and settle on another reformed branch as the one, true Church? Or was there another possibility?

Was it possible that Jesus meant for us to be one Church, with one deposit of faith, and that we were to remain faithful to that Church because Jesus promised to remain faithful to Her? Could it be that the Church our Lord had prayed for still existed somewhere? Was it possible that there was a Church that had stood the test of time, one that could trace Her roots back to that room and to the Apostles and to Peter and his keys to the kingdom? Was there a firm foundation, a core Church, a place of refuge and source of unity for all Christendom?

For the first time in my life, it didn’t seem that much of a stretch. In fact, it was beginning to make sense that our God would want His Church to be one. After all, this is the same Lord who proclaimed, Hear Oh Israel, the Lord your God is One God. The God who is One God would want nothing less than complete unity for his Church.

The beauty, strength, diversity, and historical significance of the Catholic Church called to me. I realized that the Catholic Church effectively and completely fulfills our Lord’s prayer for unity. This was the nagging truth that kept me exploring the Catholic Faith after spending the first forty years of my life in Protestant denominations. When I was ready to turn tail and run, this prayer haunted me, and I couldn’t abandon the call.

Somehow, I had to find out if my suspicions were true. I imagined a world that contained one unified Church, and I realized what kind of impact that would have on non-believers. How could anyone dismiss Christianity if we were truly one visible Church, I asked myself. When I imagined the world’s response at seeing all the churches come back together as one, it made me shiver with delight. And I realized that Jesus had predicted this in that same prayer when He shared the reason He desired unity among believers: “that the world may know that you sent me.” That just breaks my heart. Our lack of unity has given the world a reason to dismiss Jesus Christ as the Messiah, God’s Son. How can any of us ignore the call to unity when we look at it that way?

(article originally written by Denise Bossert and posted on the One Bread Lay Apostolate websitse which can be found at http://www.1bread.catholic.org/)

When Jesus Prays, He Prays for Unity

Preacher's Daughter

It seems like my dad always waited until nightfall to realize that he’d left his Bible on the podium at church. I enjoyed having a minister for a father, except at that moment in time. He’d casually lift his eyes from a bedtime snack and say, “Why don’t you run down to the church, Sis, and get my Bible for me?” I’d roll my eyes and groan, “Oh, Dad.” The idea of going into a church at night – by myself – just to fetch his Bible was not my idea of fun. It sounded more like a good way to see a ghost or something. If I hesitated further, Dad would smile and add, “If you do it, I’ll let you be my daughter.” After more eye-rolling, I’d pull myself out of the chair and trudge down the road to a darkened Presbyterian church and let myself inside.

Suddenly, I would shift gears, dashing full speed through the narthex and frantically feel along the far wall for light switches, the whole time praying, “Please, no angels. Please, no angels.” Then, I’d run like a maniac to the platform, now praying that the Bible would be right where Dad had indicated so that I would lose no time to a search effort, and finally, Bible in hand, I’d run back down the aisle, hitting the light switch in one fluid motion, as I passed through the narthex and out the church doors. I would barely drop the pace as I headed for home.
Now that I’m older some things have changed. For starters, I’m Catholic now. If you look closely at my conversion, it’s almost like Our Heavenly Father asked me to do the same thing my earthly father used to ask of me.

Sis, I want you to walk down this road where you’ll find my Word Made Flesh. At that point, I probably rolled my eyes a bit. I know I asked the Lord, Why me? Why not ask my sister or brother? Or start with my husband, at least. The idea of becoming Catholic wasn’t an easy road to go down alone.

Then, the Lord smiled and said, “I’ll let you be my daughter.” This time it was no joking matter. I reminded Him that I would probably make mistakes and look like an idiot sometimes as I fumble for the lights. But I want to please You, Lord. I want to follow You, wherever the journey leads me.

Conversion is like that.

The Father sends us on a mission. Sometimes fear of the unknown makes us want to say no, but we submit anyway. We dash in and dash out, seeking the first light switch we find, hoping to make it through the journey without experiencing anything that is too life-altering, when the way of real obedience is to walk at the Lord’s pace, even if it is through the dark night.

Preacher's Daughter

Roman Catholic Preacher's Kid

Roman Catholic Preacher’s Kid

My journey from Protestantism to Catholicism is as complex and beautiful as the God who orchestrated it.

During my early childhood, my father was a Wesleyan minister. When I was eleven, Dad changed denominations and became a Presbyterian minister. Dad’s faith journey wasn’t easy. He had high regard for the Wesleyan focus on holiness and sanctification. But his scriptural study had given him a new appreciation for infant baptism and many other things which the early church held sacred, things spelled out in the Apostle's Creed, things that were more Presbyterian than Wesleyan. The importance of seeking God’s Truth at any cost was the most important faith lesson my father taught me.

In October of 2003, Dad underwent surgery for a herniated disk. Six weeks later, an MRI showed that Dad had developed a massive staph infection and sustained a fracture to his back. They began immediate intravenous antibiotics and put Dad in a back brace. Before the medication could work, Dad died unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism. It had not been an easy death. He was only sixty and had spent the previous eight years battling a number of neurological disorders as well.

Following his death, I went on a quest for answers as to why the Lord of love and mercy would allow my dad to endure such suffering.

After a lot of seeking and searching, I found the answer in a book by St. John of the Cross. In his book Dark Night of the Soul, this saint explains that we should rejoice when we go through profound suffering, because God has not abandoned us, even if it seems like He has, but rather He is making good use of us (Starr translation 138). Protestants believe we are to pray for healing from our suffering or for strength to endure our suffering. Protestants do not subscribe to the teaching that they are to “contribute to the good of the People of God by freely uniting themselves to the Passion and death of Christ” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1499). In other words, they do not see the eternal value for the Kingdom of God in simple or profound human suffering. To them, suffering for the cause of Christ is primarily limited to persecution for one’s faith. What about a sore throat or a herniated disk? Could those be crosses as well? Could they be united to Christ's suffering and somehow be efficacious for the Kingdom of God?

While my father’s life taught me to seek the Lord for answers, his suffering provided me with the question the Lord wanted me to ask. By asking that one question on suffering and by seeking with all of my heart for the answer, the Lord was able to lead me home to the Catholic Church.

When my father died, I inherited much of his personal library, and I perused those books in a quest for answers. Once I had exhausted his library, I borrowed books from Saint Louis University library and purchased others at a local book store. By June, I had read some fifty books, including Confessions by St. Augustine, Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross and The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila.

I suppose my life as a Protestant was over at that point. When a Protestant falls in love with the saints, there’s no turning back. That’s how it was for me.

That fall, I enrolled in RCIA classes and began to explore the tenets of the Faith. I learned that the Catholic Church places a high premium on holiness and sanctification, AND they hold firmly to all that the early church taught . . . because they WERE the early church. I had followed Truth, and I had found my way home. On August 14, 2005, in the Year of the Eucharist, I received Our Lord, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in my First Communion.

Roman Catholic Preacher's Kid