EARLY ATTEMPTS AT PRAYER

When I was in elementary school, I would talk to God while I should have been trying to get to sleep. My conversations were by no means profound, I'm not implying that was a spiritual adept at 10 or anything like that; some kind of mystical prodigy wunderkind. No, quite the opposite.

My conversations mostly involved crying out to a God I wasn't sure was there, asking him if he was. Questions, almost exclusively questions. I don't know when I stopped; I assume it was sometime after puberty hit and other life forms (just as mysterious but more noticeably present) began to cosume all my energy. I never heard God's voice in those days, not once. I always assumed he never answered me, and that was perhaps the reason I gave it up. But the truth is he did answer me, but not until years later. The lesson of God answering prayers in his own time has become more and more intelligible to me as I've gotten older, especially in the last few months. But it makes me wonder now: 1) What made me pray back then? 2) What if I hadn't? 3) Would I have recognized God's voice if I'd heard it? 4) Would I now?

I think the answers are 1) The human nature God made me with, trying to do what came natural to it and find God the creator; along with his providential leading. 2) I'm not sure, perhaps the prayers of others would have led me to Him, but maybe it was those earliest yearning cries that made the difference in my later years. 3) Probably not, and 4) Probably not.

TRUTH

While pursuing the historical issue as a preliminary step toward the Church, I had to deal with another issue almost as a foundation to any potential conversion. That was the issue of Truth itself. I had gone for many many years either believing that there was no such thing or just not caring. It is not surprising that I held either of those positions; it was almost mandatory to hold them for those of us born on the cusp of the Baby Boom and Generation X. It was and remains the definition of Orthodox Belief for our secular society.

But I had had, for some time, a nagging suspicion that there was such a thing as truth. Part of it came from my years as a fundamentalist, because if there is anything that your average Independent Baptist believes holds and teaches, it is that there is such a thing as Truth. Partly is was just a nagging feeling, an intuition, the closest thing to a purely philosophical thought I’ve ever had; I’ve come to believe we all have that intuition inside us as a part of our God given human nature, but that most of us either consciously drown it out or never are allowed to hear it over the din of modern living.

Anyway, St. Thomas rescued me from all that. I can’t remember why or how, but I came across two books about the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, one by Ralph McInerny and another by Fr. Robert Barron. They were both brief, pithy, accessible little books meant for the inquisitive, semi-intelligent, short-span-of-attention American inquirer. Me, in other words. I can’t quote from either book, nor even give you an outline of what they talked about, but they were the catalyst that allowed me to at least initially conceive of the fact, and care about the possibility, that there was such a thing as truth, and that I needed to get around to finding out about it before it was too late.

Another catalyst was my occasional felt needs to pray. They were few and far between, to be sure, but they were powerful. They can be neatly classified into two categories: Teaching and Sin.

When I became an elementary school teacher in 1993, I had enough of a conscience leftover from my years of self-centeredness (as well as an inborn gift of a tremendous love for children) to realize that I was embarking on a very sacred responsibility. I knew that my words and actions in the classroom could have a tremendous impact on real human lives, and it somehow drove me to prayer. I hadn’t prayed for years and years, really. Maybe a once-in-a-while cry to heaven for help or safety (probably mostly while driving), but as far as appealing to a God I wasn’t sure was listening, well that hadn’t occurred regularly in my life since Bible College, around a decade before.

Sin, on the other hand, led me not only to prayer, but a very clear picture of the reality of God. It was one sin in particular, which I won’t recount here (suffice to say it appears very high on every list of really bad sins), and which caused horrible intense pain to a person who didn’t deserve it. I’d never before felt the presence of God, and now that I was feeling it, I didn’t like it. It wasn't the feeling of the presence of God that caused the saints to wax eloquently about the blissfulness of divine Union, but rather the type that caused St. John the Divine to have nightmares and write the book of Revelation. It was wrath, pure and simple, and I felt it. It was unmistakable and I hope I never feel it again. It sent me to my knees and led directly to my one last search for the Truth that led me to Mother Church.

Coming soon . . . First encounters with Mary and the True Presence.

TRUTH AND FICTION

As I read what Catholics had to say about the Catholic faith, as well as non-Catholic sources not tainted by fundamentalist views, I learned that the Bishop of Rome can be traced right back to Peter. I learned that the Apostles did in fact receive authority from Christ to shepherd and rule the Church, and that the office of Apostle was passed down, and even more amazing, I found those last two nuggets of information in the Bible! Odd, it was, to find out that the very verses of scripture that prove Catholic doctrine are the ones (the FEW ones) that fundamentalist exegetes tend to take non-literally. Hmmmm…..

My eyes were being opened, and it was exciting. The more I read, the more I saw that the Church, rather than being the ominous evil institution that it was painted to be, was actually, logically, and rationally the Church that Jesus founded. Moreover, there was the intangible attraction to Catholic writers, who wrote with clarity and precision, based on good sources and sound logic, distilled from 2000 years of the best minds humanity had to offer working fervently to find the truth.

It wasn’t to long before the historical argument had me convinced that the Catholic Church was the true church. Why history, as opposed to doctrine, was the key to my conversion, I’m not sure. I think perhaps it has to do with the fact that I was never un-convinced of the truth of Christianity, even when for more than a decade I was truly agnostic. Agnosticism being, at least in my understanding, the belief that it is impossible to know anything about God with certainty. Indeed, I had nearly given up all hope of ever believing again, ever being able to go to church again, ever knowing God at all, when I found the Church. God’s timing is always impeccable, hindsight has taught me. Or, as I heard it expressed recently, God cooks with a crock pot while we want him to cook with a microwave. Too true, too true.

WWFLD?

“What do you want to be anyway [asked Lax]?”

“I don’t know; I guess what I want to be is to be a good Catholic.”

Lax replied, “What do you mean you want to be a good Catholic? What you should say is that you want to be a saint.”

“How do you expect me to become a saint…I can’t be a saint. I can’t be a saint.”

Then Lax said, “all that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what he created you to be if you consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

Thomas Merton

(The Seven Story Mountain, NY, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948, 1978 (New American Library, 1961), pp.237-38

HISTORY (cont'd)

To my great surprise, after I began to research the possiblity that the Catholic Church was THE CHURCH, I found that every single solitary thing I'd ever thought I knew about the Church was not only factually wrong, but quite often a deliberate deception or careless ignorant assumption. More than surprise, I felt chagrin. I'd been sold a bill of goods about God's true Church by people I trusted. Not that I lacked reasons to be happily rid of my fundamentalist past, but this was the topper of them all.

I think back to working at the Piedmont Gospel Bookstore in Winston-Salem, back in 1985 or so, when I was a Bible College Preacherboy. One day a very nice man, a very polite and sincere man, came into the store and tried to convince Mr. Kinney to stop selling the Jack Chick series of tracts.

If you haven't seen them, don't bother. Suffice to say they are mean-spirited, wrong-headed, and horribly simplistic. They're to the Catholic Church what the of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is to Judaism, but with smaller words and cute little cartoon illustrations. But I digress.

Mr. Kinney wouldn't have any of it. They sold, and he didn't see any downside to that. The man pointed out that they were insulting to Catholics and not true to boot. I saw his point in a way, but was proud that we'd stood our ground against the Cult of Catholicism, as I wasn't immune to referring to Holy Mother Church in those days. Fast forwarding to 1998, I was mad that I'd been duped, but didn't stay mad long, because the wonder of discovering the truth seems to banish the disappointment of having wallowed in error. Besides, I had been a well-meaning ignoramus, and without the foundation of my Baptist roots might never have cared to search for the truth in the first place.

HISTORY

Reasons I became Catholic in 1998

1. The Historical Argument: After leaving the bapto-fundamentalist culture in which I became a Christian, I searched, on and off, for what I believed to be the authentic church. I tried denominations, nondenominations, house churches, informal gatherings, "Bedside Baptist Church", everything. Even some non-Christian beliefs such as Hindu and Buddhism. My mistake was not recognizing that the "1st Century Church", as I called the object of my search, need not be the same in appearance as long it was the same in substance.The chances that any 2000 year old organization would look the same as it did at its founding were slim at best; for some reason I expected the church would still be at its purist perhaps meeting in caves, catacombs or homes.

The beginning of my historical re-education, the unlearning of my years of independent baptist theology, started with a timeless tract called "Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth". This simple little broadside opened my eyes to the possibility that, as the saying goes, you always find what you're looking for in the last place you look.

A 21st CENTURY MAN

I decided to subtitle this blog “The Spiritual Autobiography of a 21st Century Man” because I have a vision of what the 21st Century Man will be.



Having spent most of the 20th as an unwitting materialist logical positivist empiricist skeptic, the 21st Century Man will take a step back, breathe deep, and gaze about him; seeing just exactly where the philosophy of his day has gotten us as a society. Will he like what he sees? Will he be able to stumble about in a world where no one believes there is such a thing as right or wrong, apart from the utilitarian principle of “whatever makes me happy is right?"



I don’t think so. I couldn’t, and I’m the king of the self centered narcissists. In my limited philosophical internal dialogue, the question came down one day to nothing more than “Somebody gotta be right, and somebody gotta be wrong." And for some reason, I was determined to find out who was right. Somewhere in my psychosocial makeup, whether from nature or nurture, whether by the direct outpouring of the grace of God, or via the burning from the little spark of himself he created within me from the beginning, I wanted to find out the truth.



And that is why, despite everything, I am optimistic about the future. Everything works in cycles in this old world, and what goes around comes around. Mankind is close to having had enough of itself as god, to the point of nausea. Like the man who exploded from eating the wafer thin mint, we’re going to get sick of what we’ve made of the world, and from there, where else can we turn?



To the truth.



Where will we find it? I believe we’ll find it in the Church, which is to say we’ll have to find it in ourselves at least to some degree. There’s no way I can wait for “The Church” to turn things around and sit on my hands while I wait. I’m as much a part of the Church as my Bishop. A different part, let us be clear, with different responsibilities and duties, but still a part. Indeed if I (meaning the average Joe Layperson) don’t do anything, it doesn’t matter what the Bishop does, because then he’s like a general without an army, making plans that will never be carried out.



But I digress. My vision of the 21st Century, in a nutshell, is that the Truth will win out, because the lie is losing its luster.

EARLY RELIGIOUS LIFE

I had no religious upbringing. I was never taken to a worship service as a child. Not once.

I don’t really fault my parents for this, in the sense that I hold some grudge against them for neglecting that part of my life. That was where they found themselves, and they didn’t have anything to give me in the religion department. What they did give me was a sense of values: how to treat other people, the importance of honesty, the importance of work (though I didn’t take naturally to that one right off to be honest); in short I was raised to be moral but not religious.

I wasn’t trained to be anti-religious either. Like with all other things, I was taught that a person's religion is something to respect, as long as they didn't get all pushy about it (a lesson I forgot in my first few years as a Christian). So, all in all, I think my parents raised me quite well. When I was confronted with the claims of the Christian religion, I was ready to receive what I was hearing. Though now I reject the exact brand of Christianity I first embraced, I cling to Christianity itself, in the purest of its forms, the Catholic Church. Had my parents raised me in one religion or the other, perhaps I would not have been able to ever freely choose to be a Christian. The way it turned out, I had a tabula rasa, at least in a sense, so that I came into the possibility of giving my life over to something besides myself without preconceived notions.

Not that I plan to bring up my own children (should I ever have them) without religious training. They'll be brought up more Catholic than the Pope. The point will be to raise them in a manner that makes them eager to embrace the truth of the Church when it comes time to trade in the religion of the parents for the religion of the grownup son or daughter. Whether that happens at 10 years old, or 40.

I don't plan on making this a chronological memoir, but rather a series of essays based on random memories, thoughts linked to current events, or whatever random association comes up on a given day. blogger.com

INTRODUCTION

"Our nature imposes on us a certain pattern of development which we must follow if we are to fulfill our best capacities and achieve at least the partial happiness of being human. This pattern must be properly understood and it must be worked out in all its essential elements. Otherwise, we fail. But it can be stated very simply, in a single sentence: We must know the truth, and we must love the truth we know, and we must act according to the measure of our love."

Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth

Generally I'll be posting my own thoughts here, with only the occasional quote, but I wanted to put this one out front, so you'd know where I stand.

This will be the story of my journey toward, conversion to, and (hopefully) sanctification in, the "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church" (as the Creed calls it). I was baptized in 1979 or 80, at the Tucker Swamp Baptist Church in Zuni, Virginia. I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church (first confession, confirmation, first communion) on Easter Vigil, 1998, at the Parish of St. John the Baptist in Edmond, Oklahoma. Between the two events is a long story of faith, hope and love, interspersed with skepticism, despair and narcissism.

I'm telling it partly for me, so that I'll never foget what it took to get me where I am; partly for you, in case you're on a similar path, or are going to be and don't know it yet, and partly for Fr. Mary Louis, known to the world as Thomas Merton, who wrote, and, I'm convinced, prayed me, into Mother Church, and into an encounter with Truth incarnate.