Conversion Story, pt. I

In the "About the Clan" page, I refer to writing down the story of my conversion to Catholicism - someday.


Someday seems so nice and far off, doesn't it?  You never actually expect "someday" to become "last night after the kids are in bed".


But, through the promptings of both the Holy Spirit and those of several friends, that's what happened.  So following this fumbling introduction, you'll find part one of my conversion story.  I have written it strictly out of gratitude for the gifts God has given me.  


Anything good in this comes from Him.  All errors in grammar and shortcomings in speech are mine.
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I was raised, in no particular order:

• 1.       With both mother and father, who modeled what a strong marriage can look like
• 2.       With one sibling, my brother, who used to be younger than I am, but since I’ve stopped aging, he’s now older
• 3.       In a suburb of Detroit, in a dark brick ranch my grandfather helped build and my mom grew up in
• 4.       Going to the same Presbyterian church my mom went to when she was a child

We went to church regularly, and I attended both Sunday school and youth group.  Any other religious expression was an individual pursuit.   I don’t remember reading the Bible as a family, but I do remember my gold foil “Good News Bible”, with stick figures and crinkly onionskin paper.  I don’t remember praying much as a family, outside of grace before Thanksgiving dinner, but I do remember, from a very early age, talking to God.

Specifically, I remember talking to God every night, and asking Him to “put my Grandpa on”.  I’d wait, imagining God going to get my Grandpa Bob, who had died when I was five.  I’d sit patiently in silence, until I imagined Grandpa coming to the prayer line, and we’d chat for a bit.  Then God would get back on, and we’d say our goodbyes for the night.

I remember my childhood religious formation being strong enough to forge that vital element- a prayer life, something I never ever lost. 

I remember the rest of my childhood formation being tenuous enough that I had slipped it off by college.

My best friend in high school gave me a book to read right before I left for Michigan State.  It was called Judas My Brother, by Frank Yerby.  Briefly, it is a book that strives to strip Jesus, and by extension, Christianity, of anything Divine or mystical.  It has footnotes and endnotes galore, and to a 17 year old girl with little grounding in theology, it was a revelation.  With no education in Christian apologetics to help me critically consume the book, I was happy to embrace the whole thing.  The ability to toss aside some Bronze-age set of patriarchal ethics all while spouting off quotes from a historical novel is extremely attractive to a new college student.  So, convinced that at its heart, Christianity was nothing more than a monstrous tale of a monstrous God who sacrificed His own Son to Himself to appease His monstrous anger, I chucked it all.

More or less.

I still prayed.  Every night.  There was that remnant of my childhood faith that I couldn’t even begin to shake.  Even if the prayer was nothing more than, “Thank you for this day, goodnight,” I still said it.  I didn’t think too hard about who was on the receiving end of my prayer, but I always knew that there was Someone to whom I was grateful for another day of life.

Atheism or agnosticism were never serious considerations.  At no point during my spiritual wandering did I contemplate either of them very long.  Where I was, at this point, was a theist.  Nothing more. 

I think that when a person says, “I believe in God, but I don’t believe in religion”, there are only two options left for her.  The first is slip off into profound lukewarmness, and to begin viewing God like a magic lamp, taken out when there is a wish to be granted.  The other option is to keep looking for a deeper relationship with God, which means you have to keep coming up against the one thing you’d rather avoid.   

I wasn’t looking to distance God even further.  I wanted more.  And so, like someone who keeps checking out the window to see if their family is pulling in the driveway yet, I kept returning to the subject of Religion.  What was God?  Who was God?  What was the relationship between religion and God?  Did we need religion?  Did we need God?  All the typical questions that we humans ask ourselves, and, like many others, I had no objective method to use in finding answers.  I just knew there was something missing, and that something was God.  I also knew that I didn’t want to run the risk of finding Him in some religion that was going to tell me things like “right” and “wrong”.

Pride is fun, isn’t it?

So, looking for a deeper relationship with God that didn’t attempt to burden me with annoying lessons on morality, I found myself become more and more enamored of the New Age movement.

(end part I.  Part II is here.)