My Conversion Story

For awhile this has been a blog in search of a meaning. It's not merely a chronicle of my life as a stay-at-home, and it's not a real consistent reflection on the Church. For every urge I get to post a bunch of pics of my kids, I get another great idea for a long post about some spiritual insight I've had. So I feel stupid and post nothing. But some people get something out of this blog, apparently. So I won't just quit. But I don't have time to write right now. So I dug up this old piece, a speech I gave to the confirmation class a couple of years ago at our parish. I'll change some names to protect the innocent, but I finally feel like I've got nothing to hide. The personal facts I shared really affected my spiritual life and to take them all out would result in a much drier story.

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Hi, my name is [caelids]. I am 29 years old and am married and have two little boys. Last year I received confirmation and first communion here at [Our Lady of Obligation].

By the time I went to college, I was an atheist, because I thought God had no right to tell me what to do. The people who are supposed to make the biggest impression on you--your parents--had totally failed me. My dad smoked pot and wanted my stepmother to agree to an open marriage. He never went to church or read the bible or prayed around us. But he claimed to be a Christian and he wanted us to believe in Jesus. What a hypocrite! I thought. Then when I actually read some of the Old Testament, it seemed so sexist and violent. I thought, I can't believe in a God like this.

I believed in love. I rejected "organized religion" and settled for having one boyfriend after another. They would love me. And sooner or later, one of them would be The One. Right? Well because of my dad's unstable lifestyle, my stepmother left him and my family support was gone. I had to quit college and go into the military. But here I would find a new life. I had always wanted something exciting to happen to me. I thought being in the military, going on a boat and leaving my old existence behind, I would finally figure myself out, and maybe even find true love.

Well, I had some good times. For once I--who had never been invited to a party in high school--had a bunch of buddies to go out drinking with and we saw some places. I had a couple of boyfriends. But we always broke up, and the heartache never got any better. I got to feeling worse and worse about myself. I thought nobody would ever love me enough to want to marry me. That's all I really wanted. But even though they said they would, nobody I dated ever offered me a ring. So when my married supervisor made a pass at me, I thought, "Who do you think you're saving yourself for now?" We started having a fling.

From the outside, my life looked perfect. I worked at my job, I was promoted pretty fast, looked and acted the part, had my own apartment, had a car, all that. But I had no close friends. I went home alone every night. I was depressed most of the time, felt worthless. I would examine myself in the mirror. Maybe I needed a new outfit. Maybe I should take a college class. Maybe--oh, who was I kidding? I drank some beer and went to sleep.

I dreamt that I was alone on this huge boat that was drifting off course. I was trying to handle the controls all by myself. And I couldn't do it. I couldn't run from the pilothouse down to the engine room and cook the meals and run out the lines and fight the fires all by myself. I was sinking. Then I realized that there was a captain on the boat, and he could steer the boat back on course, if I would only let him. I didn't want to call the captain "God" but I realized I had no choice. I admitted there was a God, and I was probably disobeying him. Next Sunday, I walked up the street to the Grace Lutheran Church and just stood inside the door, listening to the music. I started to cry. Somebody came out, and asked me what was wrong. I ended up sitting at a table with a bunch of kindergarteners gluing cotton balls to pictures of sheep. Boy, I have really hit bottom, I thought.

But that wasn't the bottom. The bottom was when I came down with some kind of infection a few weeks later. I couldn't go to the corpsman on the boat, so I went to the Planned Parenthood on [Beetle Hill] in [Santa Barbara]. I sat in the parking lot, crying. I was scared. What if I was pregnant? What if I had herpes? What if I had AIDS? What if I was going to die, and nobody cared? The guy I was screwing around with didn't care about me. The US government didn't care about my problems. My family was far away. But at least they cared about me. What the hell did I think I was doing?? What if all this stuff about finding myself and believing in myself and forging my own identity was just a load of crap? I dried my eyes, went inside and got some medicine for a yeast infection. Then I went home and spent a VERY quiet night.

When we moved up here to [Sweet Home], I tried a few churches on for size. I missed everyone back at my old Bible Church, but I felt sure I could find a new church where the people were just as nice and the teaching was just as solid. I mean, churchgoing people who loved Jesus all believed the same thing, right? I just needed to find the church that had the right "feel". I went to a little church that met at a school. This is it! I thought. This church had it all--the people, the Bible, and good teaching. I got DH to go a couple of times, but he started going to this Catholic church that met in a strip mall, and I wasn't interested in going to another Mass if he wouldn't go to my church too.

I knew DH was trying to learn his faith. I'd been told by some ex-Catholics that they weren't really "fed" in the Catholic church, but he seemed to have plenty of resources. He had a Bible, stacks of books, tapes, even a radio station, and he prayed the Rosary every night. He offered to share these with me, but I didn't want to know anything about the Catholic church--because I felt sure some of the information would be twisted somehow and I would get confused. But I did pick up enough to know that, logically, some of the things I had heard about the Catholic faith from my church couldn't be right. For example, the women at the Bible study said things like, "Catholics worship the shroud of Turin," and "The Catholics were responsible for the Salem witch trials." Our pastor said that being a Catholic was not Christian--it was the same as being a Muslim or a Buddhist. This seemed like it was going too far, and I wanted to defend my husband from these false statements.

Then one day an issue of This Rock magazine arrived at our house. Aha, I thought, now I'll read through and skewer these weak and false arguments. I read skeptically through most of the issue, making lots of notes in the margins, until I reached the conversion story. I stopped writing and just read it. It was about a woman who wanted unity of faith with her husband as badly as I did, who had worked for some of the luminaries in the evangelical community, but ended up being dissatisfied with their disagreement on fundamental issues. Then I remembered something. The year before, my best friend from the military had called me to tell me she was pregnant after having a one-night stand. I tried to talk her out of it, but she went through with the abortion. This same friend had always affirmed her status as a church-going Christian. I never understood her decision in light of her faith. But it seemed that Protestants and evangelicals disagreed on a lot of things, not just abortion. I'd received a magazine subscription of Christianity Today for a year, and each issue tried to celebrate a facet of Christian "diversity". But was that just another name for disagreement and division over what I thought were the "essentials"?

Through this period, I had a growing sense that the Protestant "position," as such, was in trouble--but I wasn't ready to chuck it entirely. OK, so maybe the Protestants could learn a thing or two from the Catholics, but that didn't mean the Protestants were entirely wrong and the Catholics were entirely right. It seemed to defy common sense, and human nature. I just couldn't conceive of a church that was guaranteed to be free from error. I thought that "real" Christianity must be somewhere out there, but we had just failed to grasp it yet, and these institutions were just the unhappy middle ground we were stuck with until finding out the truth in heaven. I settled in for a long wait. I still prayed my prayer for God to show us the truth, even if I was the one who was wrong.

One night I was watching TV and Dateline came on. It was about a religious cult that had ended in tragedy when a baby died under mysterious circumstances. But what struck me the most was hearing about how the cult had gotten its start. It seems that the patriarch of the group had been going to a non-denominational church very like the one I was going to. But this man had decided that the church wasn't teaching "the truth" and so he decided to start a "home church." He invited family and friends to join him, and the result was this closed-off group of people who all thought they were getting direct revelation from God. One of these revelations resulted in the baby slowly starving to death.

Horrified, I turned off the TV, sat down with a pen and notebook, and started to think. The Protestant scheme was bankrupt. It was unworkable because there was no authority, there was no guarantee of truth, and therefore nothing and no one to stop people from going in all different directions to find what they felt was "their" peculiar form of Christianity. The Bible alone cannot guarantee interpretation free from error. It only serves as a sop to each individual's conscience--because the reader ultimately sets himself up as his own Pope. Even if my pastor was right, I had no way of knowing. I would have to depend upon him for knowledge of faith and interpretation of Scripture, and if that was true, why should it be so preposterous to depend on the Pope for the same guidance?

I was in a hard position. My church was about to throw me a baby shower, and I was ten days from giving birth. I called up the pastor's wife and asked for a meeting. I wasn't just going to drop off the face of the earth. But I couldn't tell her everything. I simply said goodbye and to call everything off. I struggled with a new baby and no friends. I wasn't ready to go to the Catholic Church yet. Dean kept saying, "come home." But I told him it was like going behind enemy lines.

Instead, I sat nursing my baby and read books about the Church. I was skeptical at first, but everything made sense. The documentation, the Scripture references, the history, it was all there. I found myself wishing that Protestantism had so firm a foundation. That fall I enrolled in RCIA, and since then it has been like dominoes falling, my love for the Church.

I have such profound relief and peace that I can know the truth. And when people say that "the truth sets you free," they don't mean that it sets you free from rules, and responsibilities, and the need to be obedient. Rather, knowing the truth sets you free from the fear that you are not loved. The Church is a family. And, like the parents that sometimes disappoint, there are people in the Church who sometimes disappoint us. The Church isn't a sexy, slick, well-marketed fad. It is like a tarnished old bell, lying forlorn and forgotten in an old shop. The young ones come in and are fascinated by the bright and shiny, brittle things. But strike just once, and they break, whereas that old bell rings the louder.

You are coming here for confirmation. That is putting on the armor of God. In this sacrament, you will be given special graces, actual graces that are going to strengthen you for what--I promise--will be a fight to the finish.

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