Seven epiphanies that made me Catholic: 7QT VII, seriatim.

efi­ni­tions mat­ter, and words mean things. But slop­py usages abound, and they encour­age con­fused think­ing and make-believe. If I say, “I am Catholic,” I ought to mean some­thing more than that I show up at a par­tic­u­lar build­ing on Sun­days. I ought to mean more, even, than that I agree with a cer­tain set of doc­trines.

Recent­ly, Catholic con­verts like Bryan Cross and Jason Stell­man have used the term “par­a­digm shift” to describe what con­ver­sion means. More than the church you hap­pen to “belong to,” more than a series of beliefs on a check­list, being Catholic implies a par­tic­u­lar way of under­stand­ing real­i­ty. More than what you believe, it is how you think.

If some­one said, “I am a cap­i­tal­ist,” but thought and act­ed as though Marx­ism were true, would you think he was any­thing oth­er than a delud­ed fool? Would you sus­pect he was apply­ing the label “cap­i­tal­ist” to him­self for ulte­ri­or motives? Would you not say, “You know, you can’t just call your­self a cap­i­tal­ist but believe these oth­er things. You can’t call your­self a cap­i­tal­ist if you under­stand real­i­ty through a Marx­ist par­a­digm.” If words are no longer used to describe real­i­ty, if they have noth­ing fixed to which they point, then real­i­ty can no longer be known. For real­i­ty is known through the words we use to describe it.

So I have start­ed with a tan­gent and a soap­box. But my con­ver­sion to the Catholic Church entailed a series of epipha­nies, where­by a man who once under­stood the world look­ing west turned around and faced east. If you’ve stood on your head your whole life, things look very dif­fer­ent when you final­ly stand upright. That can be a dis­con­cert­ing expe­ri­ence; it can also car­ry a great deal of won­der and joy. I am Catholic today not because I jumped through a series of hoops and then went through a par­tic­u­lar cer­e­mo­ny on a par­tic­u­lar night; I am Catholic today because I once under­stood real­i­ty that way, and now I under­stand it this way. I come at life from a very dif­fer­ent set of assump­tions about the way things are.

MY CHURCH MUST NOT CONFORM TO ME. I MUST CONFORM TO MY CHURCH.

I used to church hop a lot. I grew up Unit­ed Methodist, but start­ing in my twen­ties (after I had recov­ered from a hazy soup of New Ageism), my church atten­dance was like darts scat­tered across a sec­tar­i­an map. At one time or anoth­er, I was Methodist, I was Pres­by­ter­ian, I was Bap­tist. I was Epis­co­palian, I was Luther­an. I was Unit­ed Church of Christ, Dis­ci­ples of Christ, Assem­blies of God.

There were dif­fer­ent and com­pli­cat­ed rea­sons for all that scat­ter­shot wor­ship, but the most impor­tant was this: In the back of my mind, I had com­posed a list of the things I already believed; and I was look­ing, oft in vain, for the church that taught all those things. I would com­pare the vary­ing beliefs of the dif­fer­ent sects, and I would go down the list and say, “Yes, that’s right”; “No, that’s wrong.”

Then one day I real­ized I had it back­ward. By that time, I had already tak­en a dif­fer­ent approach to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of becom­ing Catholic. In oth­er words, I made a list of every­thing the Church taught and, rather than say­ing “Yes that’s right” or “No that’s wrong,” I asked, “Could that be right after all?” Even­tu­al­ly I got to a point of sur­ren­der. I said, Well, if Christ has ensured that the Church will nev­er teach error, then any dif­fi­cul­ties I have with x, y, or z must be my own error, not the Church’s; and I’ll just have to work it out. I’ll have to fig­ure out where I am wrong. I must con­form to the Church Christ gave us, not the oth­er way around.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE NEEDS MODELS AND WITNESSES

One of the great errors of Protes­tantism is that it has a cramped view of his­to­ry. I mean this: The few who look to Chris­t­ian his­to­ry for mod­els gen­er­al­ly look to the great preach­ers and the great reform­ers. Preach­ing and reform are not bad of them­selves. But the prob­lem aris­es when Calvin and Luther and Wes­ley become valu­able only for what they taught, not for how they lived, or whether they lived well at all. (Calvin and Luther were par­tic­u­lar­ly nasty.) In oth­er words, Protes­tants may have intel­lec­tu­al mod­els, but not spir­i­tu­al ones. They often for­get who has come before.

I remem­ber when I first read about the life of Gian­na Beretta Mol­la and knew that I had been robbed. What I mean by that is that the Catholic prac­tice of declar­ing cer­tain men and women saints is about more than the doc­trine of the Church Tri­umphant and that we have inter­ces­sors in Heav­en to call upon. It is about giv­ing us mod­els and exam­ples of how to live.

The Chris­t­ian life needs mod­els. We need a cloud of wit­ness­es (Heb. 12:1). We need to know that oth­ers have faced the same dark night as our­selves, and that they have been saints any­way. We need exam­ples to show us why the uni­ver­sal call to holi­ness mat­ters. By remov­ing saints from their lex­i­con, Protes­tants have removed exam­ples and wit­ness­es; and each new gen­er­a­tion must fig­ure out how to live the Chris­t­ian life ab ovo.

THE CENTER OF CHRISTIAN WORSHIP IS SACRIFICE, NOT PREACHING

What­ev­er they might want to claim, Protes­tantism is not about Jesus—at least, not about Jesus Him­self. Rather, it is about what has been said about Jesus. The cen­ter of their wor­ship is a book and the exe­ge­sis of that book. In oth­er words, Protes­tantism is not so much about a Per­son to be known as it is about things that have been said. A Protes­tant who attend­ed Mass with me once said, “The ser­mon was too short.”

And lengthy ser­mons were the expec­ta­tion I grew up with. When I went to Church, I sought a pow­er­ful ser­mon and the preach­ing of “the Word” (by which I meant the Bible). Only lat­er would I real­ize a sim­ple truth: God did not become man so that He could preach The Ser­mon on the Mount. Christ’s para­bles did not redeem us. God became man for the Cross. The Cross redeemed us. And although what Christ taught is, prop­er­ly, part of wor­ship, and exe­ge­sis has an impor­tant place, it is not the cen­ter of wor­ship. The cen­ter of wor­ship is Cal­vary. The cen­ter of wor­ship is the Sac­ri­fice of the Mass.

THE WORD OF GOD IS A PERSON

This one sounds obvi­ous, because it is said in Sacred Scrip­ture more than once: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). But as I said: When­ev­er I spoke about “the word of God,” I meant the Bible. The dan­ger is that you reduce the word of God to a sin­gle bound object, in which you encounter, not Christ, but words.

What pre­pared me to under­stand that the word of God is a Per­son was my con­stant feel­ing that some­thing was miss­ing. The irony of that was that I would read the Bible over and over, in hopes that I would find the miss­ing thing there. But the more I read the Bible, the more I lacked it. For all that I had loved and mem­o­rized the Scrip­tures, I was miss­ing an encounter with Christ Him­self. I do not mean to dimin­ish the impor­tance of the Bible, but only to say that the Bible should direct us to Christ, not sub­sti­tute for the encounter. And we encounter Christ in the Eucharist.

THE SACRAMENTS ARE MATTER REDEEMED

I used to have a Gnos­tic and Manichean bias. I sus­pect­ed that ide­al wor­ship involved bare walls, wood­en pews, one lectern, a small cross (emp­ty), a hym­nal, a Bible (prefer­ably the King James), and a preach­er dressed for the office. I thought that mate­r­i­al things were mean, or at least that they were only for sec­u­lar use. When Christ said to pray in your clos­et, I sus­pect­ed that it was an emp­ty clos­et and smelled of moth­balls. Why moth­balls would have been need­ed in an emp­ty clos­et, I did not ask myself.

What brought me to sacra­men­tal faith was the real­iza­tion that Christ’s death redeemed mat­ter too. Mat­ter did not stay cor­rupt after the Res­ur­rec­tion. It had been cor­rupt­ed in the first place only by the sin of Adam and Eve; but Christ did not redeem the world by half. Thus mat­ter plays a part in our sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion, and that is what the Sacra­ments are. It is why God gives us grace through water, through oil, through a priest’s hands, through bread, through wine, through sacra­men­tals.

MARY IS THE AUTHOR OF THE INCARNATION

I used to think only sel­dom about Mary. I remem­bered her at Christ­mas. Oth­er than get­ting Jesus here, she had no sig­nif­i­cance or pur­pose and I could for­get her. She was a used woman.

In truth, I would get ner­vous at any dis­cus­sion about Mary. In my view, Mary was a Jew­ish woman who was Catholic and had no busi­ness being Protes­tant. Then a Catholic I once knew fif­teen years ago spoke to me just one sen­tence: “God chose her to come to us.” I knew that, but I did­n’t know that.

And here was the pow­er­ful truth hid­den like a time-bomb in those words: God could have achieved the Incar­na­tion any way he want­ed. But he chose to come through a wom­an’s con­cep­tion; and he chose that woman, and no oth­er who would ever live. That makes Mary impor­tant in sal­va­tion. There is sal­va­tion because there was Incar­na­tion, and there was Incar­na­tion because of Mary. When God became man, he became man inside her. The Incar­na­tion took place in her womb. Inside her, she car­ried God.

God could not pos­si­bly have said, “I guess Mary will have to do.” What He said was, “I have cre­at­ed Mary specif­i­cal­ly for this grace. I have cre­at­ed Mary so that, through her, I will come and redeem the world.” And yet some­how, of all the peo­ple in the Bible, she is the one Protes­tants talk about the least. When was the last time a Protes­tant pas­tor gave a ser­mon about Mary, except it be to say that Catholics are all wrong?

So I real­ized that the Catholics were right to hon­or Mary as high­ly as they do. For they could not pos­si­bly hon­or her more than God already has.

THE ESSENCE OF FAITH IS MYSTERY

As a Protes­tant, my faith involved a con­stant search for under­stand­ing and knowl­edge. Those aren’t bad things, but the intel­lect has lim­its. The smartest per­son to ever live was St. Thomas Aquinas, and he right­ly said that every­thing he wrote was “straw.”

What saved me from intel­lec­tu­al pride (though I still strug­gle with it) was the real­iza­tion that not my intel­lect, nor all the books I’ve read, nor every­thing I know, will ever sat­is­fy my hunger. Spir­i­tu­al hunger can only be sat­is­fied by an encounter with mys­tery. It is in the inef­fa­ble that we find truth. The true desire of man is not to say, “Okay, now I under­stand”; but to always be able to say, “Wow.”

In truth, I was too bored as a Protes­tant. I always got to the end of what there was to know and under­stand. But I will nev­er get to the bot­tom of all there is to dis­cov­er in the Catholic faith, even if I had sev­en hun­dred life­times. And I sus­pect that, even in Heav­en, per­fect­ed, we will nev­er get to the bot­tom of God, and that Heav­en will be an eter­nal expe­ri­ence of “Wow! Real­ly? Is it real­ly as won­der­ful as all that?” Only to find a deep­er and more won­der­ful “Wow” the next moment.

 

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Con­ver­sion Diary.