My Faith Journey

I am hoping that by this time next month I will have more time to devote to this site. My readership, such as it is, has been silent and so I’m beginning to wonder if I’m beating a dead horse with my recent sociolinguistic posts. I’ll shake things up a bit today and write a post from the personal, rather than the abstract.

I’ve noticed on Bweinh, the Protestant site which consumes much more of my time than does my own site, that the Bweinhtributors have been posting about their faith journeys. As I’ve been thinking about my own faith recently, I’ll take a page from their book and share my journey.

Just over a quarter century ago, I was born to hard-working Protestant family in upstate NY. I came of age in the shadow of the variegated maples of the Adirondacks and the Vermont foothills. My infant dedication was held in the somewhat anti-intellectual branch of the Charismatic church to which my parents still belong. Born, so they claim, under a prophecy, I lived my life expecting great things from the Lord and I took the existence of God, redemptive history, and the bible as rock-solid ontological fact. I will say this for my upbringing—while it may have shied away from the codification of doctrine or the intellectualizing of the faith, it did instill in me the childlike simplicity touted by the gospels and recommended by the saints.

My father claims that he’d been fervently praying that he’d receive a second daughter and, so the story goes, was chided by the Holy Spirit. He was informed him in no uncertain terms that I’d be born a male and that the Lord had work set aside for me. I think I was perhaps six or seven when I was told of this and, as you can imagine, it stuck with me. Even during my youthful rebellions, I always had these words on the back-burner… wondering if they were true and what they might mean if they were.

I became increasingly involved in the life of the church. At age six I began attending their version of boy scouts (in which I continued until high school when it was disbanded). In middle school I was made an assistant Sunday School teacher. A few years after that I was made a full Sunday School teacher. Active in VBS and other volunteer programs, I spent a good many hours in that dusty old church. I will not say I was pious, exactly, but that I would go through the typical teen cycle of penitence and revolt—being reborn in frequent rededications like the phoenix of legend.

When I went to college—a Protestant college that was, despite strong liberal undercurrents, more than nominally Christian—I became involved with religious life on campus. My faith began to stumble under my new-found feminist extremism and my so-called enlightened notions. Thankfully during this time a much beloved mentor stepped up and concentrated his efforts on my proper education. In time I jettisoned my militant sexual politics and began to value tradition and formalized doctrine.

I started attending a Reformed Baptist church and delighted in its love of serving the Lord with intellect as well as emotion. In this time I also began developing a love for tradition and the ancient fathers. I felt that the Reformed church best embodied the holistic faith of the earliest Christians. I wanted my life, my morals, and my intellect to conform to the beliefs and values of those fathers who lived in the shadow of the Apostles. I wanted, in short, an historic faith… rather than an innovation whose birth could be traced to Azusa Street, circa 1906.

After graduation, I went on to graduate school and, through the fathers, began to see that the Reformed church was not where I needed to be. I began developing old-school values that did not fit with the mainstream of my church. I became too reliant on tradition for their liking, I became suspicious and then antagonistic toward birth control, I grew increasingly fond of the social and spiritual merits of more high church liturgical practices, I became increasingly sacramental and mystical in my understanding of the material world and its relationship to divine grace. Though I did not know it, I was becoming increasingly Catholic.

Around this time I became convinced of the importance of Apostolic Succession and the need for the true church to have an inarguable historic root to the Apostles (as understood in traditional terms and not in the mystery-laden spiritual root that my mom’s church claimed). This newfound belief, of course, ruled out all the Protestant branches save the Episcopal and so I began attending a church in the very traditional, very high church Continuing Anglican branch of the Episcopal community. From here I flirted with esoteric communities that claimed historic lineage to the Apostles such as the Assyrians, the non-Catholic Coptics, and even the Orthodox Church.

It was, I feel, the direct intercession of Mary that led me to Rome. In my journey my last obstacles were the cult of saints, the role of Mary, and icons. I had been, since my undergrad days, a staunch iconoclast—viewing them as a violation of the commandment against graven images. Within the span of two weeks, however, I learned that my entire opposition was based on a faulty understanding of the Catholic view of all three of these items.

The saints, I learned, are not prayed to in the same way as we pray to God. We do not worship saints. Instead, these venerable men and women are asked to pray on our behalf in much the same way that I might ask my pious living friends to pray for me. In fact, all who die in a state of grace become saints over time and so this was not an exclusive cast of characters. I, too, could be a saint… and was indeed called to live my life in such a way as to become one.

As to icons, I learned that these function in the same way as a cross—we use them as instruments to help channel our devotion and focus our prayer life. They are not graven images because we do not worship them… they serve us, not we them. There is no violation of the commandment at all because we do not put them above God. Just as the (for lack of a better term) Dionysian elements of the contemporary worship service soften our hearts into receptivity (see my earlier post), icons focus our intellect on the contemplation of holy things and holy men and women who we’d do well to emulate.

Mary, I admit, is a bit tricky to understand outside of Catholic epistemology. My reconciling of her as immaculate and Queen of Heaven comes exclusively from my bowing to the authority of the Church. This is, to be sure, a big obstacle for the Protestant and I fear I cannot do its defense proper justice. In many ways I took a unique entrance into Roman Catholicism—I was convinced that it possessed both the deposit of faith and the direction of the Holy Spirit to keep its dogmas free from error. Thus I conformed my beliefs to the Church’s teachings through the childlike faith of my youth—something which is entirely untenable to the individualistic nature of modern day Protestantism. While the teachings regarding Mary are not explicit in Scripture, I had long cultivated a deep respect for tradition—the same tradition that later spoke of Mary so glowingly. Like the Trinity, I took the implicit (or at least not contrary) teachings of Mary as the Spirit-led unfolding of true belief.

Moreover, when I was most anti-Mary, I learned that a Catholic peer felt that Mary herself was ardently interceding for me and mine. Even though I highly venerate Mary and feel a particular devotion to her (perhaps beyond the average Catholic’s), I know no one who gives her the worship due to God alone. She is so highly respected precisely because she so humbly submits to the will and service of her son. I see her as chief among the saints because she so unceasingly prays for us. She is the ultimate symbol of human obedience to God’s Messiah. I gladly and joyfully call her “Our Lady” for just as Spirit-filled Elizabeth informed her she is indeed blessed above all women (Lk 1:42).

And that, in a truncated form, is my journey. It was a linear path, I feel, from the emotions-laden soil of my youth to the increasingly intellectual and historic churches of the Reformed, Anglican, and finally Catholic Church. I have retained my conviction that the Charismata is alive and valid (both within the Charismatic branches of the Catholic Church and, as Vatican 2 affirms, within the Protestant churches of my youth). I recall my parents often saying (and indeed they say it still) that though they are for the most part anti-Catholic, the Charismatic Catholics they’ve met undoubtedly have the Spirit within them. I wonder what they will say when I confess that I have left the Protestant fold and have strived to become exactly that type of Catholic. I also wonder what they will say when I tell them that I am seriously inclined to view my dad’s prophecy and my recent spiritual growth as a call to a consecrated life—whether in a traditional priestly or monastic sense or in some lay capacity such as Opus Dei.