(This was originally posted July 2016.)
I've been a little less consistent with blogging the past month or so. I've been more focused on planning Joseph's homeschool year (which we've officially begun! Woohoo!) as well as being pulled to do a bit more spiritual reading, prayer and listening to talks. It's been good to back up a bit from blogging and social media and slow the pace down a bit more.
But, with that being said, I thought I'd share a personal witness to the love of Christ in my life. God-willing, perhaps one day Bill and I will share our conversion story, because it really is one-in-the-same and God did a huge work in our lives, unexpectedly, during an 8 month period when we were not together (long story!). God brought a greater good out of the pain we each went through. And in hindsight, God gave us something better - the missing piece of our relationship and our individual lives: Him.
NOMINALLY CATHOLIC
The term "nominally Catholic" refers to one who claims to be Catholic, but doesn't practice the Faith. Typically they don't attend Mass on Sundays and they don't follow all the teachings of the Catholic Church; they may accept some teachings (like that Jesus rose from the dead or that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit), but not others (for instance, in areas of morality, the existence of hell and the devil, and so on).
Sometimes, it's just in the ignorance of their faith and an apathetic attitude toward it or other times, it's out of an obstinate denial and refusal to accept certain truths. Whatever the reason, a nominal Catholic is one who is Catholic by name only but not by their sincere desire to live according to Christ's ways. This is a dangerous way to live.
I would certainly have qualified for this category.
My remembrance of Catholicism growing up was the things I did: I went to Mass; I went to Catholic school up until the eighth grade. I made my Sacraments. After Confirmation, I went to youth group a bit but then I faded away from that. I don't recall really having a prayer life at all. Maybe here and there (like when I really needed something from God). Sunday was the day to go to church, but my faith never really "connected" with the rest of my life. However, at the same time, I knew God was important and certain values were important, but I just didn't "get it." It never became completely real to me.
I would say that was the biggest thing: My faith was a backdrop in my mind and it wasn't something that permeated all that I did. Yet at the same time I knew God was important (for example, I always wanted the boy I was dating at the time to share my Catholic beliefs and believe in God)...but things just didn't "click."
So I was happy when I met my now-husband and we started dating my senior year in high school . I was happy because God was important to him too, and to make it better, we both went to the same parish. Yet the role God was supposed to have in our relationship didn't quite "click" for us either.
FALLING AWAY
So off I went, away to college, and I stopped going to Mass - not out of a deliberate choice - but just because it wasn't important enough to me. I had school, studying, a Division I volleyball schedule, work, and hanging out to do (sadly, this topped going to Mass). I fell into the typical college lifestyle too, without going into details. After about two years in college of what was a continued walk away from God - not by words, but by actions and the way I lived my life - I went through a particularly rough time. I was depressed (though no one could ever tell from the outside, for in appearance I "had it all") and remember often laying upon my pillow at night with deep sadness and tears. I filled my days with many "exciting" distractions, events, parties, and concerts. But nothing eased the sadness at the end of the day and nothing removed the deeper emptiness I was feeling inside. I remember going for long drives on open roads, listening to country music or John Mayer (my favorite at that time) and playing his song "Why Georgia" with the lyrics:
And I wonder sometimes
about a still, verdictless life.
Am I living it right, am I living it right?
Looking back, I see that I was searching for more (even though I believed in God!) and didn't even realize I was.
How could this be? How could someone raised in a Catholic home, believing in God, still feel an emptiness and a longing for "something more?" I will answer that in a bit!
Anyway, during this depressing time in my life, it prompted me to turn to God. I remember going into a Christian bookstore and picking out a book on growing in Christian character. It was my first time really taking the initiative in my faith and trying to live more like a Christian. I really didn't know what I was doing or how to go about it. I just remember trying to read a little bit of it and praying every night. Eventually that dropped off because around August I had to head back to college for volleyball's preseason.
That's what happens - more likely than not - when you don't have someone to support you in your faith journey: You can easily get discouraged - or lazy - and give up or let it go. That is why we so very much need to surround ourselves with other good and practicing Catholics and need holy friendships!
Anyway, back at college my depression and bitterness continued to grow. I continued in my wayward "typical" college lifestyle and was finally brought to so low of a point that I had made up my mind to go to Mass the next Sunday. I remember crying quietly to myself on a ten hour bus ride back from a volleyball tournament in North Carolina, at about 2am in the morning, and telling myself that "I just need to go to Mass tomorrow!"
TRUE FREEDOM
Now everyone has a different experience in their conversion and I absolutely love to hear people's conversion stories because they always inspire me!
For me, it happened rather "dramatically" (in an interior sort of way, not with signs and wonders or visions).
So...I followed through with my resolve and went to Mass that Sunday morning. When I walked out of Mass, I felt an incredible weight and burden lifted off of my shoulders. It was really indescribable. From it, I just knew it was the Lord who instantaneously took away all my sadness, suffering, and emptiness. It was truly a miracle for me. I was convicted at that moment that God was real and Christ was with me. And I remember thinking that if I did not follow Him, I would be spitting in His face. (Yes! I remember that precise thought!) God just flooded my soul at that moment with an incredible heavenly peace and joy that I had never known before and my soul was filled with this overwhelming peace and joy for two weeks. Even until this day, I have never experienced that degree of "bliss" I did at the very beginning of my conversion. (He was definitely wooing me with the "spiritual sweets!") Heaven is real and this was only a mere, itty bitty taste of it. But God's peace and joy are beyond our understanding!
I knew at that moment that Christ had saved me from this misery I was going through. From there, the Holy Spirit lead me to Confession, to taking up daily Mass, daily prayer, and praying the daily Rosary - and all very rapidly after that experience at Mass. I don't recall (before my reversion back to my Faith) knowing that there even was such a thing as daily Mass. The Rosary? I'm sure I prayed it a few times during my life (although I can't remember for certain, except one explicit time for the intention that Bill and I would be together again after I had broken up with him - prayer answered! :P), but I certainly didn't have the knowledge that this was a daily devotion that our Lady wanted us to do. It was all God's grace and the Holy Spirit prompting me to do these things. God is amazing!
The even more miraculous part of my conversion was that my husband's conversion was happening at the very same time. At this time, however, we had broken up and had not spoken in months...so as this was happening to me, I had no idea that Bill was going through a very similar experience. It was only in hindsight after talking and coming back to together that we learned this! ...Funny because about a month after I originally wrote this post, Bill and I were invited onto a Catholic radio show called Catholic Matters to share our conversion story. You can listen to it here. Just go to the date September 7, 2016.
If I could compare my conversion with one line in Scripture, it's this:
...they left everything and followed him. [Luke 5:11]
I had never felt so free in my life and yet the struggle in the midst of other college friends who didn't understand what happened to me was very real. Sometimes I would fall into things I really did not want to be around, but I thank God for the Catholic campus ministry He brought onto campus that very same year my conversion happened, because I was given that strength and support I needed as well as a true knowledge of what it means to be Catholic and have an interior life through prayer and virtue.
From all of this, it was as though the Catholic faith I was taught and knew of from growing up was not quite the same Catholic faith I was now growing in my understanding of. The Catholic Church I was now learning about was so deep, so beautiful and the relationship offered to us with Christ within the Church so rich and full (found in its fullest at Holy Communion!). "Where was this during my years growing up?? ...Why didn't I hear this? ...Why didn't I really care?" I sometimes wondered. This was, of course, the same Catholic faith, but I was just hearing it for the first time in a whole new light and some parts of it were entirely new to me altogether!
THE DIFFERENCE
Do you really want to know what made the difference from before and after my reversion back to God? Do you want to really know why I so quickly loved being Catholic and had come to embrace with joy all the Catholic Church has to give us? It was because I had opened myself up to Jesus Christ. It was because I had opened the door of my heart that He had been patiently knocking at, that I came to deeply know His great love for me. It was this real, living, and intimate relationship with Christ that I had finally come to know that made all the difference in my "before" and "after." And it's something that Christ offers to all of us, if we are willing to commit our lives to Him.
Up until that point in time, no one had ever presented me with this radical idea of living all for Christ. But once I had encountered the "heart and soul" of being Catholic - Christ Himself - it was from there that the entire Catholic faith became animated, full of beauty, truth and goodness because God is Truth, beauty, and goodness. Once I fell in love with Christ, I finally got what it meant to be Catholic, to...
...love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. [Matthew 22:37]
Because I had opened the door to Christ in a moment of desperation, it was then that He stepped in. And I made a resolve to live all for Him from that moment on and it's a commitment I try to keep every day, though I fail sometimes and am still a sinner. He loves me though. This I am confident of. And I try with all my heart and soul to love Him; I am confident He sees this desire, even though I fall because I am a weak person. It's only by His grace that I can do anything good and I come to understanding this more and more each day. "All is grace!" as St. Therese the Little Flower often said.
You see, it is this relationship with Christ that illuminates all that the truths that Christ has given us and have been safeguarded, taught and expounded upon by the Catholic Church beginning with the Apostles and passed down throughout the centuries in an unbroken line of teaching and authority. It was only from this relationship with Christ that I began to thirst for knowing and loving Him more through prayer and Scripture, from the wisdom of the saints, and with His holy Mother Mary.
It's a shame that from the outside, Catholicism gets reduced to a "set of rules" one must follow. This is not the case at all, as I learned. The Blessed Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - is the beginning and the end of all we do! Christ is to be the center of all we do, think, and say! Yet sadly many Catholics have reduced Catholicism to a checklist (which is probably why non-Catholics perceive Catholics as such). It's not uncommon for the average Catholic to believe that by merely going to Mass and praying a few little prayers and being a "good" person, that it qualifies one for heaven. Far from it. We can't do a thing to get to heaven - it's only because Jesus Christ died on the Cross and rose from the dead that we are able to get into heaven. It is only by His blood.
Christ on the Cross is the greatest act of love He has shown you and me and every person who has, and will ever, live.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. [John 15:13]
Friendship with Christ, relationship with Christ, as He just told us, requires listening to Him and following His Commandments...
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. [John 14:15]
We know His Commandments through Sacred Scripture and the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church (that is guided by the Holy Spirit). Down through the centuries the Catholic Church, by the directing of the Holy Spirit, takes these "seeds of truth" Christ gave us and helps us to understand them more deeply and fully...
I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. [John 16:12]
You see, it's not that our Catholic faith adds anything at all, for all revelation ended after the death of the last Apostle - St. John. It's that the Holy Spirit - through the Church - continues to unfold God's Word in Scripture ("He will guide you to all truth"), in ever-deepening ways, so that we may have a deeper understanding of the things Christ has taught us and how to live a holy life pleasing to God, especially as our culture and the world around us presents us with new challenges and temptations in living this holy and virtuous life.
Nothing is meant to be a distraction from Jesus in our Catholic faith (although those on the outside - or who have left the Catholic Church and do not really understand Catholicism - may view it as such). All the devotions from Lent to the Rosary to the saints to holy water and so on are a means to an end: Jesus Christ.
If your Catholic faith means little to you and does not have much of a bearing on how you live your daily life, I suggest it's one thing: It's because you have not known and loved Christ as He desires you to know and love Him. (Take it from someone who came to realize this and still struggles with knowing and loving Christ as He ought to be known and loved, day in and day out!)
When our Lord appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1675, He told her,
Behold the Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love; and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for Me...
How greatly the Lord loves us and yet we love Him so little!
Believe me when I say that Christ loves you to death. In fact, He did die for you - on that Cross. C.S. Lewis put it like this:
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
So even if you were the only one who was ever created and would ever be created, He would have died for you just the same. Because that's how real and how afire His love for you is.
It's time to start opening that door and taking down those barriers. It's time to commit your life to Christ, if you have not. If you have, renew it.
So what about you, have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Do you surrender yourself wholly to Him? Are you going to commit your life to Him, from here on out, day in and day out, the best you can?
In your heart right now, tell the Lord. Commit your life to serving and loving Him above all else. Seek out the Sacrament of Confession as soon as you can - do not delay or let interruptions deter you! The devil would love that to happen. But such healing and grace come to us from God through this great and humbling Sacrament. Start going back to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day if you've stopped or have been inconsistent. God welcomes the repentant sinner with joy and an embrace!
Just put loving and serving God first in every moment and do not worry or be anxious about how certain things will work out or what will happen in the future. The Lord will take care of all things if you keep Him first...
In all your ways be mindful of Him, and He will make straight your paths. [Proverbs 3:6]
God's love is real and God's love is amazing. He is incredible and almighty. May we respond "Yes" with our Lady and always keep in mind her last recorded words in Scripture...
Do whatever He tells you. [John 2:5]