1. This will be my story, my journey of faith through life and how I eventually came to Catholic faith. Because no convictions can be removed from the context of a whole person and their history, I will share about my past, which no doubt shaped the attitude with which I received and thought about various experiences as they came about.

2. Before I get to my own story, I have to tell a bit about my lineage, because there is some mystery involved with it that raises a question of spiritual significance, which, depending on faith, may help explain what an uncommon sort of journey I’ve had. My Scottish ancestors were faithful Catholics. My last name essentially says I am a son of a certain town, and that town was the one that accompanied the oldest church in Scotland, a Catholic one which held the seat of the Bishop of Moray. These people held the Catholic faith for hundreds of years, including after the Protestant movement lead Presbyterianism to take over the country. It wasn’t until the time of the famines that they went to America and the town disappeared. Aside from general generational blessings, the doctrine of the Communion of the Saints would say it is most-likely that these ancestors are interceding for my family from heaven.

3. Looking a bit more immediately, my father had an interesting way of coming to the faith. He was a fairly unchurched teen in a very new-age kind of time for American youth. He began playing with tarot cards and a ouija board. His questions would be answered and his life predicted, and they would hold true. At first it started with good things, but eventually the answers became worse and worse, yet still came true. He reasoned that there was an evil that had power over his life, yet all the world was not chaos, so there must be a good God that keeps these forces in check and maintains order and blessing. He burned the occult items and believed in God.

4. He eventually became Christian and raised us such, but the charismatic pentecostal church I was raised in didn’t have such a great methodology for teaching us kids doctrine. I remember plenty of Old Testament stories on flannelgraphs and some central analogies about the fruit of the Spirit and the armor of God, which had their uses later, but I don’t remember ever properly learning the gospel or what God had to do with me as a person in a personal life purpose. This ended up being a critical lack when, in the same summer, all seven of my friends from the neighborhood moved away, as my family also left that church and didn’t enter another one, as I was just entering Jr High age with all of its questions about identity and person-hood. Yikes.

5. Now, my childhood wasn’t the greatest as it was. We were very poor, my town ended up inheriting whole ghettos from Chicago as they were shut down up there and people were evicted, and where they were absorbed is where I grew up. Both my parents worked to keep us afloat and the stress caused a lot of strife in family well-being, possibly enhanced by the burden of homeschooling my mother took on. Details of how all this went are extra personal and get into parental weaknesses so I’d rather not share them publicly, but I will say that a kid from where I am from didn’t get good messages about what they were worth to the world and what their life was for.

6. As a result, I spent pretty much the entirety of Jr High age to myself. Very closed in, very depressed, very confused, pretty much thinking on all of life and trying to figure it all out by myself perpetually all day every day. At this time, through my uncle in law, we got our first computer and soon the internet was invented, so all the good and bad from that was added into the picture. Eventually, after looking into many thoughts on life, I realized I didn’t know of Christianity as a formal teaching of a worldview, so I wanted to take a look at it. There was a “revival” at a different church in town and my dad was going, so I decided to go as well.

7. It ended up being a classic charismatic pentecostal party, and I was up in the balcony with some other kids watching it all happen. I went down to get something to drink from the water fountain and paused at the back of the wide center isle. The preacher was pointing people out, “You! You! You!” he shouted as they fell over, burst out laughing, flipped back over pews and such. He locked eyes with me and pointed “YOOOOUUU!” and… nothing. I let out a light “heh” style chuckle over his enthusiasm and the fact nothing happened and moved on, and at the end of the night we went home and I went to bed. Yet I woke up the next day with something I didn’t have in my years of despondency: Hope. So as my dad wanted to go to that church on Sunday nights, I went to the youth meetings there at the same time.

8. Not a lot happened at these. The youth leader was a very kind man who was good at relating to kids. He mostly told jokes and funny stories and then we would sing songs and pray. Time went on and I knew I wasn’t getting what I truly needed, but I didn’t know what it was that I needed. He did successfully teach me that God is real, looks upon us and our lives and loves us, and wants us to serve the world with good in some way. That’s a great message that made me want to know what exactly it was and how to do it, but I didn’t get those answers and stopped being able to go to that group, so I was left questioning.

9. Soon enough there was a youth center in my neighborhood that opened to give teenagers a safe place to hang out, since my neighborhood was overrun with gangs and drugs and many other bad things for us to get caught up in. It was affiliated with a church but was not a church, and they perhaps now and then invited us to talk about life and values, but didn’t preach to us. I started going regularly and made some friends. One morning, when I didn’t have anything in mind but eating, I went to make a peanut butter sandwich and when I picked up the knife, God spoke to my mind with a series of connections in a flash: “Knife -> Sword -> Sword of the Spirit -> The Word of God -> You need a Bible Study”

10. Now, I did not exaggerate before when I said that these churches did a poor job of teaching us kids. They were extremely experiential in their faith, and as such, while I had known about the bible, and knew people read it and talked about it, I don’t remember having ever heard the words “Bible Study” go together like that, so I had no idea what I was really looking for. Of course I knew what study was, but the bible was a very large and confusing book without a clear order to follow and I had no idea what in particular to be looking for in it. Fortunately, it wasn’t long after this that at one of the nights at this youth center one of my friends said “Hey, we’re starting a bible study, you want to do it?” so I said yes. It ended up being a self-study at home kind of thing and it simply explained the gospel and how to carry on a personal relationship with God.

11. Now, right there on my own in my living room reading it, all of reality and all my questions of identity and purpose fell into place. I accepted it, accepted salvation yes, but fear of hell was not at all the primary motivation here; to me, what I was primarily doing was accepting sonship. I was entering the kingdom of God, the family of God, among his people for the purpose of his people in the world. The world and all of its authorities and systems and even my own family had failed me in various ways, and God knew this, and came and died for all of us, and was inviting me to life with him, lived by faith with spiritual eyes and hopes, and a promise he would not fail me or leave me or forsake me. That is what I accepted.

12. I was very excited and took an interest in attending this church that the youth center was affiliated with. I started going to the youth group with my brother and sometimes the regular church services on Sundays. At this time I had all the same questions any new Christian has, but I remembered all those Old Testament stories from my childhood and now looked at them through Christian eyes, thus learning the answers to my questions as I asked them to myself, increasing my fervor in a very accelerated manner.

13. Now, this church was a charismatic church, yet more moderate and controlled in its practices. Still, we were big into singing. However, I was a terrible singer. Nonetheless, I knew I owed God everything, so even if my everything was not much, he deserved it. So as the widow giving her mite, I offered God praise with what little ability I had. After a couple weeks of this, right in the middle of a song, my voice instantly changed to sound how I felt in my heart. God had miraculously granted me singing. I was so excited I wanted to stop and shake the person next to me exclaiming what just happened, but I wasn’t sure if it would last, so I just continued singing, and it lasted. After this, I practiced my brother’s guitar about an hour a week, and within a month I had taught myself guitar to basic level and started writing songs.

14. I continued in my private practice of music and shared some songs with a friend at the neighborhood youth center. I knew God gave gifts so that we would use them for him, so I was wondering what the point of these gifts were if I was just going to write songs at home. As I was asking God about this in my mind, laying back on a futon, God said “Sit up” and I was a bit confused and again he said “Sit up” so I did, and just that moment as I did my brother was walking by and my sitting up made him notice me and ask if I wanted to go to youth group with him, so I did. The very second we walked in the doors I was approached by two friends from that youth center asking if I’d like to lead the music for their Christian school club. I agreed to this.

15. It was a bit odd, since I was homeschooled, so one of their friends picked me up and drove me over to the high school after it had ended and led me to the meeting room for this club. I had prepared a few songs, so I just led us in prayer to start then led us in song and finished in prayer. Everyone stayed standing there prayerfully, eyes closed, some with hands open, communing with God. I just quietly tucked away my guitar and sat down and the group leader got everyone to move on. It wouldn’t be until years later that one of my best friends, whom I met through this group, explained to me that such a thing had never happened before and usually everyone was in a rush to play games and eat snacks. This was the first of countless times in my life that it seemed God just chose to move in people when I would lead songs.

16. A bit after this time, those same two friends who asked me to lead the praise music, who were the leaders, asked or rather told me and four other guys to be the new leaders for the next school year. None of us had any experience as ministers of any sort, and we hardly knew each other, but we all accepted. We had no idea how to be leaders, so we decided to have sleepovers at each others houses all summer to pray, study the bible, and just do and teach what it says. Turns out that is a pretty good approach for amateurs to take. We became best of friends and grew in faith very rapidly, and we also decided that waiting until the school year didn’t make sense, so we did a summer bible study to lead up to it, laying out principles of Christian community for our group.

17. Let’s pause that group story for a moment and we’ll shift to my personal experiences on the side at the time. I was continuing at the other youth group and church on Sundays, and every single week I saw my friends returning with the same problems. I knew because we would have an “altar call” every meeting, where anyone with spiritual need could come forward for prayer, and as I was learning to be a minister to my peers, I was one of a team who had volunteered for this role at the youth group. I asked God why their problems never changed and he said “They know the covering of my grace but not the infilling of my word” so I knew I had to learn the bible for them.

18. I told all my friends they could ask me for the “word of the day” and I would always have a passage ready for them with the lesson it is communicating to encourage them. This kept me accountable to continue study at home and ended up providing to many friends precisely what they needed to hear that day. Eventually my peers started seeking me as someone who knew the faith, and they would ask questions I didn’t know the answer to, but then several passages would come to memory, combining to provide the answer, and I would explain it to them even as I learned it myself as it came out of my mouth.

19. Back to my group of friends, they had some similar experiences as we all got more involved and were looked to as leaders, and we became familiar enough with scripture to form a distaste for factions. We knew all Christians were supposed to be united and that they weren’t, and each had their own particular functions separately and sometimes almost actively excluding other Christians. We thought this was wrong, so we devoted a great deal of effort into ecumenical ministry, befriending and connecting as many youth groups and churches in town as we could. We did so fairly successfully, catching the attention of and encouraging an interdenominational youth pastors network, and planning and celebrating a city-wide youth rally orchestrated and carried out by youth.

20. In the middle of this, we also assisted a nondenominational house church in planting themselves as a regular church. Soon it was becoming time for us to go our separate ways for college days. Many wonders and even miracles had happened through these ministry years, common answers to prayers as we had need being things like controlling the weather down to the second or a large vicious dog instantly turning timid. We saved several friends from committing suicide, we saw many changed lives, we knew God was real and ready to work through anyone ready to seek and obey him. For sake of time, I won’t get into many of the details.

21. As some friends moved on to college, which I was too poor to do, I ended up actually returning to the church of the youth group I attended in Jr High. There my closeness with God and faith in his direct guidance increased, and he worked through me in prayer and music, in discernment of hearts, and once through a prophetic vision that woke me at 3am one night, which helped someone there choose the right path in a very difficult crossroads decision for their life. Eventually I felt too old to remain there, so I went to a Presbyterian church with a friend that I made through a family I knew from there and a high school sports ministry.

22. Through that friend at that church I made friends with a woman who was friends with his family, and she connected me with her prior college campus ministry, as she kept in touch with the leader and they were looking for a new music minister since the last one had graduated. I stayed there to do ministry, and in my ecumenical habit I also made friends with four other ministries on campus. As I continued with these ministries I helped plant two more churches. As things continued in this manner, I noticed that God always sent me to needy places and I was useful to those places and then they would cease needing me just as I was needed by another, so I came to understand myself perhaps as a missionary type of person.

23. I carried these thoughts in mind, and over the course of a year I always took special notice of anything about South Africa. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew there was something related to it that God wanted of me. Two years before this there was a college-age yet not campus-based ministry in town I had very loose connections with. I had visited once for a friend, and while we chatted in another area of the building I stopped mid-sentence and said “God is here” because I felt his presence descend on the building, which is a difficult thing to explain but I was familiar with from music ministry. We walked in and it was the time everyone had just started praying to draw near to God before singing. So from this and well-scripture-based teaching and community service, I knew they were a good church and nothing more.

24. So back to the year of South Africa, one night I headed out to the house of my campus minister to see the championship game that would decide if the Steelers went to the Superbowl or not. This was a big deal personally as he was a huge Steelers fan, they hadn’t been to the Superbowl for 20 years, and I had been spending Sundays at his house, letting him share his passion for the sport and team with me. I was deeply invested on a friendship level. Nonetheless, as I pulled up to his house, I felt God call to me and I stopped. A friend I led a smallgroup with called to me to ask if I was coming in, and I said no, I had to go. God was telling me to revisit that other ministry, though I had only been once two years prior, so I drove all the way across town and entered a bit late, yet entering exactly as they played a video about an upcoming missions trip to South Africa.

25. I did not have the resources to go and in the end could not accrue them, but then God provided through the overflow of the rest of the team and I went on that missions trip and it was heavily involved and it opened my view of societies and what faithfulness is meant to effect and fix and what only God can fix; the sheer scale of need in the world and humility in my smallness in comparison. The leader of the ministries there had many miracles that set him on his way as well, and he told me that he saw something different in me from the others, God’s strong hand on my life, and to never forget his calling. I already knew the extremes of Africa and wasn’t surprised by that, but coming home to the broken health, selfishness, and apathy of the US was the more shocking result of the trip. It was at once a bolster and a blow to my faith, but I continued as I best knew how. Just as Africa had societal ills, I saw these things in the US as spiritual ills. Still, my involvement in ministries ever shifted, and I started to wonder if I would ever be planted anywhere.

26. A big mess of things happened in this time. I tried to go to college, finished a year with great success in everything but math but ran out of money to go for the other 3 years. My parents got divorced and I was old enough to openly disagree with it and I did. Nonetheless I was there for my dad as he sorted through the fallout and I stayed with my mom to try and help her and my siblings. All through and after this rough patch I became best of friends with the friend from the Presbyterian church, made many international student friends, got connected with some wonderful groups of people, spent a lot of time being dearly loved by dear people, started falling for a wonderful woman who likewise thought the world of me, found solid employment after a long struggle, and was eventually doing quite well… then I was hit with mental illness.

27. It started out with a flash of what could only be described as death. Not Christian death with all those concepts, but abstract. Abyssal, abrupt, immediate, terrifying, futile, hopeless, piercing, projecting, empty, meaningless…. it was instant and debilitating, all-encompassing and consuming and… gone after a few seconds. Just like that. Back to normal. As one accustomed to communing and encountering and speaking to God, it felt like being torn away from him for a moment. Even though life was on a huge upswing, these flashes became more frequent, more intense, lasting longer, eventually leaving perpetual anxiety, then in time that anxiety became more intense, and eventually it would cycle from this intensity to a zombie-like feeling when my body just ran out of energy to keep it up, then I’d get rest and it was back.

28. No therapy helped, no wisdom helped, no comfort of friends helped, no diet or sleep or exercise helped, no prayer or faith helped. Eventually I got connected with a doctor and he diagnosed me with general anxiety disorder and panic disorder and gave me an SSRI and I reluctantly began taking it and it took care of the problem. Within two weeks there were no symptoms at all anymore. This ended up being a blow to my faith because I saw the commandments of God as commanding trust and promising peace, but nothing helped until this medicine. How could my trust and contentment in God–something that in some way I saw my salvation hanging on–be controlled by a sickness and a pill? Seeds of doubt planted in my belief system, but I moved forward.

29. Just as I had started taking this medicine and getting better, it was the middle of winter and I had the sense that I ought not be in a cold place. Not the personal preference of hating cold, but like I felt before about South Africa. God was telling me I had to be somewhere warm. I identified this clear thought to myself and then just 15 minutes later got an email from the mother of one of the friends I did those high school ministries with. She and her husband were missionaries of a sort, responsible for organizing support for an orphanage in Mexico, and they had lost a driver to drive all the kids to their various schools. She asked if I could help, I asked for a time frame of how soon, calculated if I could afford a one-way ticket in that window, saw that I could, got approval from my boss, and said yes.

30. It was to be half a year, so a friend of mine helped me arrange a fund-raising concert where he and I and a couple other friends would play songs and I’d talk about the mission, and it ended up raising funds very abundantly, much more than others according to him, as he had done many such events at the same location. So I went to live at this orphanage and drive the kids to and from their schools, trying to learn Spanish as I go, and eventually they got another bus driver so I switched to running a thrift store they used to raise funds for the orphanage. I had a good amount of off-time, so I got involved with a youth missions facility between the two locations.

31. While the time in Mexico was beautiful and I was greatly edified by the community there, I knew I was going to have to go home and would probably never be able to return. It was bittersweet in that sense, as I came to truly love the community life down there and knew from my return from South Africa, which was only a month-long trip, that returning from this one would be much harder. It was in Mexico that I had my first encounters with Catholicism. I never attended a Mass, but I did see entire towns of faithful celebrating their faith in the streets for various events, and I thought an entire culture publicly celebrating their Lord and saints of history was admirable.

32. My return ended up being even harder than I had imagined. The church I was attending, which sent me out as a missionary, did not care one bit about what took place there or anything about the orphans at all. My smallgroup had disbanded and no one who had been part of it seemed to care to really be a friend anymore. The church had become controlling and developed a weird authoritarian structure that was giving my brother grief, and unrelated but coinciding with this, the woman I had fallen for (honestly, loved more than anyone in my life to this day) and kept in touch with through my time in Mexico just kind of ran away from what we had, not speaking or responding to me anymore for seemingly no particular reason (later found out she basically got cold feet just at the idea of things maybe leading to marriage), crushing my heart.

33. On top of this, my family had lost our home while I was in Mexico and my mother remarried and siblings moved to different places. I nearly didn’t have a place to return to but my aunt had recently divorced, rather extra painfully, so I was able to move in with her for some hard times for us both. It felt like God was leaving me directionless and guessing. My aunt was used to help from her husband with her home business of a daycare, my cousin was 12 years old. I didn’t know how to be a help or what to be for my cousin, but as family we tried our best. It wasn’t always the best, but we were there for each other and saw each other through for the next seven years.

34. At the start of those years, a Korean friend of mine contacted me and said they needed a new music minister at their church, so I took that as God’s leading even though I was losing sense of his voice and presence, and helped as I could. I already felt like an outsider in America, so being among Koreans wasn’t too strange to me. Still, I had great difficulty finding employment, which strained my mental health, and as I prayed and received no answers anymore, I felt I was being tested and had to hold on. Even so, my sense of God faded further and further. I tried to draw nearer, but he just felt further. I lost sense of his hand, then of his presence, then of his voice, and eventually even of the memory of what it was like. All this while continuing in ministry, all while trying to seek more closely, repent more intensely, pray more faithfully, talking to my closest friends of this difficulty and asking for their prayer, and trying to deny what my heart was feeling as lies.

35. I felt as though I slipped to the end of my rope, and I held on with an iron grip, then the rope itself snapped. I didn’t feel as though I willfully let go of everything I believed, but it was like something that happened to me. And in quick succession, this snapping of a rope was immediately followed by a fall 6-inches onto a platform of a worldview, it was a secularist view in waiting. It was as though my entire epistemology inverted dynamics and God was no longer at the center, everything that had been pointing to God was now pointing to an empty space. I had no awareness of him, evidences that were of him now showed me only emptiness, and I was seeing many flaws in my beliefs. I wasn’t set in it as a stance, but it was a new set of touch points to feel like I was somewhere stable.

36. I saw many scriptures that made no sense to this experience. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Those who are faithful and pursue him and humble themselves and wait for him are supposed to find him. Why weren’t those promises happening? Then a thousand doubtful thoughts I had held back over the years broke the dam that held them. Why did I never fit with any ministry? Why did so many go so screwy? Why did they remain so factious? Why was there no clear form of God’s people on earth as a city on a hill? How could anyone be faithful to truth when we were all just taking our best guesses at it? If the Holy Spirit could raise Christ from the dead, why didn’t he seem to keep those seeking him faithful, and particularly me? How could we be faithful without certainty of required particular doctrine and practice?

37. I did not so much come to disagree with Christianity as I came to see it as nonexistent. I didn’t really know much about what Catholicism was or taught at the time, so when it came to my concept of Christianity, it became to me as a title for something without distinct form. As such, I could not agree to it because, well, what exactly was I agreeing to and affirming as true? A title? A sentiment? So rather than deciding to not be Christian anymore, it appeared that no one was actually able to be Christian, and so I had to cease pretending to be. It wasn’t until three months after this that I actually got the guts to make the announcement. Before I did, something terrible happened in my church.

38. The church was on hard times as it was because a pastor who was very old and whose mind was starting to go didn’t want to step down, so there was much conflict between him and the congregation over that. Yet among these trials, a woman in the church murdered her stepmother. It was a huge shock to everyone in this fairly small church. Apparently there were relational strains, a rage had built up in her over many years, and she eventually just exploded. The elders of the church tried to keep everyone in good faith. Great evils happen suddenly, but we need to trust God, seek him, pray for our sister who did this, and pray about the future. I had a different perspective.

39. I saw scripture saying we are the body of Christ, and as the Body is united by his one Holy Spirit, when one suffers, we all suffer. And we are to not hide sin, but if we confess our sins, as we walk in the light as he is in the light, he is faithful and just to cleanse us of all unrighteousness. And love covers a multitude of sins in this way, love leads us to bear each other’s burdens, love completes our unity, love shows us God. Though we had lunch together every Sunday and shared in community even through the week, we had failed to love this woman, and she failed to love us. There was not the trust to share these burdens and let them be healed, so they ate away at her until they inflamed and stole her humanity from her for a moment and she killed her husband’s mother. We had to repent of this and commit ourselves to trust and confession and forgiveness and reconciliation and love. I shared all of this with the elders and it was ignored completely and given no response.

40. Some time later I was in a church meeting about the pastor again, and he and the congregation were taking turns screaming at each other. I didn’t even believe in God anymore by that point, but I was pained to tears at the sight of it and took a turn to share several passages that speak of why Christ died for us and the love and patience we are supposed to have with one another. Everyone calmed down, but the old doubt came back. These people still professed faith, I completely lost sense of God and faith, yet somehow I cared more about what scripture said about the desires of the Holy Spirit who they claimed to commune with? It was surreal. It struck my mind as impossible. And while in one sense it pushed me further away, a seed remained in the back of my mind: Why did I care so much?

41. It came time that I couldn’t pretend anymore and I had to announce my lack of faith. I was concerned that in this time where people were already so burdened and weak that if they in any way saw God as working through me as their music minister, if I denied faith out of nowhere, it would trouble their own faith. Since I knew the pain of troubled faith, I didn’t want to cause it in anyone, and went well out of my way to try and prevent that in how I announced it, but no such thing happened at all. Instead, it seemed most just ignored it at best or at worst assumed I had some huge hidden evil driving me away from God and blinding me to truth.

42. Either way, hundreds of people, all but five friends, closed off to me. I tried getting in touch, but no one answered or responded. Instead of recognizing someone weakened and pained and caring for their soul, I was de facto excommunicated. Among these people were some I knew over ten years, people I considered as family. Of the five who still talked to me, three only ever wanted to talk about details of my faith, which I no longer cared about, as though it were a math problem to solve, not to talk to me as a person with a heart and a life. It was a very hurtful experience to go through and it took me two years to feel at peace. In the first year I developed strategies of managing it all, in the second year I found out that all of my strategies were a mirror of Buddhism, so I took an interest in that.

43. Buddhism taught me many useful things. Ways of thinking, types of awareness, ontological and epistemological deconstruction, metaphysical theory, ancient spiritual schools of philosophy in their mechanics and conclusions, openness to complete honesty of what you do and do not know, receiving others in the same manner, detachment from fear of the consequences of learning or experiencing something, organic and patient development of virtues in acceptance of one’s own strengths and weaknesses and life balance mindful of them, etc, etc. It made sense in many ways and reflected a lot of ways I self-treated myself through especially difficult things since childhood whenever I needed something now and tangible, not just hope for the future.

44. Nonetheless, while I practiced it and thought the worldviews and conclusions it found were interesting, I didn’t fully buy into it. Buddhism itself discouraged blind faith, so I was in no hurry to buy into it wholesale, and according to itself it could take a lifetime of devotion to even see what it is pointing to, and I thought I didn’t have it in me to devote my whole life to a maybe, so I proceeded through life as a perhaps particularly conscientious agnostic. Yet aside from all the skills I developed, unrealized at the time, the most valuable thing I found was openness to encountering and receiving the divine. I didn’t have gusto to chase after such possibilities, but happy-go-lucky apathy is much more open to divine encounter than hurt-and-bitter apathy, and receptive agnosticism is more likely to find the fullness of a path than a committed unknowing, since attachment to the principle of doubt will take you off any road halfway down.

45. After several years of this, life had taken an especially difficult turn and I was unemployed and my town was dying so the likelihood of finding a new job seemed exceedingly slim, especially since I devoted my life to getting a new one and yet had zero responses (even negative) on any front for three years, eating through my savings. My relatives were also all in dire straits, unable to help, and my aunt would soon be incapable of keeping me any longer. I was looking homelessness in the face, even prayed to the mere possibility of God, and eventually I was contacted by an old friend from high school. This is a friend I helped lead to Christ and tried to help guide in his early days of faith in college. He had been in the Navy and was just returning, starting a new life for himself, and invited me to join him in Omaha.

46. It was a strange time and strange circumstances. He had recently gotten engaged, and since he and I only managed to keep loose contact over the years, I hadn’t met his fiancee yet, so why invite me to live with him? They first visited and I met her and he made the proposition to move with him while she was present in a cafe. He was also friends with my sisters and mom, and had been through an atheist period in the Navy, now Catholic. He was one of the few I called right away when I had lost faith. She knew of our friendship and my trials, and I didn’t fully know then, but she was deeply full of faith as was he, and in that faith they did the opposite of what hundreds of others had done and chose to help me in a time of need as Good Samaritans in the actual manner the parable describes.

47. Due to the short timeline and my aunt and cousin visiting some relatives, I was unable even to really say goodbye. I packed my things as my friend prepared on his end, and he came back on a Saturday and we moved to Omaha. That night there happened to be a full lunar eclipse during a supermoon, so I called it a super bloodmoon and joked about it happening during my somewhat-forced exodus, that it was a sign against a town rejecting their prophet. I was truly joking, mostly because my friend was helping me move in the strength of his faith, yet a part of me did find the moon thing odd. A blood moon is a very significant biblical symbol of very important events, so it took my notice, happening at a huge event of my life. At the same time, I thought if there was a great other, maybe it doesn’t care about your understanding of it, like we don’t care about how our dogs think of us so long as there is a bond with them. If there was a great other, maybe it was a kind and powerful being on another level of being, but maybe not God.

48. We arrived to stay over at his mom’s since she had more room to sort out details of moving stuff into the space of an apartment he already had. His mom was away at the time and he left to get a couple things sorted so I was alone at the house. For whatever reason, I was compelled to pray in tongues. I had a few times in my agnostic years. It was mysterious, possibly divine, yet it wasn’t a declaration of a particular belief, even to myself. So it was as a comfort, an openness to possibility of some great other. In this moment I didn’t feel as though I decided to do it, rather I felt as though I was supposed to; not as being told by God, but simply supposed to by some necessity of the way of life, as though it was blessing the house in return for the blessing being extended to me. I remembered the miracle of my singing voice. I let that remembrance simply be.

49. After getting all moved in, I remained aloof to spiritual matters and my friend was a good friend, never prying or pressing, caring about where I was at and how I was feeling, ready to share but not trying to evoke my seeking of his sharing, and taking what I would communicate only as what I said and not presuming more. He encouraged me to be faithful to the truth as I best knew it, to be ready to discover and to learn, but to not pretend that I knew more for sake of his wishes. Interestingly enough, this is basically the same advice I had given him when he was returning to faith, which happened to be the same time I was leaving it. I told him not to fake your spirituality, and let it be messy if it is, because God knows if you’re faking, so there is no point. This brought to mind many people I helped sort out their faith even when I was agnostic, like a habit I just couldn’t turn off even though spiritual matters meant little to me personally.

50. Before I get to the next point, I’d like to interject a bit of perspective on a frustration of my many years as a music minister. I say “music minister” now as it is a more appropriate term, but back then the term everyone used was “worship leader” and I took that very seriously. Looking at Romans 12 and a few other passages, I knew worship was offering yourself and being transformed by the renewing of your mind, and in conjunction with both of these you would be able to know and also verify how pleasing God’s will is, presumably because you were carrying it out and bearing the good fruit of it. I also knew that being a leader was simply to be the one who went first. So instead of simply playing music, I would always try to humble myself even before practice time and orient my mind to a reverence of God and readiness to make my song a legitimate intention of offering to respond to whatever he wished of me. I would try to always pray plenty before and between songs and sometimes speak directly about the lyrics. I did this to lead people away from a receive-only, concert sort of mindset, and into a humble offering mindset.

51. When I attended my first Mass, it took 10-15 minutes of observation of the opening sections to for it to fully sink in that everything about it was fully and perfectly offering-based. It is a service of sacrifice, and everything–songs, spoken words, ritual arrangements and actions, even the whole directional flow of the sanctuary–was unto God. People were involved, but only as those making offering unto God. The altar was also very prominent, and while I didn’t know the actual doctrine of Real Presence in the Catholic faith, being raised Pentecostal I understood divine presence and consecration and it was obvious the altar was consecrated to be the holiest place of presence of God to whom everything was directed. The music was even in the back, so as to not be the focus but push the congregation toward God, like wind in sails. And from all this perfection of arrangement and acknowledgment and declaration and posture and action and offering, pure joy rose up within me and I couldn’t wipe a smile off my face for at least 10 minutes. As per Buddhist training I tried to not presume meaning into it, but it all did bring me joy, seeing something I had longed to see and strove to cultivate and shape in congregations for ten years.

52. I continued going to Mass with my friends on Sundays somewhat regularly, and in the meantime studied for school and considered what employment options I had in Omaha. There were plenty, but we had plans to move and since I didn’t have a car, I didn’t want to settle into one area if I was going to leave the apartment the next month. Strangely enough, all sorts of circumstances kept arising that had to be dealt with, and all sorts of good potentialities kept falling through, and all of this while my friends wedding kept getting closer, so bit by bit this plan to move out of the apartment and neighborhood kept getting pushed back a little bit again and again, so my stalling for sake of simplicity ended up being the opposite. However, with all the stalling, it gave me a lot of free time to consider the philosophical propositions of my friend’s worldview insofar as we shared with each other about how we saw things, and it let me take inventory of what was in me and why I reacted in what ways I did. In the meantime, I connected with his family around Omaha and we were able to be a help and comfort to each other in various ways.

53. Sometime in January a friend of mine asked me if I could help with a documentary he was working on. It involved going to several sites of remembrance for tragedies in national relations with Native Americans. It would take us way out west, even to Santa Fe, Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon. It was a wonderful trip overall, but the highlight was definitely Santa Fe. We ended up meeting a very friendly person who had time off work, and they showed us all the best stuff all over town. It helped me gain a view of Catholic heritage in the whole country rather than just that location, and we visited the Basilica on Sunday. It felt not just welcoming, but like home in some way. Two of the four songs that were sung basically spoke what my heart would have if God were real, as well as what he would to me if he were real; really specific stuff that wouldn’t be in hundreds of other songs, and I knew since I was a music minister. Was this a spark of faith? Was God calling me? There was nothing conclusive, but I took notice. We came back to Omaha and life there continued the same except for my eyes being more open.

54. Ash Wednesday came around and my friends went to their parish but I was a bit ambivalent and didn’t decide anything about going until it was too late, so I last-minute went to visit the service at a newly restored church down the block. It was utterly gorgeous and the sight and sound of it was comforting. I saw people from all over the neighborhood had gathered and I thought about the simple fact of their assembly. If not for this religion and this place, they would mostly have nothing to do with each other. They would likely still feel conviction of need to live and become better than they were, but there would not be a help, a process, a guide like this. In this place they all came to acknowledge their concepts of perfections, to recognize the ways those perfections reveal a better way, and to direct their hearts and efforts to pursing them individually and together. This building was a place to do that, and it was there because all of those things were in these people, becoming united in it.

55. I listened to the music and looked at the beauty of the art all around. These were expressions of those perfections being pursued and offered. If mankind was not in the world, these things would not exist at all. Yet because we do, and because we have the capacity to imagine a better world, we create these things and make these offerings to create that better world in part, even if imperfectly, and even if only but for a little while before we go back into the mundane things and polite restraint of societal design. What put this in us? How do we know such beauty and passion? How do we know when we are approaching or retreating from those perfections? How do we create it? How do we know of virtues and why do we desire them, even when what is in us fights against them? All of it arising from nothing didn’t make sense to me, and I wanted to pursue these things with the others, so I went forward in offering and pursuit, in ritual telling the potential of a God that I desired him if he was there. A thought developed in my mind: This place was as a beacon to me, one that would not otherwise be, like a city on a hill.

56. These questions stirred and began to solidify into principles. I don’t claim to be philosopher of the millennium, but they seemed to invalidate Buddhism in my mind. Say there is a chair, and you look at it and you can see it is a brown wooden chair. But now imagine humans don’t exist and it is just floating out in space. Light is bouncing off of it at the wavelength of brown but there is no brown without anyone seeing the brown. It is made of wood but that is as meaningless as any other composite of matter. It has a form but no purpose or identity with no one to recognize them. It is just a hunk of matter floating in space like the rest. Yet we see the chair, we see the brown, we know the origins and nature of wood and how it came about into the form, and we know the form signifies a specific purpose and that demonstrates an identity of chair. Substance of the thing is there with or without us, but the being of its identity is granted by the being of our mind perceiving its form and purpose.

57. Now turn that around to the mind perceiving. Where is its substance but in the effect it has? This being-granting awareness, the will and choices, the word making law through defining, the knowing of beauty and virtue and perfections and the longing for them. These things are the form of that mind as they manifest, and it would seem that the purpose they serve is to imagine and to bring those things into being, as that is what it functionally effects, and so the identity recognized in this form would be a creator, but from where comes the being of that identity for the perceiving mind? If the identity of chair comes from our mind perceiving it, and the being of a chair (in that identity rather than just its unknown form of substance removed from purpose) is manifested through that perception, does the identity of our mind then come from a divine mind manifesting us by its defining perceptions? Our being would seem to hang upon some other. Buddhism recognizes the emptiness of any identifiable character in itself and how it seems to be filled with other characters, yet all of them are also each empty in themselves. It concludes that existence is an interdependent co-arising, that the fullness of all is coming out from the emptiness of all integrating. It makes more sense to me that if each character is empty in itself yet together has an apparent fullness, then that in which they are held together into their integrated form is fullness itself, an ontological source, an uncreated being: God.

58. So then we take a look at all things and some things are better and some things are worse. Buddhism tries to put forward a denial of this and yet then goes on to say it is noble to pursue release from suffering, so even if suffering is thought of as an existent bad because of ignorance and delusion, it would nonetheless be holding that ignorance and delusion are worse than enlightenment and release, otherwise there is no reason to pursue those. So there is worse and there is better, and in recognition of that there must be better still, and this sets a trajectory that infers perfection. Now none of us have seen or conceived perfection, yet it would seem to exist if there is a clear trending toward it. But what would that mean and what would it be and how would it relate to us?

59. Well, looking at bad, we tend to recognize it most often in physical aspects. Corruption, decay, breaking apart, destruction, death. Focusing on these it seems all is trending toward death, even the heat death of the universe. Yet if breaking down and oblivion is the completion of bad, then the perfection of good must mean assembly, order, integration, cooperation, unity, wholeness. But all is not physical. We see beauty in aesthetic order yet also sometimes in wildness, and virtue can even be found in destruction if it is sacrifice for another, so what are these traits? How do we know these are good? Let me pose that there is a recognizable link between the physical and these other traits we’ll call metaphysical. When people fall in love they often take better care of themselves and find better health, yet when people suffer depression it usually manifests in bad health and life destruction. This is just one example of how the two aspects seem bound in some way. Yet how? Is it only in consequence? I think not, and reverence shows why.

60. There are many things people may speak or do that they might be proud of around the right persons, yet around their grandparents, their boss, their children, they won’t. Why? In some ways it can be thought of as mere fear of social reproof, yet the children reveal otherwise. Just as we recognize identity of chair in the form and purpose of a chair, we can recognize in form and purpose of a person some relation of due dignity and honor in others. In some cases by our relation, in some cases their role, in some cases their purity. When recognition of dignity and honor combine it comes close to reverence, and yet reverence is more than just a combination of these, it is pointing to something more profound.

61. Let’s imagine another space scenario, one once posed to me by a philosophy professor friend. A man heads out on a deep space mission, and something goes awry and he is headed into a star. He has no control of his ship. He can do nothing to change course. He can make no communications. He can leave nothing behind. He has only to wait as his annihilation approaches. Do his actions now hold moral weight? None of them will make a difference to anyone else. Is morality only consequential, and is consequence only in relation to others, and is it based on end result? If so, the same end will come out of anything he does, so moral variance would seem to not exist here. Yet somehow that feels wrong, doesn’t it? If he were to be full of regret, hate those who led him into this, become bitter, curse his journey and those on it and life itself and commit suicide, something about that seems morally worse than being grateful for the time he had, to love those he loved with what moments he still can, and in nobility receive his end fate with courage and calm.

62. Why does the latter seem better? Even more moral? It seems to me because life itself has a certain due dignity and honor. Just as we all come and go to be forgotten in the sea of time, yet something in us screams that we are more than nothing, that we have real value, that our lives have meaning, that we aren’t meant for death. That same part of us says life is not only worth living but worth loving. And recognizing this due dignity and honor of all existence itself reaches to the depths of what can be called reverence, and it is a moral reality beyond consequence. Can I demonstrate this apart from subjective convictions? No. Yet as Buddhism would love to point out, I can also not demonstrate my perceiving mind apart from the subjective conviction of it. I tend to live my life by what is most sensible to my best understanding, not only by what I can convince others to accept.

63. With this in view, I am reminded of a beautiful film I saw in those years called The Tree of Life. It is rather abstract and not everyone gets it, but it spoke to me deeply. It essentially draws attention to all of these things and takes notice of how all this potential we recognize and desire can get corrupted and end in destruction and pain and death, even senselessly. Yet in all the upward trending toward perfection that we may realize in observing the budding of life, in all our grasping for those orders of perfections, moral evils seem to materialize and in turn trend us on a pattern promising even physical death. The film brings a question to focus: Is there anything to counter this? It has a speculative answer.

64. There is one thing, quite powerful and again originating from the dignity of our conscious being and manifesting it into a world that is otherwise without reference for it: Forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness for the moral inner, reconciliation for the relational consequence. It is a rebirth, a restoration, a new opportunity to pursue and perhaps find those perfections despite the order of their development failing. The reality of it at first exists only in our inner and relational being apart from our substance, yet seems to have a potent effect on the direction things go and reverses many of the negative consequences that were playing out by law of the nature of consequence we observe trending toward death. Yet if those evils of degradation seem to promise a trend toward death, when we then see the reality of this grace of rebirth of beauty and virtue and love witnessed in the processes of forgiveness and reconciliation, is that then a promise of a rebirth after that death? A resurrection of all things? If our convictions manifest these realities where they would not otherwise apparently be, are the parallel convictions of the reverence that life is due speaking to us that the apparent end will not be the actual? The film has beautiful depictions of hopes in this.

65. Separate from this sequence of developments in my mind, I had done some thinking and discussion with my friend on a big issue in Protestantism, which was the dichotomy of man’s will and God’s sovereignty, with the problem of evil playing into this. I’ll spare the process of development and try to describe the conclusion. To understand our relation to God’s plans we have to imagine our relation to him. We begin by imagining the relation of a finite point to the infinity of space. Without the infinity there can be no point, yet while the point causes a definition from the infinity, it does not turn the infinity into finitude. It is easier to understand the finite point in relation to other finite points, and this would seem to form a sense of finite area, but that area itself is as a point in the infinity that is required to define any of these points. The finite hangs on the infinite, yet the infinite is unmoved.

66. God is not only infinite, but eternal. So he is not merely beyond or outside of time, but all through time as well, or rather, all that time encompasses is in him. We can act and those actions have consequences, yet he remains unmoved just as the infinity is unmoved from the finite point. Our very being must hang upon his own being, the ontological source, and yet if we are made in his image and likeness, and he is creator, we have a certain capacity like unto his. If his creative act relates to us as an effect upon the formation of ends through the unfolding of time, then our capacity must be of the same relation. Just as he grants unto us being, and as he grants unto us to exist in a finite space, he grants unto us the power of effect in the creative act of forming ends though unfolding the events of time. Sharing in this is a sort of unity with him, it is the definition of relationship. Yet just like our being and just like our point of space, he is unmoved against the mere definition of us and the subsistence of ours is in his.

67. With this in mind, we act and it has real effects, yet he is not responsible for them because it was given unto us to have power of effect. His effects are also not thwarted by our own just as his being is not thwarted by ours, his eternity is not thwarted by our time, and his infinity is not thwarted by our finite space. This is a mystery to us because we like to think only in cause and effect and our minds want to tie things up in neat little explanations that fit in our heads, but this reality of him is beyond us, which Isaiah 55 confirms. In a world of wills with power to effect, he yet accomplishes his purposes. From our perspective, two causes to one effect, cooperatively sharing in the creative act of forming ends through unfolding the events of time, although he transcends even this. Because we utilize the life and being and the power of will he grants us to do it, we are truly responsible, and evil is truly evil, and good is truly good. We are not mere puppets, and the gift to effect existence is from his very being and thus demands perfection as he is perfect and all of the purposes he wills.

68. Yet even with these views making the belief a potentiality of reality, belief isn’t really about what you can prove or demonstrate. In my agnostic times I always said I couldn’t merely infer an ultimate truth, so I couldn’t be academically argued into believing in God. I knew if belief would return it had to be an encounter. I am a human, and our trust is birthed of encounter. It was true that all of these observations of life–of my most honest convictions of what I experience, of what I believe is true and observe all around me as laws of existence–all ended up seemingly supporting not only God, but the Christian God. No other religion came close to incorporating these principles in due measure to the testimony of nature and our being and witness. Yet even after all this, his being had not again made contact with mine, so I just couldn’t make the jump. I frequently reminded my friend of this, and that if God were real then that jump would depend on him causing contact. However, in the meantime I could make a different kind of jump: Faith.

69. Since I was testing in particular the potential of Catholic reality, I decided to test by a particular means, that being prayer to Mary. There are some important details as to why this was the case. Aside from all these philosophical things, I was looking for the clearly established people of God, the city on a hill as Jesus said his kingdom would be. Not endless people guessing away at truth in endless factionalism and shifting directions, like a sea full of pirates, but instead a kingdom. What God described in scripture had to manifest. If our being as humans manifested beauty and order and virtue, for God to manifest the life of His Spirit through us, even so as to be called the Body of Christ, then his people and their establishment had to be as incarnate in his ways and forms as he himself was and scripture is. “For as he is, so are we in this world” John says. I looked for that.

70. I looked at the Catholic church and saw a lot of good things but also the great schism, and I saw another mess resulting from Vatican II. Jesus did say the wheat and tares would grow together, so I didn’t expect perfection, yet these things seemed fairly catastrophic in effect so I thought God couldn’t possibly have left his people clueless through them. Israel went astray in major ways and consequences of natural law played out, but he always sent a prophet to do wonders and to speak conviction of truths to which they had blinded themselves, and to warn them of further consequences. Where was this prophet? That’s when I read of Marian apparitions. They came in timely manner to the humble faithful the world wouldn’t recognize, they spoke in higher wisdom than the people of their ages beheld, they gave instruction that proved perfect when followed, they validated the message by both wonders and specific prophecies that came true even centuries later. The greatest of these was at Fatima, and even back then it spoke what became our times now. She was the prophet, the Theotokos of our mystical Body, the Mother to all mankind.

71. After sitting down to think on the implications of Mary’s role and what must be true of her, I concluded over 2/3 of Catholic beliefs regarding her after just a short bit of time. I shared this with my friend and she gave me a Catholic classic on Mary written by a saint, and it confirmed and illuminated and expanded on my every thought. Mary was completing a very large lack in the Christian worldview system for me. In the past I saw gaps scattered all through it, but I never realized they could and would all be filled by not one concept or thing, but one person. Furthermore, if God was real and he was Jesus, then he must also be Lord. If that was true, the inescapable reality is different from my readiness to accept it, so it felt disrespectful to potentially approach the Lord of the universe if I was not yet willing to receive his Lordship over me. Mary, however, was not Lord, but mother. I could approach that, even if unwilling to offer my life to the Lord.

72. So, without telling anyone, as per Christ’s instructions on prayer if you want it to be fruitful, I stayed in my room and prayed the rosary for the first time. This was the first genuine prayer to a specific person in actual anticipation of their being that I had prayed for years. A true step of faith. With the rosary there are accompanying mysteries you are supposed to meditate on in relation to the prayers you repeat, and this session focused on Christ suffering in love to achieve victory over death, and I considered the death of my belief, of my sense of him, of my old life in my hometown and many relationships there, of my hope and ability to trust, and I recognized I was powerless to have victory over these things, yet if he exists then he died for that victory, and I asked Mary, if she was there, to ask him to break through.

73. The following day I pondered all of these things along with all those philosophical and epistemological concepts and I sat out on the front porch of my friend’s grandmother’s house, as we had been caring after her. I was reading a book by a prominent western professor of Buddhism who had converted to Catholicism. At first I found it funny, because while he was a master of describing Buddhist concepts, he actually had little practical experience of them, which he admitted in the book. In my years I had gone deep in meditative practices and what I suppose one would call mystical observation experiences, so I found his logical breakdowns of things that he hadn’t seen kind of funny. But then his rational deconstruction brought him to some statements from St. John of the Cross he clearly didn’t “get” yet couldn’t deny, but I got them. In an instant, they all came together in my vision of life before me.

74. I looked out at nature all around me and went into a meditative observation state. Layer upon layer of perception of reality fell in on itself to see deeper, reaching to something I had only experienced twice before, something called in some disciplines the 7th jhana; the emptiness and formlessness of all things in themselves, the nothingness of anything and their unity of mutual non-being and the stateless ever-shifting of existence, including time and space. This description probably sounds downright insane to anyone who hasn’t observed this, but it is not too uncommon. It is a state of observation anyone can be trained to go into and many have. In some sense, I would almost describe it as akin to observing quantum reality. Yet instead of slipping to the 8th and 9th jhanas (very rare for anyone to do), where perception itself deconstructs and ultimately self into emptiness, instead I saw the being of God providing fullness. The nothing was something, the formless was given form, the shifting given state, the unity given definition. And it was not all “dukkha” as in Buddhism, but the gift of his life. God was living all about. “For from him and through him and to him are all things” and “In him we live and move and have our being”

75. Unfortunately, while I saw God and believed again, my heart did not yet feel ready. I had gone all-in before and it came to such unimaginably painful ends. My trust was still wounded. I didn’t know if I could fully give myself to him, to the faith, to the church, submit even to authority that I recognized as valid. I needed something to convince me this was the right entry, the right house, the right fellowship, the right discipleship. What did I need? I didn’t know. I prayed the rosary again and it was the joyful mysteries that day. They demonstrated God’s surprising provision to and deliverance of those left unknowing, longing, empty, forgetting how to be what they were meant to be. I took heart and waited. I woke up with a song from early childhood on my mind called I Exalt Thee; it was as a reminder that God was with me from the start of my life. It was based on a Psalm. When I read the Psalm past where the song stopped, it continued:

76. “You who love the Lord, hate evil,

he protects the souls of the faithful,

rescues them from the hand of the wicked.

Light dawns for the just,

and gladness for the honest of heart.

Rejoice in the Lord, you just,

and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness.”

77. My now two friends had married, and I was temporarily staying in the basement of his grandma’s house as we prepared to move to Phoenix for a great-sounding career opportunity for him that had come just in time. We had a friend over for dinner, which was a rare opportunity, and were very engaged in conversation after eating. In the middle of all this, suddenly I felt the touch of God. I hadn’t felt it for seven years, but I knew it immediately, just as it had always been. He was telling me to go to my room and pray, so I immediately excused myself without telling them why and did just that. I was still in my Lordship and trust predicament, so again I prayed to Mary, and asked her to ask Jesus to convince me of what he wants me to be convinced. One way or the other, yes or no to Catholicism, he knew my heart and what could move me and had all power to make it happen, so I asked to please ask him to make it clear.

78. I went back up to join everyone and they had moved out to the porch. As I went to the porch a stray dog was also coming up to the porch. It was a greyhound, very well mannered with a collar, clearly not lost for long. We found a Facebook page for lost dogs in Omaha and identified him and contacted the owner. A young woman came to get him and she was extremely grateful to the point of tears. Apparently she took in dogs who were retiring from the racetrack and had lost him from a transportation van, and it was one of many things that had gone wrong for her in recent times. With her openness of present difficulties and gratitude and sociability to get to know us, we invited her in for something to drink and a bit of discussion, since she was also waiting on a friend who worked with the dogs to arrive.

79. It turned out that her car had been stolen and in it was her wallet with all her important things and her rosary, and she had been engaged but due to various trials and confusions in the church and with family they decided to just go back to dating, but more than that, to kind of start over from the beginning. We had an extra rosary to give her, but more importantly, my friends had just been married for a few weeks. And if marriage is a ministry to the world (it is) there was little in their short marriage they were prepared to help anyone with, but within that tiny scope was the one thing they had been through, the one thing this woman was having trouble with: The preparations for marriage in the current state of American Catholicism. They shared stories, offered advice and encouragement, books that helped them, and we all prayed a part of the rosary together before parting ways. All this immediately after God made himself present to me again after seven years and I prayed in secret to Mary to ask Jesus for a clarification.

80. So I decided I would see about becoming Catholic, and this was right before we were going to move. We actually already had 85% of everything packed up at this point. Soon we set off on the road. Along the way, as we drove through a storm in New Mexico, a tune and these lyrics came to my mind, which was significant since playing music and songwriting had completely dropped off in my faithless times:

81. “A bitter mind but your heart holds on

A distant light but your eyes so strong

And still of night says you’re more than a flashing in the sky

A broken faith but your soul still screams

And through the pain you know that there must be

A far off place where the striving ache can still turn out right

I’ll bring you home…

I’ll bring you home… with me”

82. After getting set up in the new place, we had already picked a parish, which was rather traditional, just as the sort of Catholicism we were used to was. There were many reasons for this, most of them my friends convictions as I was the newcomer, but I saw the sensibility in their perspectives and had no qualms with it. I contacted the parish office to ask about meeting with a priest about becoming Catholic. He contacted me and asked if I could meet on a certain day, the only one available for him, and I said yes. This turned out to be kind of significant if you’re into “signs” to mark the guidance of God. I had taken to Mary, clearly, and studied something called her seven sorrows, which has an associated chaplet my friend had gifted to me. This was occurring after seven years of spiritual sorrow for me, after an exodus into the desert, at a parish devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows, on the liturgical feast day of Our Lady of Sorrows, which happened to be my 33rd birthday. One can see this as coincidence or as extremely thematically layered signs of confirmation that I was where God wanted me to be. I’ll leave that to you, but it was worth mentioning.

83. The following months were an utter crucible. In one house we had three people starting life anew, having never lived together before or with anyone but family, a new marriage, a pregnant woman, a shockingly morally stressful new job situation, a new convert trying to learn and live up to the faith at extremely rapid speed and establish stability for single life, and a time limit. There was in all directions stress, fear, anger, fights, tears, reconciliation, laughter, devotion, learning, transformation, discernment, hope deferred, major health problems, personality misunderstandings, differences of convictions and methodology, trust issues, long distance relational trials, frustration of plans, heart to hearts, house maintenance challenges, financial worries, church controversy and contentions, weaknesses versus commitments, etc, etc. I really cannot remember let alone cover all the whirlwind of happenings, but in the end, beyond us, a two year plan shortened to six months and things had to work out fast.

84. In the midst of all these trials, I found an old song I wrote back in the time I was attending college for a year, a very difficult time in my life. I remember running on just a couple hours of sleep, walking so far, needing a short break so I sat down with a guitar in the building for the campus ministry I was involved with and I wrote a hymn extremely quickly. These were the lyrics:

85. “Call me, Lord, to thy holy hill

Let thy pure light awaken

My slumbering soul

Draw me unto thee nearer still

Let love release me to thy will

/ No more let darkness veil my eyes

All earth and host of heaven

Thy glory does fill

Into thee all I once was dies

And in thy p’wr will surely rise

/ Hold me, Lord, closely to thy chest

May I be in thee hidden

From thundering lies

Received as thine own child to rest

In boundless grace forever dressed

/ To thee I sacrifice control

Let of my life be given

Thine every request

For all my days thee to extol

And to their end found in thee whole”

86. At the time of writing I was thinking of the example of the city on a hill, the true church I was seeking, a place to belong once and for all instead of being sent here and there between ministries and trends and even doctrines as they would rise and fall and come and go. Yet looking at the old song at this point, it seemed familiar in a different way. At Mass something in the liturgy caught my eye in the beginning prayers: “Send forth Thy light and Thy truth; they have conducted me and brought me unto Thy holy hill, and into Thy tabernacles.”

87. Over years, God had answered the prayer of that song. I released control and he took it. I would never have left to join my Catholic friend; I would not leave the ministry or my family. My world, my epistemology, my identity was wrapped up in an error. How could he hide me in himself, away from the lies? By hiding me from myself. I did not actually lose faith, but my faith led me to lose belief in all the erroneous ways of thinking about God and the religion he gave mankind. By his word transforming my mind, he had revealed the shattered and incoherent nature of the Christianity I knew and drove me out from it. All I once was had to die to take this journey, and it did, all but one thing: “When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.”

88. This is how God led me from early childhood, how he led me in truth, how he guided me in good works, how he used me for ministry, how he did great wonders in my life, how he delivered me time and again, how he saved me from myself. I knew his voice, and he didn’t always call, but when he did I heard it and followed. Now all the years of trial were revealed, and I trusted him for the future. I had a temp job for a month but needed something lasting, I needed a job very soon. There was tension in the house. I set out planning to apply to many places starting with the closest, but when I went to ask, the closest place hired me on the spot. It wasn’t glamorous, it was Subway, but we were a good fit for each other and it turned out the boss was Catholic, and it made me some much-needed money for set up costs in the city.

89. Still, while it helped, the time limit was short, and I also had to decide how I would go about officially entering into the Catholic church, particularly because I would be doing it alone since my friends were moving back to Omaha. The -ism in traditionalism had revealed itself downright factious, not something I was interested in as a convert, and beyond that were controversies simply beyond me. My friend had decided he had to move on back to his old parish, and he knew these situations wouldn’t be good for me and prayed that God would sort things out for me. I’ll save complicated Catholic doctrine details, but in the end God led me to seek a different place as well, although for different reasons, and when it could no longer be hidden on either side, to both of our surprise we found ourselves in agreement on the matter.

90. In the midst of this, Subway had been good enough to me, but to scrape out a survival in the city I was going to need more. I had the option to become a manager but it would be chaotic and I’d likely have to work on Sundays fairly often. I prayed intensely that God would deliver me to a stable life. After two weeks, I received a call out of the blue. The guy who had hooked me up with the one-month temp job (who I had told my concerns about Subway management and desire for a solid schedule, but asked nothing of him) connected with a wonderful Catholic-owned small business that had steady weekday-only hours and good enough pay to live on. They needed somebody, he suggested I be that somebody, we connected, and it has been a wonderful fit for me and my employer.

91. Looking at troubles in the church motivated by church culture errors I didn’t want to be involved in anymore, knowing I needed a very strong community as I would be on my own otherwise, and desiring traditional practice and old richness of the faith, having a draw to ancient, mystical, holistic spirituality, I wanted to check out the Byzantine Catholic church in town. I went and it was immediately just right. I needed to get an apartment and the best bang for my budget was located perfectly between my workplace and this parish. I’ve been making many friends and getting more involved here, and I feel right where I need to be and I’m excited to see where it goes.

92. Being here is yet very peculiar. The church I am at is the Eparchy for all Byzantine Catholic churches on the entire west side of the country and Alaska. The Bishop is here and yet it is kind of a small-medium community church and I am the only catechumen. For what purpose did God bring me and apparently only me for right now? When I first arrived I was very enthusiastically greeted and introduced by a very sweet and joyful old religious sister. If it were not for her, who knows if I would have gone around introducing myself? She was to catechize me as well, but she died before our first meeting, so now I am being catechized by the parish priest, who is a convert himself. I’m not sure what to make of these things, but if you ask me, it seems that the marks of very specific orchestrations of God are all over it.