This is a very special Lent for me, as I finally enter into the Roman Catholic Church, after 17 years of researching her, loving her, and, (I admit) arguing with her.
This is my story:
Into the Deep
I guess the most interesting thing about it was that the reasons for doing so did not become clear until after I made the decision to become Roman Catholic. It was not until I said "yes" to Jesus' call to me, that my reasons for becoming Catholic began to occur to me.
Although I have no relatives who are Catholic, I did have contact with Roman Catholicism as a child. I was born in a Catholic hospital, which scandalized my elderly relatives: my mother was considered "foolish" to go to a Catholic doctor. My great grandmother even predicted that I would become Catholic, although how she knew is completely beyond me: she based this opinion on the fact that I was born in a Catholic hospital.
However, it took a lot more than that to get me into the Catholic Church as you will soon see.
I was baptized as an infant, attended Sunday School, entered into full membership in the Church at age 14, exercised my franchise at congregational meetings, and began to serve the ministry of my local congregation through committees and volunteer projects. My roots at Knox United Church were firmly planted, and to all appearances, not about to go anywhere very suddenly. Even though I had contact with Catholics throughout my growing years, in my neighborhood, and through friends of my parents', who were heavily involved in the ecumenical movement during the 1960s, I do not recall ever having a serious discussion about religion with any of them.
As a consequence, I developed some very odd prejudices about Catholics, first of which was that they didn't really practice any sort of religion, at least, not in any form that we would understand as Protestants. After all, we Protestant children were always discussing religion among ourselves, comparing each other's worship styles and belief systems, and debating theological issues such as the nature of God, the requirements for entry into Heaven, whether hymns are holy or heathen, and so forth, and because the Catholic children we knew never entered into these discussions, we simply assumed that they had no religion.
The first Catholic I ever met who did discuss religion with me was my college roommate, and she hated being Catholic. She came up with what to me sounded like very odd reasons for not liking to be Catholic however, which triggered my interest, since they were so contrary to my prejudices.
She said that at the Catholic Church, all they do is read the Bible and worship Jesus.
These are good things to do at worship, in my estimation, and as my childhood prejudices fell into doubt, I became curious, in the back of my mind, about what Catholics are REALLY like. When I tried to discuss these things a little further with her, she reacted quite strongly and accused me of being "some kind of Jesus freak."
I first began attending Mass in January of 1984, a few months after my roomate left, at the age of 23, in my last year of Art College, and my reason for attending the first one was because while I was out wandering around looking for something to do, I got caught up in a crowd of people who were going into St. Joseph's Church, and when I tried to get out of the crowd, a little old man (he later turned out to be Father Arthur) grabbed me by the arm and dragged me inside.
I never did have the opportunity to find out why he did that, since he became extremely ill and then died shortly afterwards. Although I was terrified, and was experiencing a severe case of culture shock, I was also very curious, and I felt that I probably would never have a similar opportunity to see what Catholics do "when nobody's looking", so I stayed inside to take advantage of the opportunity.
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