“Then I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Splash. The darkness closed over me and the cold stunned my body. But not my mind. I was as lucid as ever, having just publicly professed my belief in and need for the saving power of Jesus Christ. I was ten years old, but this was my new beginning. When I rose from the water of the unheated spa, my pastor reminded me that I shall rise from the grave and have eternal life with Christ.
My friends, parents, and a few other family members were there to celebrate. My grandmother gave me a small chalice and a 59-bead necklace. Christians in the Holy Land made them. They were simple olivewood carvings that I treasure to this day.
I have always believed in God. I was even born at Auburn Faith Hospital in the Sacramento area of California. The closest intersection near my parents’ house was Luther Road and Wesley Lane — the names of two Reformers. Somehow, all roads lead to Rome. Mine sure did.
Around the time of my baptism, I was advancing in Cub Scouts. Upon graduating to Boy Scouts, we could bring only a few badges from Cub Scouts. One is a study and professed commitment to a religion. Since the Scouts had not certified any Protestant leaders in the area, I earned mine at the local Catholic parish.
My memories of these classes, almost two decades later, are clear. As I walked in the nave of the church with my mother, I saw a large statue of Mary looking down at me.
“Mom, why don’t we have a statue of Mary?”
“Well, we focus more on Jesus than Mary, and we don’t even have statues of him.”
While that answer sufficed, still, she was Jesus’s mother! I thought that we should have statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph— just like the Catholics. The only statues we had were nativity sets.
My faith grew over the years, and I considered going to seminary. I wanted to grow in my relationship with Christ. When I was in the eighth grade, I read the entire Bible to make sure that what I believed was still believable after seeing the big picture. In eight months, what I saw was this: When Eve said no to God, Mary said yes. The Magnificat seemed to undo the curse that God put on Eve after she ate of the forbidden fruit.
I read the Jews’ response to Christ forgiving sins. Yes, Jesus is God, but Christ also gave the apostles the ability to forgive sins, too (Matthew 18:18). James told us to confess our sins to one another (James 5:16). I read about bishops and how “anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Cor. 11:29). This was a problem.
I ran into contradictions. The admonition “call no man Father” (Matt. 23:9), taken literally, would have meant that I should call my dad by his first name. Of course, that didn’t happen. Also, 1 Corinthians 4:15, Philippians 2:22, and Philemon 1:10, all spoke directly to a spiritual fatherhood. A face-value, literal understanding of Scriptures was not sufficient; I needed an interpretation—a tradition.
Upon entering high school, I made new friends of differing types of Christianity. I visited the Nazarene, Baptist, and Evangelical Free denominations. I had Catholic friends invite me to church, but I rejected the offers and presented my problems with the Catholic Church. Yet occasionally I found myself arguing on behalf of the pope.
“If the outside world considered one person as the leader of Christianity on earth, who would that be?” I would ask my friends.
“The pope,” most would respond.
“Then wouldn’t it make sense that God would give a certain grace to him to help the outside world see Christ?”
When I got my driver’s license, I would drive about 20 miles to the closest bookstore to find books about prayer. After encountering the concept of contemplative prayer, I devoured books like The Interior Castle by St. Therese of Avila and The Cloud of Unknowing by an anonymous Catholic mystic from the Middle Ages. I discovered the Lectio Divina. It was biblical meditation. Perfect!
When I was looking at contemplative prayer books one day, a young man approached me.
“Are you a seminarian?”
“No, but I’m thinking about it.”
“Does any particular order stand out to you?”
“Order?”
“You know, Dominicans, Franciscans, et cetera.”
“Um, I’m a Protestant.”
“And you’re reading Thomas Merton?”
“I’m just looking,” I said quickly.
“What are you looking for exactly?”
I wanted to say “the truth,” but I said nothing. It turned out that he was a Catholic priest. He said that he would offer Mass for me. I didn’t know what that meant, but I said thank you politely.
Weeks later, I had to do a report on the Edict of Milan and Emperor Constantine. Through my research, I stumbled across St. Paul Orthodox Church of Irvine’s website.
“What is this?” I wondered. “A 2,000-year-old Church with no pope?”
As the Eastern Orthodox put it, their teachings are all rooted in Scripture, the seven ecumenical councils, and Sacred Tradition. I was fascinated. The more I questioned, the more the Orthodox sufficiently answered. My views on the saints and sacraments changed first. I asked an Orthodox priest many questions and promised to keep researching. And I did. I read books, websites, and pamphlets. I planned when I could attend a divine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; I realized my only chance was in college.
The end of high school was more difficult than I imagined. Between my grandparents having health issues, a friend committing suicide, and college applications, I developed a gastric ulcer. I thought it was a stomach ache, and when the pain got worse, the doctors diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome. It perforated and I underwent surgery.
I frequently prayed an Eastern favorite, the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” When the doctors told me that stomach cancer might have caused the ulcer, for the first time I implored all of heaven.
I petitioned St. Ambrose, St. John Chrysostom, our Lady and St. Joseph, my guardian angel, and “all of the saints” to pray to God to spare my life. I also added a legal disclaimer, “Jesus, if that was heretical, please forgive me!” The doctors ran tests and cleared me. They said that I was having an unusually fast recovery and that cancer did not cause my ulcer. I would be fine.
That fall, I went to a California state college. It was a good school, but the Christians on Campus group was unwelcoming, and I did not relate well to those in InterVarsity, another Christian fellowship. My roommate was Catholic and invited me to the Newman Center, but I resisted until Ash Wednesday. It was wonderful. Never had I seen such a solemn reminder of our mortality.
“Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return,” the priest said as he put ashes on my head. I fought emotions from overcoming me. The service’s focus was on the wages of our sins and hope in our Redeemer.
This made me curious about Catholicism but reminded me to visit the Orthodox Church. When I finally made it, the Russians were warmer than expected. However, I was transferring to a small Evangelical university in Los Angeles and would not have a chance to return. They gave me parish recommendations in Southern California.
When I transferred to Los Angeles, I loved visiting St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral. The icons, gold, and incense made me feel as if I stepped into heaven. However, half of the liturgy was in Greek. Much of my time visiting Orthodox churches was spent learning new languages. Thankfully, I’m a fast learner and mastered some Arabic, Greek, and Russian. Yet, as a German-French-Dutch-Norwegian American, I felt out of place, to say the least.
My regular parish was not Orthodox, and it did not fit well in Protestantism. It was a High Church Anglican parish called Blessed Sacrament. I was not out of communion with my friends and family. Yet this parish recognized the communion of saints, the sacraments, and the aesthetic qualities of the liturgy that I came to love, which they called the “Mass.”
After a long day, I went to the prayer chapel at school. In it, the Bible sat on top of the altar, along with a cross and a book of prayer requests. I felt like I had to bow. I genuflected before entering the pew, pulled out the kneeler, and prayed that I could find the original Church. I believed that it did exist. If Christianity was true, then the original Church existed. Christ said that he would build his Church, “and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).
The next day, I spoke with a Baptist friend about Anglicanism. When I mentioned the line of bishops from the apostles, he said I was “playing Catholic.” I wanted to prove him wrong, so, stubborn as I am, I withdrew and went camping alone in the Anza-Borrego Desert to sort everything out. I spent time praying, reading Scripture, and meditating. I realized that I had to leave Protestantism. I loved much about Catholicism, but I thought that Catholics believed the pope was sinless.
I headed East. I hung icons on the wall and my Sunday-best clothes smelled like incense. The Orthodox priests had already taught me about apostolic succession (for instance, we know Matthew wrote his Gospel only because of Tradition; we have the Bible only because of Tradition; et cetera). Soon I became a catechumen at St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral. Upon graduation, I entered the Orthodox Church.
That fall, I went to Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida. As an Orthodox at a Catholic law school, I was an outsider. That didn’t matter, though. As someone of non-Eastern blood in the Orthodox Church, I was used to being on the outside. I discussed religion with Catholics during my little spare time. I usually ended sitting in the doorway to my bedroom, and my roommate, Peter, sitting in his. We typically discussed the authority of the pope. The Orthodox agree that the pope is the primate of the Church and the “first among equals” of the patriarchs, so we had little disagreement.
Yet there was still the concept of infallibility.
“I just can’t believe the pope is sinless,” I told my roommate.
He stared blankly at me.
“What?”
I repeated what I’d said.
“I agree,” he said. “And the Catholic Church agrees. Infallible doesn’t mean sinless. It means that God grants him the grace to teach faith and morals free of error. It’s specifically when he speaks from the throne of St. Peter. That’s only been done a few times.”
“Oh.”
Truly, my roommate Peter led me to Rome. In a sense, I had always been Catholic. I believed that God granted the pope the grace to lead and guide the world to Christ.
The next day, I went to the Orthodox Church for the last time. I stood with a beautiful Slavonic choir, icons all around me, and incense wafting out the windows. I saw a valid priesthood, valid sacraments—and yet something was missing. The See of Peter. Protestantism instilled in me a love of scripture, and Orthodoxy a love for the sacraments. But I had to leave. Not across the Tiber. No, from Greece I crossed the Adriatic Sea.
My journey to Catholicism was a bit unusual. I never had formal teaching and instruction in the Faith. No Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. No confirmation. Nothing. Then how did I make it in? Well, after being chrismated Eastern Orthodox, all I had to do was a give a profession of faith before a priest (in my case, the chaplain of Ave Maria School of Law). Before the formal profession of faith, I spoke with him for some time. He could tell that I knew the Faith. I had been researching it for years. I researched it to argue against it. Not surprisingly, one by one, my arguments had fallen.
I have had people tell me indignantly to read the Bible instead of the Catechism. I’ve had others denounce Catholicism as a “man-made” religion. Others argue vehemently against the rosary or the teachings against contraception, about the pope, et cetera. Virtually all of them have not done one thing, though: They have not read why Catholics believe what they do. They say “I disagree” without knowing the premise. They disagree only with the conclusions—the surface level—not the teachings. The Church has a formal instruction of the Faith because of its depth, beauty, and truth.
I didn’t intend originally to become an incense-breathing papist, but I entered the Church in 2007 on the Feast of St. Ambrose. It was St. Ambrose, one of the most influential church leaders in the fourth century, who said, “‘It is to Peter himself that Jesus says, ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.’ Where Peter is, there is the Church. And where the Church, no death is there, but life eternal.”