I was born and raised Presbyterian. Growing up I attended the local Presbyterian church in Houston, a large, hip congregation that boasted a “joyful noise” choir and fiery sermons peppered with love and forgiveness. In college, I moved from Christianity to agnosticism. After college I explored Taoism and Buddhism. Following an abortive attempt to join the Buddhist Temple in downtown Washington, D.C. (the Asian proprietors couldn’t understand my intentions), I began a concerted effort to find meaning and truth. I studied Nietzsche, Sartre, Plato, and other great thinkers. I spent weekends reading volumes of philosophy and attended courses in metaphysics and phenomenology. In my late twenties I became entrenched in atheism and believed that the almighty intellect could provide all there is to know about the universe.
It is in search of strays like me that Christ said he would leave the other ninety-nine sheep. But, in my case, I prefer to think that he chose to send his very own mother.
It was a typical day in the summer of 1991. I was living in a decrepit mansion within the shadows of the monuments of Washington, D.C., leading a routine life as the director of communications for an association of government contractors. One day a coworker, Beth, and her husband, Steve, returned from a trip to the site of an alleged Marian apparition in the former Yugoslavia with tales of smelling invisible roses in mysterious places, rosary beads turning to gold, and a miracle in the sun. Baffled and a little miffed, I said they were interesting experiences but did not prove any kind of Transcendent Spirit.
Unbeknownst to me, when my friends traveled to this site they took with them special petitions to the Virgin Mary, written on plain white paper, requesting my conversion. Had I known, I would have laughed and told them not to get their hopes up. I thought the universe was governed by the laws of physics, not spirits and demons, and relying on petitions left for people long since dead sounded like hocus-pocus.
These same friends, who had recently returned to the Church after having been away for years, took it upon themselves to evangelize me. They gave me a book, Life in Christ, thinking, “If we reach this person, it will be through logic and theology.” I read two pages of the book and returned it. Life went on. I didn’t dwell on their experiences or convictions until the following year when I received an urgent message.
In May 1992 a very strange thing happened to me. I began to sense strongly a mysterious message: “Pray, pray, pray!” Over and over, I felt this urgent calling, and, though inaudible, it was almost as clear to me as if someone were speaking the words. As an atheist I did not take kindly to cryptic messages and mysterious feelings. I tried to ignore it, much like I would a cold or the flu, knowing that these things simply go away. But the message continued, day after day, for two weeks. It was as if a neon sign was blinking in the fog and I was able to make out a single word: “Pray!” Finally, I decided to acquiesce just to make the message go away.
So one night I got ready for bed, went into my room, and lay face down on my bed. After a few minutes, I lifted my head up, put my hands together, and talked a little to God. I had not prayed in so long that I was not sure what to say. Like any conversation with a friend from long ago, it was awkward at first. After about four minutes I said, “Well, I guess that’s it.” Then I went to sleep.
I started praying daily. As my prayer life developed, I began to realize that I was not leading the life I should. The most immediate and urgent change was a call to chastity. My girlfriend, Kathleen, and I discussed it at length and were in agreement. We chose a date when we would begin living chastely. This date came and went. We chose another date, realizing it would take greater effort to succeed, but this too came and went without success. Finally, we chose a third date. We realized it was imperative that we succeed. We set down rules to live by, reminded each other of the importance of the endeavor, and agreed to give as much effort as we were capable of. The date we chose to start this new life was Labor Day 1992—the day we were struck by lightning.
With Labor Day approaching Kathleen and I decided to go camping in a very remote region of Ontario, Canada, called Algonquin Park. We bought new camping gear, a tent, clothes, and plane tickets to Toronto. After arriving in Toronto and spending the night there, we rented a car and drove the long trip north to the park. We rented canoes at one of two tiny settlements inside the park and canoed south, accidentally leaving our map of the lakes and trails back in the car.
We camped beside Ragged Lake, a beautiful lake that cut in many directions through the small mountains like crooked fingers. We made mapless sojourns throughout the surrounding lakes, investigating the territory but not getting too far away from our campsite. They were possibly the most beautiful days we had ever seen.
The morning of the third day—Labor Day—we awoke in our tent to the sound of distant thunder. I had intended to sleep through the impending storm, but Kathleen suggested we cover up our gear to keep it dry.
After putting our belongings underneath the canoe, I crawled back into my sleeping bag on the right side of the tent. The rain had already begun to fall, and the storm took no time in delivering itself. Light rain quickly became heavy, followed by high winds and finally spectacular displays of lightning. Lightning cracked and boomed around us, and after a particularly close zap that sounded like a canon blast in the forest, Kathleen asked me, “Are we going to get struck by lightning?”
I laughed at her naivete and responded with assurance, “No. There are too many tall trees around.” Everyone knows that lightning will strike the tallest object first, and camping inside a forest would guarantee that we wouldn’t be hit.
Less than a minute later, as I was lying on my left side facing Kathleen, the most incredible pain hit me from every side and surged through my body. I was suddenly screaming uncontrollably with a pain so excruciating that at that instant I was convinced it was my moment of death. There was no warning flash or boom. Every inch of my body was put under the most agonizing and intense torture I could imagine. Then, after what was probably two or three seconds, the pain departed and the world around me went black.
After a moment of unconsciousness, I awoke paralyzed and dazed, as if out of a coma. Kathleen was lying on her back moaning in pain. “My legs. My legs. I can’t feel my legs,” she seemed to be saying.
I couldn’t feel anything in my body, but tried to cover her up with my arm in case something was going to fall on us. “Come closer,” I moaned. With every ounce of energy in my body I lifted my right arm and dropped it on top of her. For several terrifying minutes after this we were unable to move at all. Then, slowly, we were able to sit up. Kathleen’s legs were paralyzed and numb for another few minutes, and I was paralyzed and numb for a few minutes longer.
After about ten minutes more we were somewhat coherent and able to move a little more. My left knee and shoulder throbbed like someone had hit them with an axe. The smoke we smelled inside the tent turned out to be the burned back of Kathleen’s sweatshirt and the singed hairs on my arms. Later we would find some gray hairs on my head.
After a couple of hours we packed up and canoed to a ranger station in the intermittent drizzle and rain. We discovered as we left our campsite that the bolt of lightning had somehow passed between the branches of the tall trees and blasted a small tree near our tent. It blew apart the poor little tree, went through the root system and up into us—our tent was perched on top of the roots. My left shoulder was directly on top of the main root, and the lightning passed through my body and jumped from my left knee into Kathleen’s legs. From there it passed out Kathleen’s ankle and back into the ground. This lightning, we think, was the kind that seems to flicker on and off a few times before going out, thus accounting for the length of the shock itself.
We later got checked out at a hospital (the doctor didn’t believe our story—he only took my blood pressure and barely even talked to Kathleen) and then retreated in disgrace back to Toronto. For about a day and a half after the incident, Kathleen and I both suffered from a strange variance in hunger, from famished one moment to satisfied the next. For a week I suffered blurred vision, migraine headaches, depression, and memory loss.
The day after Labor Day we flew back to Washington, D.C. Kathleen was still shaken up by the whole event and, as a Catholic, had decided that she should talk to a priest. After several phone calls she managed to get in touch with a priest who was willing to meet at that odd hour of the evening.
“Do you want to go?” she asked me.
“Sure, I’ll drive you,” I said. “I’ve never met a priest.”
After a short wait in the St. Agnes Church rectory, Father Donahue came slowly down the stairs. He walked with two canes because of a spinal injury suffered by being shot by a sniper when he was a teen-ager. He turned out to be one of the supremely nice human beings I have met.
After Kathleen talked to Father Donahue in his office for about a half-hour, she stuck her smiling face outside the door and invited me in. We spent another ten minutes or so talking to him together about our experience in Canada, and then, just as we were about to leave, he said to us, “Before you go, I want to give you something.” He made his way with his canes over to the closet and returned with two small platinum objects.
“These,” he said, “are Miraculous Medals. I want to give one to each of you before you go.”
He gave us a brochure telling the fascinating story behind the Miraculous Medal: St. Catherine Laboure is awakened by an angel in the middle of the night and led down corridors of flickering candles in her convent. They arrive at the chapel and she is instructed to wait. After kneeling in a pew for a short time she hears the rustle of silk. Mary appears to her in splendor and with great kindness explains the reason for her visit. She then shows Catherine the vision of a medal with an image of Mary surrounded by the words: “Oh Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”
“Have a medal struck in this image,” Mary said to her. “All who wear it will receive great graces.”
The medal was originally called the Medal of the Immaculate Conception, but so many unusual and unexplainable events were associated with those who wore it that it soon became called the Miraculous Medal.
“Great,” I said. “I used to have a shark tooth but I lost it. I can wear this instead.”
Father Donahue blessed the medals, put them over our heads, and we went on our way.
About a week after receiving the Miraculous Medal something tremendous began to happen. I began to “hear” the prayers of my Catholic friends Beth and Steve. It was not with words, but audible through inspiration, like a solid tug on an invisible rope. As it continued each day—I could not discern what the message was nor could I fathom why they were doing it—I became convinced beyond doubt that they were praying for me. I mentioned it to Kathleen.
“I suppose you could be sensing their prayers,” she responded.
A week later the sensation had grown to be so strong that I said, “Kathleen, I know that Steve and Beth are praying for me. They have never indicated to me in any way that they were praying for me, but I’m sure it’s true.”
“I’m sure it could be true,” she said. “Why don’t you ask them?”
A week later, Steve, Beth, and I were shopping. As we walked back to our cars I knew there would be no better time to ask perhaps the silliest question I had ever dreamed up. As we stood there talking, I said, “Steve, I have a question for you. Have . . . have you . . . have you been praying for me?” I winced at the question and sort of ducked in fear of his laughter.
Steve looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “I sure have.”
“I knew it! Somehow I knew it!” I cried. “I felt it. I knew you were praying for me. I even told Kathleen. I told her twice, and I even said that I knew you guys were praying for me. You have to believe me. I really did know somehow.”
“I do believe you.”
“No, really. I could feel you praying for me!”
During the next ten minutes, Steve and Beth recounted the great extent to which they had committed themselves to praying for me. They told me that they were saying prayers almost daily for my conversion, and that in the beginning I was so far away from believing in God that they thought I was a hopeless case. They asked St. Jude for help. Then Beth said to me, “Craig, do you know what prayer we were saying for you?”
“No. What?”
“The Miraculous Medal novena.”
“What!” I cried out. “You prayed the prayer of the Miraculous Medal?” I yanked the chain with the Miraculous Medal out from underneath my shirt. “Do you realize that I was given this medal only a couple of weeks ago by a priest? This is too much. Before that I had never even heard of one before.”
I spent the next few minutes talking about the Miraculous Medal and the prayer, about the feeling I had of Steve and Beth praying for me. I left that night perplexed but happy.
The next morning I sat at my desk drinking coffee and thinking about what had happened the night before. I pondered the details. I always knew that my vision of the universe was not the only one. It couldn’t be. It is like looking through the end of a telescope, and we think what we see constitutes the infinitude of reality. What was happening to me, I thought, was an expansion of my field of vision through my telescope, so that I was able to see more of reality than I could previously, albeit not in its entirety. I knew beyond any doubt, though, that I had heard my friends’ prayers. This was astounding.
If something was really going on, something I couldn’t explain that was spiritual or religious, I couldn’t simply sit around waiting for things to happen to me. I had to do something in return.
I thought hard about what to do. A link was connecting all these events—Beth and Steve’s pilgrimage, my receiving the Miraculous Medal, my friends praying the Miraculous Medal novena for me, and me sensing it—and that link was the Blessed Mother. I decided my one step forward should be to learn the Hail Mary.
I obtained a brochure that explained how to pray the rosary. I had to meet my friend Steve at his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and it would be the opportune time as I drove to learn the prayer. I left work and headed south on the Beltway. Holding the brochure with my right hand and steering with my left, I maneuvered the crowded highway repeating the words of the prayer for half an hour until I reached Alexandria.
As I prayed I thought about what the words meant. The first half of the prayer is a salutation, an invocation of praise meant to glorify Mary and her role in Christianity. The second half of the prayer is our request for Mary to intercede on our behalf and bestow upon us the graces that she administers.
When I reached Alexandria I had time to kill before Steve got home from work. The only parking place I could find was in front of the Alexandria Coffee Company. I bought Kathleen a pound of coffee, tossed it onto the passenger seat of my car, and drove to Steve’s apartment.
When I arrived, Steve had just come home. His wife was at the gym and he had to make himself dinner. As I sat down at the kitchen table he microwaved a chicken sandwich and sat down to talk with me. His dinner smelled strongly of processed food, and I kidded him about it. As we sat at the table discussing football and other topics, I caught the faint smell of something different. I thought nothing of it, of course, until the same smell drifted by, only stronger. Suddenly, the most powerful scent of roses I had ever encountered came over me. The smell was so powerful it nearly knocked my head back.
“Steve, where are the roses?” I asked. It was obvious to me at least a few dozen roses had to be on a table nearby.
“What roses?” Steve responded.
I laughed out loud and swiveled around in my chair to look at his apartment. “The roses. Where are the roses?”
The incredible scent hit me not in one continuous intensity but stronger and stronger, like waves hitting a beach. The waves increased until the overwhelming smell of roses surrounded me.
“We don’t have any roses here,” Steve said, fixing me with a curious look.
“Beth must wear rose perfume,” I said.
“No,” Steve said after a moment’s thought. “Beth doesn’t have any rose perfume.”
I got up and walked around the apartment. It was as if I was in a room piled up to my neck with roses, their fragrance everywhere, but I couldn’t find any.
“You mean you don’t smell any roses?” I asked.
“No, I don’t.”
As I walked around the apartment sniffing the air and looking in vain for roses that didn’t exist, Steve said to me, “Craig! You’re being visited by the Blessed Mother!”
I immediately remembered Steve and Beth’s episode with roses during their pilgrimage, a story I had heard more than a year before and had forgotten, and I knew what Steve meant. But this was so far from any sort of reality that I would even consider that I wheeled around and said, “That’s bull, man.” I stormed around the living room, then the dining area, then the kitchen, then the study, looking for roses I knew had to be there.
I returned to my chair and sat down. “Come here,” I said to Steve. I lifted my hand up next to my face where I wanted him to be. “Put your face right here.”
Steve moved closer to me and leaned forward so his head was right next to mine.
“Now take a deep breath.” He breathed in deeply and held it. “You don’t smell roses? And don’t lie!”
He laughed and moved back to his side of the kitchen table, smiling as if he understood my dilemma. “I don’t smell any roses,” he said again.
Just then Beth returned home from the gym. She walked in, turned around, and no doubt saw two men sitting at the kitchen table with looks of awe on their faces. She stopped dead in her tracks and said, “What happened?”
“Craig is smelling roses,” Steve said.
“What!” Quickly Beth shut the door. She threw her bags onto the floor and sat down in the chair next to me. “Craig!” she exclaimed.
“Beth,” I said, looking at her sternly. “I want you to take a deep breath and tell me what you smell.”
Beth drew a long, deep breath, exhaled, and looked at me seriously. She shook her head. “Nothing.”
After I had calmed down a bit Beth said, “It smells perfumy, doesn’t it?” recalling her own experience in Yugoslavia.
“Yes!” I said. A few minutes later she said, “It comes in waves . . .”
“Yes!” I exclaimed again. It did come in waves, and unless she had had the same experience, she would not know to make this comment. I spent fifty minutes in their apartment that day. The first twenty minutes I smelled nothing but stale apartment air and the smell of a microwaved chicken sandwich. Then the overpowering aroma of roses stayed in the air for the next thirty minutes until I left their apartment.
When I climbed into my car to leave I was incredibly ecstatic. I sniffed the air of the interior of my car, but all I smelled was the very strong odor of coffee from the bag of beans I had bought an hour earlier. I fired up the engine and drove away practically giddy with joy. How in the world could something like this happen?
I was so happy, in fact, that I decided to pray the Hail Mary again. I began with the words, “Hail Mary. . .” But before I could even finish the short prayer the strong odor of coffee was suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of roses. Right there, sitting in my car—the very same car that I drove to work in every day of the week and had owned for more than three years—it was as if roses were piled up to my neck. During the entire drive home I smelled roses—not just roses, but overwhelming and intense ROSES.
Sitting in the office of Father Donahue, I explained that I had returned because I had had some experiences that were inexplicable to me and wondered if he could shed some light on them. I related my friends’ experiences staring into the sun, their encounter with the rose scent, my undeniable conviction—confirmed by them—that they were praying for me, and then my smelling roses in their apartment after having prayed the Hail Mary for the first time. What in heck was going on here?
“Well, Craig, experiences such as smelling roses do happen. There are stories throughout history in which Christians were converted by means of dramatic events. But let me give you some words of caution: These experiences happen, if at all, only a few times during a person’s life. These little gifts, called graces, are used to call people closer to God. Don’t expect them to happen forever. If we were to get these signs all the time we would not be required to believe with faith. We also might believe and act as we are supposed to only in order to continue to get these signs.
In other words, God doesn’t want us to act in a way that is pleasing to him just so we can get the prize from time to time. Just like you don’t want to give candy to a child too often—if you do, the child is simply doing what you want in order to get more candy.”
As an atheist—or, more accurately, as a former atheist—I could no longer presume that God didn’t have a hand in these events. Once again, it was time to act—time for me to do something instead of merely waiting for things to happen to me.
After work one day I drove to one of the most majestic and beautiful buildings that I have ever visited: the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. I had come to pray my first rosary. It was, I suppose, a way of saying, “Thank you.” Inside was the beautiful, smoky fragrance Catholic churches often retain from the incense that burns as a symbol of our prayers rising toward heaven. I walked through the nave of the church admiring the crimson and blue stained-glass on either side until I found what I was looking for: a small shrine, like a grotto built into the side of the church, with candles burning on either side and a small altar at the front. Above the altar was an enormous replica of the medal I wore around my neck. This was the Shrine of the Miraculous Medal.
I entered the little shrine and knelt in a pew. After a few moments I began to pray. I gave thanks for having been given the grace to “smell roses” and for having been led on a path toward prayer and the Church, which was by now undeniable. There was nothing I could say or do that could reciprocate what had been given to me. I was truly, completely grateful.
After this prayer I pulled out my brochure explaining how to say the rosary, took out the rosary beads I had brought with me, and started from the beginning. The first few prayers of the rosary were tricky. The middle section was easy to learn and was an enchanting way to meditate on the life of Christ. As I prayed the final “Hail, Holy Queen” I felt a beautiful, inexplicable peace come over me. It was a realization that somehow, despite all evil and chaos in the world, harmony really does exist; peace is the one, lasting element of our existence.
At the final words, “Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ,” a familiar smell came over me. It was as if ten crates of roses had been dumped in front of me—no, a hundred crates of roses, a smell so strong it was almost intoxicating.
I knelt there in that beautiful little shrine, surrounded by white flickering candles, and breathed in the fragrance of eternity.