In seventh grade study hall, a friend and I would make fun of a girl, an upperclassman, who sometimes brought and read her Bible. Taking the “Living Bible” as a point of departure, we’d make various adolescent jokes about her and her reading material.
Three years later the girl and I were in a high school English class called Transcendental Something-or-other with a teacher who would be fired a few years later for giving drugs to a student. Seated in a circle, we were declaring what sort of outlook we had on life. Since I was sitting next to her, it was immediately after she had said that she approached things from a nonreligious outlook that I made my first public profession of Christian faith. Since I had no close friends in the class, for all practical purposes my faith remained a secret to the outside world.
People sometimes read about the conversion of Paul or hear about other conversions, and they say that it’s a great testimony to God’s grace that he can bring about such a sudden transformation. While every conversion to Christ is a testimony to God’s grace, I think that no conversion is truly sudden. When I began attending Mass a few weeks before graduation, it created a minor sensation that Mr. Science was suddenly a Christian. But I knew there was nothing sudden about it.
The son of a college professor in the Pacific Northwest isn’t likely to get a religious upbringing, and I certainly didn’t. As a child I think I went to a church once, for the wedding of one of my father’s colleagues. My conversion began in eighth grade when I had a sharp change of general attitude. I realized for example that the mania shared by many of my classmates for getting drunk was absurd. They say it’s more pleasant to learn from other people’s mistakes than from your own, and it didn’t take much of classmate example to persuade me in this regard.
About the same time I developed a strong interest in math and the physical sciences. For over a year and a half, my best friend and I produced a biweekly, eight-page periodical on different aspects of science. He would write about astronomy, and I would write about other areas of physics and chemistry. Our readership was pretty much limited to our families, but it was a labor of love.
Shortly before tenth grade, a Christian friend spent the night at my house. As we stayed up late talking, he tried to convince me to believe in Christ and the Bible. I opposed what he said from a rational point of view. I remember asking him, “But if God created the world, then who created God?” Twelve years later, after nearly eight years of reading Thomas Aquinas, the full import of his third proof for the existence of God inundated my mind in a flash of insight, and I realized that his proof answers precisely this objection.
A couple of years after that, while reading Bertrand Russell expounding the very same argument I had put forth as a fourteen-year-old (and which I have since heard a child articulate), I realized that Russell didn’t fully understand the third proof. As a philosopher, he surely would have read it, but his mind, one of the most brilliant to attack Christianity, was no match for Aquinas’s mind, enlightened by grace.
There was no dramatic change in me after the late-night conversation with my friend, but I decided to start reading the Bible. We had an old King James Bible in our living room, so I would read two or three chapters from it each day. On one of the first days I did this, my sister and mother were in the living room. My sister saw me take the Bible and start back to my bedroom, and she asked, “What are you doing reading the Bible?”
My mother, an open-minded woman in most things, said something to the effect of, “Now, Lisa, there’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible.” After that I read the Bible almost every day, but I made sure nobody saw me. Some time later my sister, who had attended Mass with a friend in her younger days, began going to a Church of the Nazarene, where she was baptized.
In the weeks that followed, I remember praying, “God, if you’re there, let me know.” Fairly quickly this changed to a real faith in Christ and a life of prayer. I ignored my friend’s advice to begin by reading the Gospels, preferring instead to start at the beginning of the Bible and doggedly persevere in going straight through. Since I hadn’t reached the New Testament by the time I took the Transcendental class, most of the students in the class knew more about Christianity than I did.
I stayed faithful to reading the Bible and spent a good amount of time in prayer. I came to feel guilty about not going to church but told myself that when I moved away to go to college, then I would start attending a church.
Shortly before my senior year, I was watching television when my program was interrupted by an announcement of the election of Pope John Paul I. People call him “the smiling pope,” and the most memorable part of his pontificate seems to have been the moments when he greeted the people from the balcony of St. Peter’s. Perhaps because of the shortness of his pontificate, God touched those moments with special graces. I know it was so in my life, as this was the first time the notion of the Catholic faith took root in my mind.
By this time I had finished the Bible and started in again on the New Testament. In the months to come, I overcame my one remaining serious moral obstacle (if you don’t count not going to church), and the following Ash Wednesday I read in the newspaper about the Catholic practice of giving up something for Lent. I decided to give up reading science fiction and to read in its place various articles in the encyclopedia about Christianity. Since public schools in the seventies seemed to have a zero-homework policy, I had lots of time for this.
Meanwhile my secret was still safe, with only a couple of close calls. One of my extracurricular activities was something immodestly called the “Brain Bowl” in which we would train in answering trivia questions about different subjects, both school-related and otherwise. The teacher who coached us was superb. In our several contests against other schools we never came close to losing, and we almost beat a team of teachers that included our coach.
In one of our lunch sessions, my sister wanted to know how I knew the Israelites spent forty years wandering in the desert. On another occasion, after I had identified Avignon as the temporary residence of the popes during the Middle Ages, our coach asked if any of us were Catholic. Nobody raised a hand. He said in his inimitable way, “Now, in the competition, we might encounter some questions about Catholicism, so I want one of you to convert.” We all laughed.
Some Christians say there has to be a moment of decision, a time when a person commits his life to Christ irrevocably. I can say that up to this point there was no such moment. I don’t remember exactly when I began to pray, when I began to believe in Christ, when I began to try to change my life for the better—it all seemed to flow as soon as I considered the possibility that God existed.
But there was a moment when I decided to become Catholic. It was toward the end of Lent, and I knew by this time that the Catholic Church had existed continuously since the time of Christ while the Protestants posited a period of corruption and re-establishment of a pure faith. I knew that, even with the same Bible, Protestants had different opinions concerning the faith, whereas Catholics were united around the teachings of the popes.
The encyclopedia article on the papacy mentions Matthew 16:18 as the biblical foundation for the papacy. As I re-read Matthew 16, it seemed clear that Jesus founded the Church on Peter. I decided that when I began going to a church, it would be to a Catholic church. I decided that after having read the entire Bible without hearing different interpretations. (I can say that a neutral reading of the Bible really does support the Catholic faith.)
When I made this decision, my fear about professing my faith vanished. Within a few days our family was at supper, and my father said, “Hey, George”—he was the only one who called me that—”why don’t we go to church with Lisa for Easter, then to the college breakfast?” He often made proposals like this that my sister—or, more often, I—would reject.
“Okay,” I said.
I know he wasn’t expecting me to say that, but he didn’t show any surprise. My mother, on the other hand, had a look of utter stupefaction on her face.
I went to Easter services, then to the following Wednesday Bible study with my sister. Then I looked up the address of our town’s Catholic church and biked out to it for Mass the following Sunday, the Sunday that would later be named Mercy Sunday. I’ve never looked back.
The following Easter I came back from the university where I was a freshman physics major, and I was baptized and confirmed, and I received First Communion.
Our society is like my university’s history of philosophy course, which jumped from Marcus Aurelius to Descartes without covering anything in between. It would have us label any thought about God as metaphysics, to be banished from serious public discussion. Its philosophers tell us that a being’s ability to feel pleasure—not any “metaphysical” soul—is the foundation of any right to life, and it encourages us through a technologically enhanced pursuit of pleasure not to think of anything that might be higher.
But truth radiates a splendor, as our current Pope has reminded us, and this splendor will illumine the minds that open to it. In our prayers and our actions, let us strive to remove the barriers people set up to keep that splendor out.