Whenever I count my blessings, there are three which loom large over so many others. The first is life, and the mother who chose to give me this gift when it might have been easier for her to make another choice. The second is the new life I found in the Catholic faith. The third is that I was baptized by a saint.
It was a long journey from a cradle in the Methodist Church nursery to the baptismal font in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; from growing up in the Deep South where the word Catholic was anathema right into the waiting arms of Mother Church. It has been a fascinating spiritual journey, one which goes on, never losing its wonder, its excitement, and its joy.
I was born in Fort Valley, Georgia, in 1925. When I was ten, I officially joined the Methodist Church and soon realized the experience was just that, “official,” placing my name on the Church roll. I don’t know what I expected to happen, but nothing did. I thought I would feel different, changed somehow, and I was disappointed.
As children we were expected to obey the commandments to the letter of the law, the old law which Jesus came to temper with love, but our parents seemed not to know much about the tempering. We attended church and Sunday school every Sunday, no excuses short of dire illness. We read our Bibles and memorized verses. We said our night prayers, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” at our father’s knee, and we never dared to taste a morsel of food before God was properly thanked. Religion was a thing to be lived quietly but not discussed.
God was a stern judge in heaven, one we’d have to answer to one day in the distant future. But while we waited for his judgment, temporal punishment would be meted out by his appointed guardians of our immortal souls here. The very worst threat was, “If you don’t behave, I’ll send you to Mt. De Sales!” To those sinister women in black robes? Catholics? Heaven forbid! So we tried to be very good.
I knew that to question our religious beliefs would be seen as the worst kind of disobedience—apostasy, though there was no such word in my childish vocabulary, especially in our insulated world. I knew I would be seen as rebellious. So I kept my concerns to myself, and decided that it would be up to me to find the missing ingredients. It was to be a very long and lonely search for truth.
The summer after graduation from high school, I attended a Holiness Camp Meeting and had the first religious experience that truly changed me. These services are always charged with emotionalism, full of “fire and brimstone,” inciting guilt, frightening many into “accepting Jesus as personal Savior.” The concept of instant and irreversible salvation somehow escaped my sense of logic, my understanding of Scripture. So when I felt moved to go forward to the altar that August night of my seventeenth birthday, it wasn’t for this quick-fix salvation but my personal decision to commit my life to God from that moment on.
There were lots of tears and laughter and hugs and praises to God that I had been “saved.” I alone knew the truth, that I’d simply made a pact with God: He would show me the way to his salvation and guide and protect me on that journey. In return, I had promised to do whatever, go wherever, he asked me, if he would just give me the directions, fill in the gaps in my religious education, satisfy my hunger, and let me know what it was that I so hungered for.
Two weeks later I heard his first response. I received communion in our Methodist Church. As I knelt at the altar, I listened to the words intoned by the pastor as he served each one, “This is the symbol of my body.” But wait! That’s not what Jesus said. He said, “This is my body.”
If there was one thing we understood from earliest childhood, it was that the Bible was to be taken literally. Any child who could read, who dutifully committed Scripture to memory, would know that something was wrong here. Our pastor was putting words into Jesus’ mouth! Even before he reached me with the cracker crumbs and grape juice, I knew that I must take Jesus at his literal word. He meant exactly what he said, and so from then on I would believe that I was truly receiving his body and blood. It would be another secret I would carry with me for many years, another “word hid in my heart” to guide me and accompany me in my search for truth.
In fact, there were things other than the Eucharist that my friends and I figured out in our childhood. Purgatory, for example. We didn’t know the word, but we decided that many of our friends were not as good as we were, but not bad enough to go to the “bad place.” So there must be another place for them. We discussed the difference between mothers and fathers, the need of each for different reasons, and wondered why God the Father didn’t provide a mother. Mary!
I went away in the fall to a small Christian college, safe from the temptations of the world, an environment conducive to our expected growth in “holiness.” For the next three years I listened, read, studied, still searching but knowing I dare not question anything openly. I had perfect confidence that God in his own time, in his own way, would show me where I should be. What a wonderful surprise he had in store for me! He would take me to a remote mountain a thousand miles away, and there, in the midst of all the fun and frivolity of teenagers on vacation, let me find the answers to life’s most serious questions.
My best friend and I had filled our childhood and adolescence with dreams of leaving our monotonous small-town life behind, traveling to new, exciting places with new people, new ideas. Old enough now to make our decisions without asking permission or even announcing our intentions, we found the address of a resort hotel in New Hampshire. We wrote and got jobs, earned our travel money by picking peaches, and headed off to see the world.
It was a carefree world, filled with adventure and fun. Even in our jobs, which we performed responsibly, we could always find a way to have fun. But through it all, the seriousness of my search would not go away. Almost all our new friends there were Catholics, and I wondered if perhaps God had sent me there to “convert” them. To my surprise, I found nothing strange about them. They were no different from our other friends. We found most of them as devout in their own beliefs as we were in ours. Could it be that they were different from other Catholics? Or had we been terribly misled about the true character of these people who in our tradition were not even considered Christians?
I was the hotel parlor maid, and my first job early each morning was to sweep the grand ballroom. On Sundays and some other days which I came to understand were “holy days,” I couldn’t get into the ballroom because the Catholics were having their Mass there. I would sit on the stairway just outside with my broom, waiting, trying to peek inside to see if I could understand what was going on. I had already begun to see that attending Mass and receiving Communion were important to my friends, and I determined to find out why. For the first time, I dared to ask a question. The friend I trusted most, with whom I was sure I could safely entrust my curiosity, answered, “Why, when we receive Holy Communion, we are really receiving the true body and blood of our Lord!”
That long journey to the White Mountains of New Hampshire was my road to Damascus: I felt as if I’d been knocked off a horse. My questions tumbled out faster than they could be answered. I asked my friends to take me to Mass, not in the ballroom, but to the nearest Catholic church. The next Sunday, the Feast of the Transfiguration, my twentieth birthday, we walked and hitchhiked from the hotel to Bethlehem. That day, in that church, I knew not only would I one day be a Catholic but that I had been one in mind and heart for a long time.
In the fall I returned to college at Asbury, determined to correct the errors of those who had so misinformed innocent and trusting students. My friend from the summer in New Hampshire went back to Creighton University and sent me one of her texts, Faith of Our Fathers, which became my treasure house of information.
At first I hid this private study, because what I was reading was unacceptable at Asbury. My sister and I roomed together, and our dorm room had two spacious, walk-in closets. One contained all our clothes while the other we equipped as a study with lamp, coffee pot, etc. In there, we could study long after “lights out,” and the night watchman who checked and reported curfew infractions, would never see the light.
But, oh, did I see the light in that closet! Night after night I closed myself in there and devoured this wonderful truth so ravenously that I couldn’t digest it as fast as I could read. I would go back, slow down, and sometimes I was almost breathless as the real truths came tumbling out.
Before that year I had always been so shy that I would never speak up in class. But this I could not keep to myself, could not keep my mouth shut when I heard the untruths being fed to us in class. It wasn’t long before I had an invitation to visit the dreaded Discipline Committee. They demanded to know where I was getting my information. I told them, if they were concerned, they would have to censor much of what was in the library for all to see. I can still see those startled but stony faces glaring at me. They knew they had not intimidated or deterred me, so the only solution was to get rid of me. I was told that I could either make a public denial of my belief in Catholicism or pack my bags. I left Asbury.
My mother was a controlling person who was doomed to have given birth to a “free spirit.” Though on the surface I was a very obedient child, she had never been able to control my mind. She knew I could not afford to go to another college, since I was at Asbury on a scholarship. I would have to get a job. But she was not about to let me off her hook so easily, so she found a job for me.
The principal of a small country school in South Georgia had asked her to come and teach the fourth grade there. No, she could not leave home, but her daughter Helen would be glad to go. This without ever even consulting me. Obediently I complied, and it sent me on the course of my wonderful teaching career.
The man in charge of the school in Georgia accepted me on my mother’s recommendation without ever having met me. I filed no application, offered no reference; I had none to offer. He told my mother the day the school would open, and I simply showed up and was led to my forty-five children, many of the farm boys towering over me. I was the four-foot-ten, ninety-eight-pound new teacher. But I refused to be intimated. I had found in teaching a new love, second only to my newfound faith.
So there I was teaching, far removed in Georgia from any Catholic presence. I never doubted for a moment that the Holy Spirit had set my feet on a spiritual journey, and I could never turn back. I waited. I studied, I prayed, I wrote to friends for information and encouragement. During that time Bishop Fulton Sheen became a popular radio, then television, personality and, unknown to him, my absentee mentor.
I knew that if I entered the Church it would devastate my family. I could not bear the thought of causing such pain. Yet I began to think that if I could just meet Bishop Sheen, just be in his presence, I might find the courage I needed to take that final step. One day I read in a newspaper that he would be the guest speaker at the Georgia Catholic Laymen’s Association in Rome, Georgia. (First “Bethlehem” in New Hampshire, then “Rome” in Georgia. Coincidence? I think not.)
I met Bishop Sheen after his address that Sunday afternoon. I’ll never forget the moment. He seemed to stand so long, silently, holding my hand, his dark, piercing eyes looking right into my soul. Spellbound, all I could think to say was, “I want to be a Catholic.” All he said to me was, “Write to me tonight and tell me why.” In our correspondence I shared with him my long years of self-instruction. He made sure that I undertook a formal course of instruction with the parish priest in my community. Two months and three days after I met him in Georgia, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Bishop Sheen conditionally baptized me and received me into the Catholic Church.
We corresponded through the years. His letters were always warm and personal, full of encouragement. On many occasions we met at his public appearances. It always amazed me that he so readily recognized me and called me by name. In spite of the fact that he had instructed and brought into the Church many hundreds of people, many of them famous, he never forgot this little schoolteacher from Georgia who had sought to draw courage from his presence. I knew even then that this servant of God was a saint.
It has been more than fifty years since Bishop Sheen received me into the Church. I have to say yes to God every day because he still surprises me with the things he asks me to do. The fact that he has preserved my health, physical and mental, when so many nowhere near my age are no longer able to lead active lives, tells me that he does not intend for me to take it easy for the rest of my life. I hope to spend every moment of it letting others know what I have been so blessed to learn about Christ and his Church, the only thing that truly makes life worth living. I like to think I might live to see Bishop Sheen’s canonization, but that is asking for another miracle. More wonderful yet would be to celebrate with him!
I know that he is a saint. Having had a saint so touch my life, so change my life, is enough for me.