My conversion in a nutshell: infant baptism; reception of First Communion, confession, and confirmation without having a clue what they were about; raised in a secular environment; quit going to church as a teenager; a life of hedonism followed by exposure to truth; questioning, deciding to begin attending Mass again; discovering Jesus Christ as my Lord and Redeemer; obedience to God; phase of complete self-righteousness and pride; loss of all friends; full-blown life crisis; complete loss of control over my life; humility, subjection, and openness to the will of God; and, finally, learning to act like a Christian.
But of course, like all stories mine has its idiosyncrasies and unique angles. My parents were classic “good” Catholics, accepting false dogma—said to be the spirit of Vatican II—without question or reservation. Society and the Church were ripe for a change. In my parents’ catechism books, God tossed the unrepentant down from the gates of heaven like candy wrappers, down to where their bodies were pierced unceremoniously onto the pitchforks held by the leagues of Lucifer and into the fiery underworld with never a second glance.
Little wonder parents boxed their children’s ears and teachers rapped their student’s knuckles with wooden rulers. How medieval! Was not the focus of Vatican II that God was a loving God? That’s what they were told. Love—oh, the love and mercy of God—what a welcome change in the philosophy of civilization. Yes, it was a welcome change for many, but love without obedience came with heavy price tags. Dissent. Indifference. Cafeteria Catholicism.
I was born on the cusp of Vatican II, washed dutifully from the stain of original sin, then raised up in a world that seemed to be fast losing any concept of actual sin. Like most of the children of my generation, I was taught with watered-down catechisms that downplayed sin and emphasized forgiveness (for what, I wonder now) because we were too tender at the age of seven and our minds were too dull to understand the nature of sin.
But look—my two-year-old son, sneaking the icing off his baby brother’s baptismal cake, turns around guiltily to see who might be observing his infraction. Surely by the age of seven I had some idea of the difference between good and bad. Tell me my conscience was at the very least beginning to develop. Convince me that somewhere the seed of truth was planted in me through my parents.
Of course it was. They took me to church. There was a crucifix there. The priest talked about God. We had a nativity scene under our tree at Christmas. We had some holy pictures in our house. Thank God for the sacramentals of the Catholic Church. But our home was a far cry from the domestic Church it was intended to be. Perhaps my parents had private prayer lives, for they were pillars of strength to me. But we never prayed as a family, not even grace at meals.
It wasn’t enough. By the time I hit my teens, I longed for more . . . more something . . . something deeper—something fun. In our small French community, where I spent my early youth, they knew how to have fun. Fun was afternoons after Mass, getting together with friends and family, playing cards and drinking. Grownups were having a lot of fun. By the time I was about twelve, I had it firmly planted in my brain that drinking was fun. Any small seed of the difference between good and evil planted in my early childhood was beginning to crumble.
And so began, in my early teens, a life of self-centeredness, pleasure, and hedonism. Although I failed to see the immorality of excessive drinking and drunkenness, I could see the wrong of many of the pleasures sought by my peers. Something always held me back from committing some of the sins where I could see the evil, like stealing and sexual immorality. I was no angel, but I did have a vague sense that things could get carried a little too far. What I didn’t have was a concrete idea of where the boundaries lay. Mass was dull to an adolescent hung over from Saturday night. Like my siblings before me, I stopped attending church.
Despite this pleasure-seeking life, I prayed. It wasn’t a great prayer life—in fact, it was completely one-sided. I asked God for stuff. Always good stuff, of course: not just material gain but safety for my family, an end to war and famine, pleas to pass tests at school. I didn’t ask for forgiveness—I was Basically a Good Person.
I was thankful to God for answering my prayers, but I didn’t praise or honor him. I was very big on supplication. And I certainly didn’t talk about this relationship with anybody else. It was private. Undoubtedly God shook his head about me. However shallow it was, at least I still had a relationship with him, and he did not forsake me.
In college I was exposed to all manner of secular living. Here I began to see the dead-end street of alcoholism and cut back my drinking to one night on the weekend. Just about the time I faced graduation, and a future that dangled the brass ring of success temptingly in front of me, I was called home to assist in the management of the family business. While I had planned to climb the corporate ladder, a sense of family duty gave me the patience to put that desire on hold while we got things sorted out at home. Of course, it was providence that led me home. Here two significant things happened.
First, I witnessed the conversion of the souls of two of my brothers. My eldest brother had exhausted all the avenues of pleasure, had had a great deal of fun, but had experienced no fulfilment in life. Extremist that he is, he became a hardcore, anti-Catholic, “Bible” Christian. He took his place among the growing number of poorly formed Catholics in the Seventh Day Adventist church. But he turned his life around morally. I watched with a mixture of fascination and dismay as he became a different person. Shortly afterward, my younger brother walked a similar path straight into the Baptist church.
Second, I met Bonnie, the woman who would become my wife. She was a single mother with a two-year-old daughter, Breann. She was opinionated about almost everything, and, luckily for her, most of her opinions agreed with mine. Unknown to me, she had been trifling with the notion of the existence of God. Several seeds had been planted, and God was working hard on her.
One evening, about two weeks into our relationship, after we had discerned that this was likely to be a permanent, heading-toward-marriage kind of relationship, she cornered me. “Do you pray?” she fired at me in her frank manner.
What now? I panicked. I couldn’t just lie to her—this was the person I was going to marry.
But it was rude to ask someone like me if I prayed—it was personal. She stared me down, and made no apology for being so rude. So I told her. I told her everything. I told her about God and why I prayed, and what I believed, all of which was only remotely formed in my own mind. Thus began many long discussions about God, about truth, about where we should go with this: her conversion, my reversion, and the long journey that we are still on.
Well, sure enough, we got married, and shortly afterward conceived a daughter, Lucy, who was later to become the cross that brought us to a much deeper conversion. We were shocked by some of the teachings of the Catholic Church, such as the Real Presence, the communion of saints, and the perpetual virginity of Mary. Despite my sketchy formation, instead of running blind from the Catholic Church like my brothers, I decided I needed to pursue a fuller understanding of what the Church taught.
Of the teachings we researched, I was convinced that the Catholic Church was the true Church instituted by Christ. Of the doctrine I was unable to research or understand, I had come to the conclusion that, since the authority of the Church was historically undeniable, I would trust that if the teaching magisterium said it was so, it was so. We were convinced that we would pursue our life in Christ within the Catholic Church.
Particularly fascinated with Church teaching on human sexuality, we got on the bandwagon to promote Natural Family Planning and openness to the will of God in this regard. Completely convinced that I had the fullness of truth behind me, I became a swaggering, antagonistic, self-righteous Catholic, leaving people annoyed and hurt in my wake.
Revealing truth to the ignorant masses became my apostolate. I looked down from the lofty heights of superior birth—down on the little old ladies in the pews, down on the crowds of contracepting Catholics, down on the uninformed Protestants, and down, down on those self-seeking pagans who could not see plain and simple truth, even when I held it in front of their very faces. These ignorant masses had never even heard the word apologetics. And I, unfortunately, had a very poor understanding of the word charity.
Undaunted by the formidable task ahead of us—teaching the world to embrace Humanae Vitae—we began with our friends. I explained and expounded. I listened and lectured. I criticized and cajoled. When we had no friends left to proselytize, the mission began on a larger scale. I became the “Life Issues” representative for the local Knights of Columbus and couched our purpose in the friendly environment of the pancake breakfast. Bonnie would often soften up my sometimes caustic comments, which I saw as the only way to real truth.
After a few years on the learning curve, my methods improved somewhat, and we were asked to be marriage preparation instructors, to explain Church teachings on sexuality. God had to use many means to chip away at the mountain of pride I carried on my shoulders. He led us to meet devoted Christians whom we deeply respected and to watch them carry out their mission with charity. He led us into a group of solid Catholic families whose goals were the same as ours. One more daughter, Mary, was welcomed into our life.
Daily rosaries and weekly adoration became phenomenal channels of grace in my life. Listening to Mother Angelica throughout the day on the Internet while I worked taught me many things. I prayed with my wife and children. Reading about the lives of Francis of Assisi and Martin de Porres also had a significant impact on me. Then came the blessing of another child, Isaac, our first son.
I was unaware of the change that was taking place in me. Bonnie could see the transformation from understanding what a Christian is to acting like one. But change takes time and, often, drastic measures.
Just prior to the crisis we were about to confront, Bonnie had been asked by our parish priest if she would take on the job of coordinator for religious education for children. We determined to do it as a team.
We were unaware and unprepared for the spiritual warfare that we were about to engage in. The families in this parish were so immersed in watered down Catholicism that they were skeptical of the faith we were presenting to them. We were called pre-Vatican II, fundamentalists, and archaic.
It was strange for me. Here was Bonnie, who had always taken a back seat in informing people about the faith, instructing a parent’s class as our priest had requested. Here was I, pouring juice for the kids. But it strengthened her faith and my humility. God’s ways are not our ways. At the end of our first year in this job our life fell apart. Spiritual warfare had worn us down, and our time had come to suffer.
Shortly after we celebrated the birth of our fifth child, Noah, we began experiencing a family crisis that would bring us to our knees. Our second daughter, Lucy, was eight years old. She had always been the high-maintenance child of our family and had some quirky behavioral issues. She was exceptionally outgoing and friendly, yet volatile and aggressive in the face of any kind of strong emotions and overly sensitive to noise, smells, slight changes in temperature, and other minor discomforts.
Her behavior continued to escalate until we were dealing with a child who was fast losing control of any ability to calm herself or maintain any kind of composure when upset. We had been receiving counseling and learned some skills to deal with the aggression. Although there were periods of relative peace in our home and in her soul, each time she came out of a calm time, the aggression worsened and ultimately developed into rage and violence.
We found little support from the medical community. Bonnie and I appeared collected when we visited our family doctor. We were good parents, he told us (as did the counselor), and we had such a lovely, well-behaved family—we were going to get through this.
These comments subdued our natural instinct as parents; deep down, we believed that something was seriously wrong with our child. She had bizarre fears regarding food and illness. She was terrified to be away from us. We persevered, wondering if the experts knew what they were talking about. They didn’t.
Perhaps we should have told them about her intense fear of leaving the house; maybe they would have understood if we had told them that when she did leave the house, even to go to the neighbors’ or the corner store, she packed two suitcases with every single article of clothing that she owned, including pillow, sleeping bag, first aid kit, and an emergency food supply. If the experts could have seen how she has hacked apart her bedroom, and how it looked like a gloomy, vandalized prison cell, maybe they would have had a clue.
The violence and rages persisted until we were literally holding her for a minimum of three hours a day. She often spent as much as five or six hours a day in a full-blown rage. Hitting, kicking, biting, throwing, tearing—she was a wild animal. I missed more than half my work schedule. Our eldest daughter, Breann, then 13, was spending hours a day keeping the little ones out of the line of fire. Our marriage, our faith, the life that we had so carefully chosen, was crumbling before our eyes. This went on for several months.
In terror and exhaustion, and with a sense of losing complete control over all that was dear to us, we decided that the only solution was for Bonnie and me to separate. I would quit my job. Lucy would live with me until she grew out of this or until a solution was found. I would raise her so that Bonnie and the other children could live a relatively normal life in safety without Lucy.
E-mailing my brother (who was now my business partner) a long letter, I explained the hidden details of our life of madness. I outlined the only plan our weary minds could muster. I was broken. I felt like I had failed at the only things that I ever considered truly important: raising children for the kingdom of God and having a prosperous, Christ-centered marriage in the midst of a secular world.
Before the message was sent, Bonnie and I were fighting, brutally fighting, using abusive language and accusations shamelessly, in front of our children. This is what our marriage had been reduced to. Our baby, Noah, just a year old, crawled innocently into the office and turned off the computer, losing the letter I had agonized over, losing the plan—and opening a door we were unable to consider before God led him to his childlike act. Bonnie and I fell weeping into each other’s arms, reassured that if we trusted God he would show us another way, a way with him, a way together for getting our family out of this crisis.
We prayed together, and over the next few hours God revealed a new plan. I would work a regular schedule, only half a day, from 7:00 A.M. until noon. Then I would take over the care of Lucy so that our other children could lead a normal life, with Bonnie schooling them, playing with them, taking them places. Bonnie agreed that she could hang on until noon, even if she did nothing else but deal with Lucy.
The plan worked for one week. At the end of the week, Lucy’s behavior reached an epic level. In retrospect, what had happened was that I had become her phobic partner. I was the only one able to assuage her fears, although I was only vaguely aware of them myself. Losing her partner for those hours wreaked havoc on her already tormented mind.
She turned her rage inward and began hurting herself, as well as hurting Bonnie and me. We called our doctor in despair, late at night, and he agreed that we had reached the “do something” stage. Over the next couple of days she switched gears completely, and Bonnie unknowingly became her phobic partner in my stead. In Lucy’s mind, I was no longer reliable.
Lucy was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and, retracing our steps, we realized that these bizarre fears she had regarding food, eating, and illness all stemmed from an obsessive fear of vomiting that had taken over her mind in the last several months. Apparently, the intrusive thoughts had been coming and going for the last three or four years without surfacing enough for us to deal with effectively. She responded to her fear initially by developing many compulsions, and when the compulsions could not give her relief from the thoughts in her head, she raged.
Due to the unbelievably slow process of our local mental health services and the amount of time that the medication she required took to be effective, healing was still many weeks away. But, by the grace of God, there was a glimmer of hope.
Our friends and family rallied around us, supporting us in every way possible. With their prayers, their time, and their concern for our family, we felt lifted up physically to rise to the task of getting through the next few difficult weeks after Lucy’s initial psychiatric care. The only strength we had was the strength we received through the Body of Christ, both in the Eucharist and in the people we saw acting out the will of God on our behalf. Our Catholic family became the arms and legs, the heart and voice of Christ.
Only then did we know only a shudder of the pain Christ felt on the cross for mankind. We had never suffered before. Certainly we never knew the grace that could come with that suffering. In thankfulness and humility, we truly gave our lives to him. It was time to serve. Not just obedience to his laws and the teachings given us through the Church but obedience in character, in Christian charity.
It was a painful way to grow, and I know that it will not be the last time I suffer pain and humility inorder to grow in conscience and love. May Christ continue to be my model, remonstrating me gently when I fall, forgiving me when I repent, and ever continue calling me home when my yoke is not easy and my burden feels more than I can bear.