As a young girl, I was taught that there are certain places good Christian girls do not belong: sitting with a boyfriend in the backseat of a Firebird, frequenting movie theaters or karaoke bars, or venturing within fifty miles of Hollywood or Las Vegas—cities so sinful that God must one day destroy them in a torrent of fire or else dig up Sodom and Gomorrah and apologize.
Attending a Catholic Mass was not far down this list. I was told that the Catholic Church is dead, and that Catholics are not “real” Christians. For the first twenty-four years of my life, my exposure to the Church consisted of reruns of The Flying Nun and the occasional wave at our next-door neighbors, the Bells. (We knew they were Catholic because their kids wore parochial school uniforms. Beyond that, they were a mystery.)
So imagine my surprise when, at the age of twenty-eight, I found myself leaning against a palm tree in Pasadena, California, well within the fifty-mile Hollywood “fire zone.” As I deliberated whether to enter the mission-style church in front of me, a bell began to toll. First an elderly couple and then a young woman with a baby carriage smiled at me before disappearing inside. Finally, as the last bell tolled, I took a deep breath and ran up the steps before I could change my mind. I was sneaking into my first Mass.
The result of that first clandestine encounter with Catholic liturgy was another surprise. I had expected empty pomp and ritual; instead, I came away sensing that I had been in the presence of God himself. To my eternal delight, God had condescended to meet me in the last place I ever thought to find him.
Sliding into Grace
Many of my childhood memories revolve around church life. My parents had a conversion experience when I was eight, and we joined Lafayette Federated Church, a close-knit Evangelical church in Lafayette, New Jersey. That year, my sister was kicked on the knee by a horse, and her injury swelled like a melon. The doctor did some tests and came back with an unexpected diagnosis: bone cancer. For years our family life revolved around operations, chemo treatments, and a stack of medical bills that my parents struggled to pay. Eventually Chris lost her leg, though never her spirit, and we learned what it means to live by faith and to trust God.
When I was eighteen, my resolve was tested. As I drove home one night after work, my car hit a patch of black ice and careened down a hill into oncoming traffic. A week later I woke up in intensive care, my leg in traction and my abdomen swathed in bandages. My internal injuries were so severe that the doctors said it was unlikely I would ever have children. Soon after hearing this, my boyfriend, who I had been dating for a year, disappeared.
Fortunately, my friends rallied around me, and I began dating Andrew, a young man so thoughtful and attentive that I forgot all about the first guy. I remember sitting with Andrew on the front porch of my house one warm summer evening, side by side on the glider. I told him what the doctor had said about my not being able to have children and asked if the scars bothered him. He was silent for a moment and then gently touched the pin scar on my knee that my shorts did not quite cover. “Bother me? Not at all. Without those scars, I would not have you.”
As wonderful as Andrew was, there were two obstacles. First, I was about to leave for college, determined to become a missionary in order to pay back God for sparing my life. Second, Andrew was Catholic—and he was leaving also, to go to law school. “And so we must part for a time,” he wrote to me at the end of that summer, his old-fashioned fountain pen scratched nobly over Chinese rice paper. “You have your road, and I have mine. Perhaps one day those roads will converge. In the meantime, I take comfort knowing that in you I have a true friend.”
As soon as I was able to walk on my own, I enrolled in the Bethany College of Missions in Bloomington, Minnesota, which is part of a Christian community that trains, sends, and supports missionaries all over the world. The third year of the training was an overseas internship. After a few false starts, I decided to teach English at a small mission school in Senegal.
Shortly before I left, Andrew proposed marriage. Mature Christian friends advised me that I could marry a Catholic or I could go to heaven, but I could not do both. “The Bible tells us not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers,” my mother reminded me.
What else could I do? I said good-bye to Andrew for good and boarded the plane for Africa. Although the choice had been mine, I was heartbroken. What was so bad about the Catholic faith, I wondered, that I had to give up such a gift? The question haunted me for years, and even after Andrew married someone else, I found it difficult to move on.
God in the Third World
The year I spent in Senegal tested my faith again. During the day I helped around the school and taught English. In the evenings I went into the city with other teachers or to rehearsal at the church, where I played keyboards for a music group. The five African college students in the group befriended me, teaching me about local customs and culture.
Some things I immediately enjoyed, such as navigating the stalls of the open-air market. Others (such as the way the locals splashed everything they ate with a hot pepper sauce called pima) took some getting used to. I also found it difficult to cope with the lepers and other beggars who swarmed my car at every stoplight, begging for alms: “Cadeau? Cadeau?” What did it mean to be a Christian in a place like this? My other Catholic friend, Janet, encouraged me to embrace the experience. “God has something he wants to teach you there,” she wrote.
At the end of the year I returned to the States, finished school, and went to work in the publishing house that supported the missionary community. Two years later, I enrolled at Azusa Pacific University, a small Christian liberal arts school in California. While going to school full-time, I worked three part-time jobs to pay the bills. One of these jobs was at a small Baptist church in Orange, where I was the piano player and choir director. I had been there a little more than a year when the pastor announced that he was resigning in order to join the Catholic Church. To my shock, the congregation voted to bar him from church property.
A few days later I got in touch with Pastor John to see how he was doing. Over lunch, he gave me a series of tapes by Scott Hahn and a book entitled Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating. I dug into the materials, curious to find out what had prompted Pastor John’s drastic choice. I was surprised to find how much the Catholic Church had in common with my own. And as I listened to Hahn’s tapes, which were laced with Scripture references, it was difficult to fault his explanations, even for those tenets that bothered me most—including, of course, the Church’s teachings on Mary.
I made an appointment with a counselor at my university, who listened in silence to my story until I had spilled it all: the broken romance with Andrew, the renegade pastor friend, my own theological doubts. Finally, she said, “You do realize, don’t you, that Catholics really are in fact Christians?”
Her words took my breath away. It was the first time I had allowed myself to consider this. But once I did, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. I had spent years zealously sharing my faith (and trying to convince everyone I met to practice it exactly as I did). I had given up everything to serve God the way I thought he wanted me to. I had even sacrificed the one person I loved most in the world, just to show God how much I loved him. And now I realized: God had not asked me to make this sacrifice.
Days passed, and weeks. I went through the motions at work then returned home to bed. A thick wool blanket of anger and depression wrapped my head, making it hard to focus or even to take a deep breath. I stopped going to church and tried to put God out of my mind. Desperate not to be alone, I embarked on a relationship I knew was not good for me. This went on for months until, shortly after graduation, I received a phone call: My father had suffered a nervous breakdown. Dad and I had been close in the past, and I decided to move back home to help. But I was unable to find work, and it soon became clear that, once again, I had made a mistake.
Returning to California, I tried to put my life back together. I could not bring myself to venture inside the large church I had attended in college. I could not tolerate the smiles and praise choruses now that my neatly packaged view of God had been torn apart. I needed something bigger than my own imagination, something more in touch with real life.
And that was how I found myself standing under that palm tree outside Holy Family Catholic Church in South Pasadena, California.
Waiting for Joy
I’ve often marveled at how God orchestrated my journey to his Church. Earlier in my life, I would have argued with or tuned out any Catholic who approached me about joining the fullness of the Catholic faith. God waited—until I had a greater hunger than I knew how to fill—to lead me to the Bread of Life.
Of course, there were many things I needed to learn. I read everything I could about the faith. When I finally presented myself to the director of religious education, she was surprised to hear where I had come from and how much I had already studied. She seemed to sense that I needed companionship, and she welcomed me into her family and into the life of the parish. The rest she entrusted to God and encouraged me to do the same. I was officially welcomed into the Church at the Easter Vigil of 1993.
Even after I was confirmed, there were still doctrinal issues I continued to grapple with, especially concerning Mary. A few years after I had been in the Church, I asked Mary to have someone sit with me at Mass and asked God not to allow anyone to sit with me if it was improper to make a request to Mary. Three weeks in a row I asked for company. And three weeks in a row, my prayer was answered. (To read the full story, pick up a copy of my book With Mary in Prayer [Loyola Press].)
While this in itself was not proof that the Church was right about Mary, I considered those women who sat next to me each week as God’s angels in disguise. God knew that I had to unclench my fists and open my heart before I could receive all that he wanted to give to me. And for that, I needed a sign.
The problem was not an inability to understand Catholic dogmas. My will had become so encrusted with spiritual pride and prejudice that I found it difficult to imagine that any real truth could lie outside the narrow parameters of Scripture as I had understood it. In time, I came to be grateful even for the heartbreak of romance. I realized that God had brought Andrew into my life to give me courage to follow the path God had for me, even if I had to walk that way alone.
Some have suggested to me that I became Catholic to escape the spiritual influences that had caused me so much pain. In reality, I will always be grateful for my spiritual heritage, because from the church of my childhood I learned many important truths: that God loves me and wants me to trust him with every part of my life, and that he speaks to his children through his Word, the Bible. It was also from the Protestant tradition that I learned to love the great hymns of the faith and to use all my abilities to glorify God.
At the same time, overly subjective faith is devoid of mystery. It tends to cast God in the image of one’s own limited imagination. In order to transcend such limitations, true faith needs something outside itself to provide balance, guidance, and permanence. That is what I found in the Catholic Church.
Ultimately, I attribute my interior transformation to two things: the intercession of my sponsor (aided, no doubt, by our Lady herself), and the life-giving graces of the Eucharist. Each time I received the body and blood of Christ, he whispered words of love to my heart, melting all my fear. Perfect love, Scripture tells us, drives out all fear, including fear masquerading as intellectual pride, spiritual prejudice, or emotional resistance. I am living proof.
Nor did God’s gifts stop there. Five years ago, the man who was to become my husband waltzed into my life—literally. (We were both members of a community ballroom dance club.) It is in a Christ-centered marriage that a couple learns what it is to love truly, and through that vocation they are made holy and ready for heaven.
A decade later, the realities of the Church’s liturgy and its members continue to intrigue me. Like all families, the body of Christ is not without its share of oddball relations: the tiresome feminists who rally for ordination, the clock-watchers who gripe if the homily is a little longer than usual, the self-righteous watchdogs who complain if the priest chooses the Apostle’s Creed over the Nicene. At such times, I remind myself that the most significant human action associated with the Mass takes place not within it, but as a result of it.
In the kingdom of God that by faith is both already and yet to come, one day we will comprehend the true splendor of God’s intention. Earthly images will be transformed into heavenly reality, and we will see the Church in all her splendor as, in that eternal moment, the Bride of Christ dances with her Groom at the great wedding feast of the Lamb.