How I became Catholic

This weekend has been a little hard for me.

Irina asked how I became Catholic. And I think I can answer that I only became Catholic in outlook at least (though I'd been attending infrequently for years at my wife's church) as I sat and watched another person's life ebb away to shallow breathing and intermittent consciousness – my mother in law.

For years she had been the matriarch and thread that stitched my wife's family together. The rituals of our lives that she loved became the rituals we all loved. The quirkiness which she embraced in us became the quirkiness we embraced in each other. We used to camp, every summer, on an island without electricity or any conveniences, in the middle of a lake, at her insistence. I remember one time when the grandchildren conspired to fill her tent with balloons while she was sunning on the rocks. They snuck into her tent with a dozen bags full of balloons, and blew them up for hours, until they were dizzy.

She went back to her tent and found all the kids in there, with hundreds of balloons. Laughing, she sat on her cot, surrounded by balloons, posing for pictures so that the moment would be remembered - so that she would be remembered. Then we all laughed as the kids made a raft out of the hundreds of balloons and tied to float on them in the water.

As I watched her life ebb away, I was still surrounded by her spirit. Her family sat around her hospital bed in the same camping chairs in which we'd watched her balloon antics. Her room was filled with visible signs of who she had been, even if now she was no longer capable of being her own sign.

After she passed away, I was asked to sing “Ave Maria” for her funeral Mass – the words are the Latin you see in an earlier post. It had been her favourite hymn. As I sang, I knew I was destined for this journey. Just as we were living signs of my mother in law's many years of love, I now realized I could see in the lovely rites and sacraments of the church the visible signs of who perhaps God might be.

I'd struggled with religion for years. I spent most of my denominationally-Protestant but actually-agnostic life in a twilight zone. I never really believed, not the way I perceived belief. And yet, I never was able to fully doubt either. I still hold onto the vague echo of my earliest memory – standing in my crib, wondering who or what I was. I remember having a palpable sense of my own newness, and pondering in a surprisingly philosophical way what I was, how I got there, and what I was meant for.

I never had an answer for that question. I remember being attracted by the joyful faith of many people that I met, but how could I come to swallow it? I knew beyond any doubt the world was ancient. Strange creatures struggled into the biosphere, and left the stage over eons of unimaginable magnitude. You cannot explain fossils like Archaeopteryx, Homo Habilis, Hesperornis, Icthyornis, and the trilobites unless you accept Darwin's basic premise that life derives through survival mechanisms from earlier life. How could I be asked to embrace belief if it meant adamantly disbelieving what I knew to be true about the natural world?

Catholicism was my wife's faith, but I didn't adapt it simply to buy family peace. In part, I came to accept it because it was a religion that treats the subject matter of my most probing questions with great seriousness, and yet does not try and shuck off the knowledge we have about the world (remember, Galileo is hundreds of years in the past.) About the question of evolution, the Pope asserted, “Truth cannot contradict truth.” The province of science is the discovery of the natural world. The province of religion is the discovery of purpose and meaning, the very first questions I ever wanted an answer to. True journeys of discovery should be journeys where varying truths meet in unity. In the many rich layers of the Catholic view of the world, great intellectual disciplines unite with great heartfelt devotion and faith, often in the same persons (such as St. Augustine, Thomas Moore, Therese of Lisieux, or Thomas Aquinas.)

My own grandmother had had simple faith. Yet she would listen with tremendous interest as the precocious five year old that I was would natter off arcane facts about dinosaurs, red giant stars, and the Apollo space missions. In the year I studied in RCIA, I began to realize that Catholic faith was like both of us – able to sound out learned discernment about every aspect of the human experience, and yet so very simple that the entire faith and all of its mysteries is contained within these words; “This is my body, which will be given up for you.”

That is why by the time my grandmother's funeral came, two years on the heels of my mother in law's, and I came to sing in her small country church, I was filled with far more peace about it. I was united to her, for I had finally, in all my complex seeking, the sifting through cosmology, paleontology, phislosopy.... I had finally found simplicity. I selected one of the readings for her funeral, “Lazarus, come out!” Here in a nutshell was my faith – that somehow, beyond any hope, we are called. My first questions in the crib had been, “Who am I?”

And the very simple, answer, the one I'd spent a lifetime searching for was simply this.

You are mine.