Ah, but a conversion is a long, life long, process, and we certainly do not have the wisdom necessary to contradict God. As is aptly said, “He moves in mysterious ways”, and so what we consider the simple direct path cannot always be taken for those of us who had a lot of “excess baggage” to get rid of first.
Take me for example. I was raised as your typical no-church protestant. That is, one (christian-protestant) church is essentially as good as another. Helps I went to a lutheran school during the week, and to a evangelical church on sundays, as well as visiting friends’ churches on occasion along the way.
At anyrate, while I always stove to keep God in center focus, it took a very long and round-about road to get me into Catholicism, which included occultism, which led into mormonism, which culminated in masonry, and finally to “Rome”. While none of these steps were “ideal”, there were very important things that I both had to let go of, and to take hold of, before Catholicism was even a valid option. These steps were necessary for my personal journey into the Faith.
For example, thanks to my religious upbringing, I had no concept of a need for ecclisiastical “authority” or preisthoods. Like many, the Holy Spirit was the only “authority” necessary for a Christian. Unfortunately, in seeking better means of quieting myself in order to listen to the Holy Spirit, I fell into the occultist trap. While happily “spiritual”, my occult worldveiw forced me to actually look past the empty intolerance and prejudice against mormonism, and I found a “christian” church that actually had room for both occultism (not to say it is welcomed by your average mromon) and the idea that we are our own authorities in regards to the Gospel, thanks to personal revelation, ect. However, my years in the mormon church helped to pull me out of my directly occultic dealings, and started to form the question and awareness of the necessity for a valid preisthood. This awareness did not culminate into a postitive determination until after becoming a York Rite Mason. Thanks, ironically, to two relativistic ideologies (mormon and masonic), I discovered that I was both a realist, and that the Gospel requires an objective reality. Coupled with the full realization of the real requirement for an objective “authority” to perform the scriptural mandates of teaching doctrine and correcting error, I shed the last of my protestant baggage, and was able to finally look at the Catholic Church for the first time as it is, rather than as all my prior experience told me it was.
Is it a cure-all for all protestants like I was? Would I ever tell someone to join the lds corporation so that they can eventually become Catholics? No. But neither can I deny the necessary (thanks to my own peculiar brand of stubborness and spiritual blindness) of the path I took in order to finally arrive at the straight and narrow. Yes, I humbly recognize there were many cases where I went in the opposite direction, but in those cases it was necessary to show me the error of the path. I wish I could say I was wise enough not to have ever needed to be a mormon, but I cannot. All I can say is, the Most Blessed and Holy Trinity was guiding me
as much as I would allow to get me to where I needed to be. Would it have been easier to just go from basic american -protestant striagt to Catholic? Certainly, after all, the shortest distance between two points
is a straight line. But, again, I was too blind in certain areas of the Gospel, and too disordered in others to make such a direct route.
My time in the refining fire needed a little more time and process to bring out the gold, is all. And it is still an ongoing process, its just that
positive progress is finally being made.
