In nomine Jesu I offer you all peace,
I am finishing RCIA and I will share with you the words I spoke regarding my experience there.
Although raised a Baptist, I have had very fruitful relationships with many Catholics in my life. My mother (Lillian) was raised Catholic and although she married my father (James) who was Baptist, she continued many Catholic practices in our home growing up. One of my childhood friends was a fully practicing Catholic and served as a moral example in my formative years.
As St. Francis once said “preach the gospel at all times and everywhere, and if necessary use words”. Although I have never been directly evangelized by a Catholic, those who I knew served to preach the gospel to me in many ways unspoken. Although often un-watered and planted shallowly and in poor soil those early seeds eventually took root and began to effect in my life a turning to God. It was not the sudden conversion experience we find with St. Paul on the road to Damascus but more a subtle blossoming within, a coming to a certain awareness of Christ Jesus in me and in my life. This launched me off into a 3 year study of the Christian Faith which eventually led me to the Catholic Church as the most complete expression of that faith from it’s origin to our current day.
RCIA was a surprise for me and not a good one at first. As someone who had spent the last three years in study of the orthodox (i.e. straight path) of our Lord’s Message and the Traditions which grew out of that fruitful deposit I was hungry for more depth. No longer satisfied on milk I came seeking the meat St. Paul mentioned in the Scriptures to fill me. It was not long in RCIA that I came to the realization that perhaps I was in the wrong program or even at the wrong Church.
You see I came here with an ego and a pride in my feeble accomplishments. Because I thought I knew the Scriptures, the histories and the Traditions, I felt there was little I could learn here; little of St. Paul’s “meat” I could sink my teeth in to. Out of respect for my Aunt and Uncle I had determined to stick it out and simply “get through the process” even though I felt at the time, it would do little for me and my understanding of Christ Jesus. This arrogance blinded me for several weeks before it was lifted to reveal that I was still yet a babe in the faith.
For I was lacking in the one thing you cannot learn in books, histories or Traditions the one thing you can only learn in community. That one thing was “love” (i.e charity). It is the great stumbling block of the wise of “this” world. You see as St. Paul teaches in Scripture:
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. - 1 Corinthians 13:1-2 DRB
If we learn nothing together on this journey let us rest in these words from our beloved St. Paul:
Owe no man any thing, but to love one another. For he that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the law. - Romans 13:8 DRB
So let me leave you with the words of my Patron Saint Francis of Assisi:
Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.
Peace, Love and Blessings.
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