K
Kyle2253
Guest
Feel free to share your testimony of how you fell in love with our Lord and His church. I always enjoy hearing other’s testimonies.
God Bless!
God Bless!
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.
E
EricF
Guest
Here’s mine. I’ve told it before. I was born to Lutheran parents and as a toddler we attended the Lutheran church. As I got older we moved to a small town with no Lutheran church. We began attending the local Methodist church where I was confirmed around junior high school age. As I went through high school we sort of drifted away. I went away to college at Wichita State, and as happens with lots of college kids, church wasn’t high on my priority list. I met the woman who was to become my wife, and we both felt that we needed church to start our lives together in the right foot. We had some good friends who attended the Evangelical Free church and we began attending there where we were married. In a few years an opportunity arose to move to rural western Kansas and own a business. We went back to the Lutheran church where my wife was baptized. After a few years we became disillusioned with Lutheranism and started going to the Episcopal church. (With a one-Sunday stop at the Baptist church). We were Episcopalian for seven or eight years, and we’re close friends with the priest and his wife. There was turmoil in that congregation and one Sunday I blew up and walked out. My wife kept going without me.
…continued…
…continued…
E
EricF
Guest
We were back in Wichita a few months later (attending a WSU basketball game, huge fans) on a Saturday night. We got up on Sunday, checked out of the hotel, and I asked my wife what she wanted to do, since it was too early to start for home. “Church,” she said. “We haven’t been to church together for a long time,”. I totally agreed. We were at that moment driving East on Douglas Avenue and I pulled into the parking lot of St. James Episcopal church. I started walking and quickly noticed she wasn’t with me. I said, “Let’s go,” and pointed at St. James Church. She was staring across the street to the east at The. Hutch of the Blessed Sacrament. She said, “No, I don’t think so. I want to go see what these Catholics are all about.”
What the heck I figured and off we went. We sat in the back, and were aware of what we could and could.not participate in. We did have a solid liturgical background, and the liturgies are quite similar with some of the churches we’d attended in the past, and we’d both been to a few Catholic weddings and funerals. We knew what to expect. (We expected to not be greeted or acknowledged. We always thought Catholics were rather cold, even snobby, more on that later.)
Before the Mass began, we noticed something. We noticed the silence. As people came in, they were sitting quietly or kneeling in prayer. This was our first clue that something was going to be different.
The Mass began, and we saw all those silly little things that Catholics do, the sign of the cross, the holy water, the kneeling, etc. But this time we saw something differently. This time we saw them with eyes opened by the Holy Spirit. We didn’t see people making empty gestures, and trying to look holy in front of their friends. We saw a group of people doing these things as if it were the most natural thing in the world to them. They were doing them in unison, together, as if they were a single body. This was the first time I think we understood what Paul meant when he wrote about “the body of Christ.”
Then came the homily. The priest that day wasn’t their regular priest. It was Father John Hotze, the postulator for the cause for canonization of Father Emil Kapaun, a military chaplain who died in a prison camp during the Korean War. He spoke of many of Kapaun’s selfless acts in that prison camp that afforded his fellow prisoners some amount of hope and comfort. He spoke of how the prisoners loved Father Kapaun. One soldier, a Jew, was so moved that he carved a Catholic crucifix as a gift for Father Kapaun. The unique thing about this crucifix was the corpus. The face on the corpus was the face of Father Kapaun. You see, to this Jew, when he saw Kapaun, he saw Jesus himself. If that wasn’t enough to get our attention, the Mass moved to the Eucharistic liturgy. We saw those people go up to receive our Lord with such a sense of reverence and awe, we were literally crying softly by the end.
We walked out of the church, and neither of us spoke for a little while. I finally asked, “What did you think?”
Her answer was “Yes! That’s what church is supposed to be.”
…continued…
What the heck I figured and off we went. We sat in the back, and were aware of what we could and could.not participate in. We did have a solid liturgical background, and the liturgies are quite similar with some of the churches we’d attended in the past, and we’d both been to a few Catholic weddings and funerals. We knew what to expect. (We expected to not be greeted or acknowledged. We always thought Catholics were rather cold, even snobby, more on that later.)
Before the Mass began, we noticed something. We noticed the silence. As people came in, they were sitting quietly or kneeling in prayer. This was our first clue that something was going to be different.
The Mass began, and we saw all those silly little things that Catholics do, the sign of the cross, the holy water, the kneeling, etc. But this time we saw something differently. This time we saw them with eyes opened by the Holy Spirit. We didn’t see people making empty gestures, and trying to look holy in front of their friends. We saw a group of people doing these things as if it were the most natural thing in the world to them. They were doing them in unison, together, as if they were a single body. This was the first time I think we understood what Paul meant when he wrote about “the body of Christ.”
Then came the homily. The priest that day wasn’t their regular priest. It was Father John Hotze, the postulator for the cause for canonization of Father Emil Kapaun, a military chaplain who died in a prison camp during the Korean War. He spoke of many of Kapaun’s selfless acts in that prison camp that afforded his fellow prisoners some amount of hope and comfort. He spoke of how the prisoners loved Father Kapaun. One soldier, a Jew, was so moved that he carved a Catholic crucifix as a gift for Father Kapaun. The unique thing about this crucifix was the corpus. The face on the corpus was the face of Father Kapaun. You see, to this Jew, when he saw Kapaun, he saw Jesus himself. If that wasn’t enough to get our attention, the Mass moved to the Eucharistic liturgy. We saw those people go up to receive our Lord with such a sense of reverence and awe, we were literally crying softly by the end.
We walked out of the church, and neither of us spoke for a little while. I finally asked, “What did you think?”
Her answer was “Yes! That’s what church is supposed to be.”
…continued…
E
EricF
Guest
We had just seen something special. We hadn’t attended some sort of social event. We didn’t see people visiting, or catching up on the latest news and gossip. Those people weren’t there for those things, and as for them being “snobby” we had completely misinterpreted that too. They weren’t there to see each other, and they sure weren’t there to see us. They were there for one thing, Jesus.
We were in our hometown priest’s office the next morning signing up for RCIA. That was almost thirteen years ago. Twelve years ago I was called to join the RCIA team, and I have been the director now for three years.
We were in our hometown priest’s office the next morning signing up for RCIA. That was almost thirteen years ago. Twelve years ago I was called to join the RCIA team, and I have been the director now for three years.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.