Why are you here?

[ladylinguist]

As one thinking about converting, I just thought I’d ask those out there who are thinking about converting, or in the process of converting, what brought them here? What makes you want to be Catholic, or what made you start investigating the Church? Where are you at in the process? Just curious to know who else is on the same road I am.
As for myself, I’ve been a Christian for almost 5 years, and though I’ve never followed through on the interest, the Catholic church has always drawn my attention. A few months ago, I decided to pick up a book and start reading. The more I find out, the more I’m fascinated by the Church. I haven’t yet attended a Mass, but I have a friend who’s getting me in touch with the RCIA director at her parish. I’m planning to attend my first Mass this weekend, and see what it’s all really about.

 

[perplexed]

I want to welcome you to our catholic faith. I was born and raised catholic by two catholic parents. We were never what I call a catholic family in the sense we did not attend church weekly for various reasons but the signs of our church and faith were in our home such as statues and books and stories of the "old church"and how my parents were raised.

We all grew up 6 kids in all and 3 of us stayed catholic and 1 never attended any church on a regular basis.

When I attend mass or enter the church I have always felt at home and at peace there. I have very strong beliefs about the old church and how things have changed but I would never ever leave. God is truly present in our faith.

I have had things that I have and am struggling with but I always go back to my faith and find that inner peace that only God can give.

I hope you find your way into our faith and I wish you Gods love .

 

[whitehat]

Ladylinguist,welcome,I became interested in the Catholic Church when at the age of 18 I dated a Catholic girl and eventually began to think of marriage.Well I was too young and immature(so was she) so the relationship didnt last.About 10 years later my employer began sending me to do repair work 2or 3 times a year at a Poor Clare Monastery.One does not become friends with cloistered nuns,but over the next 20 years the same 2 or 3 nuns would escort me as I worked at my craft.I came to really respect the their commitment and life.This stimulated my interest and then I started watching EWTN TV channel and decided to investigate further.Im in RCIA and will become Catholic this next Easter season.

 

[m134e5]

What brought me here?

Simply put, the Lord led me here. I had left the church I was raised in, and had no sense of direction in my life, and was starting to look into things like athiesm and the occult for answers.

What made me want to be Catholic?

I didn’t. It would have been much easier to stay agnostic and not care about mortal sins or going to Mass or anything like that. When I was going through rough times, God helped me through it, so when God called me I couldn’t say ‘no’.

What made you start investigating the Church?

It was interesting to me from my childhood- at least the culture was. I didn’t know what it was all about until I was 19. I guess you could say the mystery of it all intrigued me, and I looked into it further and realized this wasn’t a fantasy- this was all real- and much more amazing than any story could be.

Where are you at in the process?

I went through RCIA the next school year, and joined the Church the following Easter Vigil (I was 20 then). I realized then that was only the beginning. Christian life is about death and rebirth- over and over again- death to your sins, and rebirth in Christ- we all sin every day, so we have to die to our sins and be reborn in Christ all the time.

 

[mylo]

ladylinguist:

what made you start investigating the Church?

I grew up hearing a lot of mistruths of the church. When I turned 18, I wanted to see if they were true. I had fallen out of the religion I grew up in and was really just floating along. I prayed to God, asking Him to lead me where He wants me, I would follow with no questions asked.

He led me here, so I’m guessing this is where He wants me.

ladylinguist:

Where are you at in the process?

I am now in RCIA, and will be confirmed at Easter Vigil, 2006.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

I am a cradle Catholic.

I have a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and have taught mathematics in college. My father was a chemical engineer.

Stuff didn’t seem right. I was like, AWOL big time, then I came back.

On this forum, I came in here venting about things wrong with the Church, but now as of less than a week ago, I suddenly became flooded with ideas, emotions, truths, etc that made me feel like a spiritual flat tire being pumped up to get ready to roll.

Now I’m on a roll, and my vocation is a prophetic one within the Catholic Church, and I’m happier now than every man I know put together. Of course, having a wonderful, faithful Catholic wife has played a large role in showing me the beauty of the Church that Julie loves so much.

My six chidren all attended Catholic schools, and I would not have it any other way.

Yes, there are problems with the Church and nobody can deny it. Gosh, it’s run by sinners so how can we expect perfection? I finally learned how: through faith.

I’ve listened to many philosophers and preachers outside the Church, and were tremendously edified, but now I am convinced. I am where I belong. I am home, and happy beyond bounds I never realized I had before.

This blind/deaf person can now hear/see the beauty of the Church’s teachings – even and especially the ones which are most problematic. Strangely, I am also completely at peace with the fact there are many who attack these teachings – they are a necessary albeit annoying part of our ministry.

Alan

PS do you remember Rich Mullins – author of Awesome God? My wife and some others were in a radical campaign to get him to become Catholic. His pinings for Catholicism and his supposedly “being too chicken” to convert and let go of “Sola Scriptura” Anyway Wednesday I think it was, I visited Fr. Matt McGinniss in Wichita and asked him straight up about Rich, as Rich frequently confided in him and knocked on his door in the middle of the night with gobs of questions – he was known for showing up unannounced at the doors of friends. Anyway, Fr. McGinniss did confirm for me that Rich was nearly ready to take his first Holy Communion and Fr. Matt was expecting to be able to give it to him within a week after his death. Rich Mullins has had profound impact on our lives, including playing a concert on my own grand piano just before his last Christmas. I mention this because I want you to know that Rich helped me accept and even embrace my Catholicism – although he spoke highly of it from a technically Protestant point of view. Here is Father Busch, the priest who married me and said “yes” to the concert when a much richer, fancier Church turned them away becuase they were too busy getting ready for Christmas, and Fr. Bernard, who founded Totus Tuus, a program for youth:


In short, please come on in. The water’s fine, and you might be surprised how many friends you have here! This from a person who was recently called heretic, crazy, troll, Saul, and a number of other things. Now i’m pleased but not proud to have worn those labels because it taught me the difference between love and anger.

(Please don’t mind the mess – we’re always remodeling our attitudes around here and sometimes passionate people bicker a bit – still we are family.)

Alan

edit>> that’s son #2 Chris, our Christmas baby, in the background – he’s now in college and working as a bank teller.

edit again>> wow I just can’t stop marveling at this photo as its image is in my mind; my piano is just off camera to the left, out of the scene and in the scene are my beautiful son, two priests I reeealy like, Rich, the Tabernacle, the Crucifix, gosh. What more do you need? This concert was at All Saints Church.

 

[Ahimsa]

I’m here, via a Baptist-Hindu-Buddhist trajectory. The short story is that I grew up Baptist, quite devout, but also distinctly pro-evolution (unlike most/many Baptists in Georgia). By high school, I had rejected the idea of the divinity of Jesus, after coming across some of my aunt’s JW literature and after doing my own reading of the New Testament. In late high school and early college, I got into New Age/New Thought teachings, since they offered some new ways of looking at old issues. But New Age/New Thought was too “new” for me – which led me to my encounter with the Hindu and Buddhist traditions by sophomore college. Reading Hindu and Buddhist texts and doing meditation showed me how Jesus in fact could be divine. So I re-accepted Jesus’s divinity, via Hindu textual analysis!

I was a de facto Hindu/Buddhist for roughly 15 years, while also exploring Sufism, Taoism, Kabbalah, and the like. But even while in college, I had some sort of intuition that I might in the future return to Christianity – most likely not to the Baptist faith, but Catholicism or Orthdoxy, since those two traditions (like the Hindu-Buddhist traditions, and rather unlike much of Protestantism) were deep in history, reason, and contemplative practices.

However, I also believe in reincarnation/rebirth, which prevents me from being able to honestly convert to Catholicism/Orthodoxy (at least at the present time), so now I simply imbibe the teachings of Rome and Constantinople, to supplement my Hindu-Buddhist practices. It wouldn’t be wise for me to simply reject and forget about my Christian ancestral and spiritual heritage. I go to some sort of church or service each week, whether it’s a non-denominational, “Purpose-Driven Life”-inspired, rock-band playing mega-church; a more traditional Baptist church (with the requisite whooping and hollering); an upper-crust, incense-imbued Episcopal service; a no-pews-allowed, icon-drenched Orthodox church; or a Catholic Mass, of either the Novo Ordo or Tridentine Latin variety.

But I might convert to Catholicism/Orthodoxy in the future – who knows?

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Ahimsa:

I was a de facto Hindu/Buddhist for roughly 15 years, while also exploring Sufism, Taoism, Kabbalah, and the like.

Wow that’s really interesting. Our new bishop Jackels was talking to my daughter’s Confirmation class and was asking them of their motives – such as whether you are here to become on fire with the Spirit or to satisfy you dad who said you had to be here.

He spoke of the time he left his parents, and as soon as possible, the Church. He actually joined some Buddhist monestary (or some sort of rank as Buddhist) and was there for about two years until he, in his words, “came back … in a BIG way!” And the kids were amazed as were the adults. This guy is so charismatic I think he really has it together as our new bishop. What a welcome relief to the confusion since Bishop Olmsted left here.

However, I also believe in reincarnation/rebirth, which prevents me from being able to honestly convert to Catholicism/Orthodoxy (at least at the present time), so now I simply imbibe the teachings of Rome and Constantinople, to supplement my Hindu-Buddhist practices.

Hmmm. Is the reincarnation of which you speak a resurrection and reanimation of the body, or the same spirit in a different body? I’m not familiar with Buddhist reincarnation.

incense-imbued Episcopal service

My dad was Episcopal before he converted to marry my mom.

We used to use a lot of incense around the house, because a priest used to say that at noon the people looked to the temple and saw smoke, which was a sign of God – but we don’t anymore because we have a cat.

I think Buddhism and the Catholic apophatic tradition can be mapped to each other, roughly, (some similarities, stark but subtle differences) but of course their practices have distinctions that do not allow certain types of “mixing and matching.”

Alan

 

[Ahimsa]

AlanFromWichita:

He spoke of the time he left his parents, and as soon as possible, the Church. He actually joined some Buddhist monestary (or some sort of rank as Buddhist) and was there for about two years until he, in his words, “came back … in a BIG way!”

Ah, very interesting. I wonder how many other bishops, not to mention priests, were former Buddhist monks or Yoga practitioners?

Hmmm. Is the reincarnation of which you speak a resurrection and reanimation of the body, or the same spirit in a different body? I’m not familiar with Buddhist reincarnation.

By “reincarnation” I mean the same spirit, in a different body – whether that body be a physical body or a spiritual body.

In Buddhism, the term is “rebirth,” since Buddhism often compares the human person to a flame: if you take one flame on a candle, and light a new flame on a new candle, is the new flame the same or different from the old flame? Is there some distinct “something” that passes from one flame to another? From the Buddhist perspective, the new flame is not the old flame, but neither is it a totally new flame. Bringing this back to the human person, the “you” in this life would not be identical to the “you” in a future life, but the future “you” wouldn’t be a totally different “you” either. So, to make a long story short, Buddhism uses the term “rebirth” to describe this process, rather than “reincarnation”. I tend to follow the Buddhist interpretation.

Ultimately, though, reincarnation/rebirth shouldn’t be an obstacle to converting to Catholicism/Orthodoxy, since (from a Buddhist perspective) rebirth is not something you’re required to believe in. However, I’ve never been one to simply follow the “requirements”.

My dad was Episcopal before he converted to marry my mom.

We used to use a lot of incense around the house, because a priest used to say that at noon the people looked to the temple and saw smoke, which was a sign of God – but we don’t anymore because we have a cat.

My non-Catholic/non-Orthodox option would be the Episcopal Church. Even though I admire Episcopal open-mindedness and willingness to “reason,” the fact that they lack monastic orders (for the most part) is one huge strike against them, in my view.

I think Buddhism and the Catholic apophatic tradition can be mapped to each other, roughly, (some similarities, stark but subtle differences) but of course their practices have distinctions that do not allow certain types of “mixing and matching.”

My practice of going to different churches, while maintaining a Hindu-Buddhist orientation, is not so much a matter of mixing and matching, but of being open to my ancestral Christian tradition and maintaining my connections to the local Christian communities. I guess you could say that I’m a “cultural” Christian (like some are “cultural” Jews or “cultural” Catholics). You can take the boy out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy.

But seriously, I think the impossibility of mixing and matching is true, at the institutional level. You can’t really be active in the ecclesiastical institutions of Christianity, while also active in the ecclesiastical institutions of Buddhism. But what about people who might be, say, Christian, but who learn Buddhist meditation (without formally adopting Buddhist beliefs)? Or what about people who are committed Buddhists, but who once in a while visit Christian churches? Are those forms of mixing and matching, or something different?

 

[Seamus]

Why am I Catholic? Good question.

I suppose the short answer is because I believe. I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I believe that when Christ spoke to St. Peter about “My Church,” He was talking about the Catholic Church. I believe that I can go into a confessional and receive absolution for my sins because Christ gave that authority to His apostles, and through Apostolistic Succession, that authority has been passed down to the priest that, just yesterday, told me “I absolve you of your sins.” I believe that when I receive the Holy Eucharist, I am receiving the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Risen Lord.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point: *I am Catholic because I believe. *

You are in my prayers.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Ahimsa:

By “reincarnation” I mean the same spirit, in a different body – whether that body be a physical body or a spiritual body.

I think I understood most of what you were saying, but I’m not sure I can conceive of a “spiritual body.”

Is that roiughly similar to a soul in Catholic belief system?

Alan

 

[Ahimsa]

AlanFromWichita:

I think I understood most of what you were saying, but I’m not sure I can conceive of a “spiritual body.”

Is that roiughly similar to a soul in Catholic belief system?

Alan

Yeah, a spiritual body would be analogous to a “soul”.

 

[TOP]

Because I feel good about the Church right now. It has been a slow and sometimes painful conversion from a non-practicing to a practicing Catholic, but right now I feel stronger then I have in the past and am getting rid of old resentments. Tim, God Bless

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Ahimsa:

Yeah, a spiritual body would be analogous to a “soul”.

Is that the primary comparison, then? If so, I don’t understand how to compare the two.

Clearly they are opposed, but I can’t seem to put it into words other than my faith requires a certain amount of rejection of ideas that do not make sense given my current condition…

I seek to learn more, but the more I learn the more questions seem to spring up! Kind of like a Pandora’s box.

For the moment I wish you a warm welcome and invitation to ask questions, because these people have taught me more in less than two years than I have known in my previous 40-something.

Alan

 

[Fidelis]

Back to topic, my story is somewhat different. I was baptized as a baby, but rarely attended Mass all the time I was growing up (I would guess maybe 5 or 6 times all together). I never recieved First Communion or Confirmation, or was given even the rudiments of Catholic instruction. Somehow, however, my baptism “stuck.” I always felt Catholic and that Christ had his eye on me, but as from a distance. I dabbled in Protestantism (mostly Baptist) churches, and though they were all very nice people, it never felt right for some reason.

I have to say my parents, no matter how lax they were at raising me in the Faith, at least got me baptized and “prepared the way” for me (who says baptism doesn’t “do” anything?).

I went through some tough times in my mid-twenties which for the first time made me question the existence of God — not that I thought He didn’t exist; it was really the first time I thought about his existence at all. When I met my wife, one of our first dates fell on Palm Sunday so she asked me to Mass. It was at that point on the scales fell off and the floodgates of grace opened after that. I dug out the little green NT the Gideons had given me when I left for Air Force bootcamp at age 18 and started devouring it, starting with the book of Acts, then the Gospels. When I finally found my Faith at age 28, it was like Christ couldn’t wait to make up for lost time, so happy he was that I was finally home. Since then, I’ve never looked back.

 

[Guar_Fan]

Alan’s comments about Bishop Jackels are interesting. I don’t know anything about him, so I did a web search and found an article that appeared on this site about traditionalist bishops, and it opened by describing him as the picture of orthodoxy.

But something else has been occurring lately—something that happens only now and then. Consider the new bishop of Wichita, Most Rev. Michael O. Jackels. Bishop Jackels spent the early years of his priestly ministry in important posts—director of vocations, director of religious education, co-vicar for religious—in Lincoln, Nebraska, a diocese widely known as a bastion of Catholic orthodoxy, with a corps of priests reflecting that. From 1997 until last January, furthermore, he was an official of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by the formidable Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

To people experienced in reading a curriculum vitae like that, Bishop Jackels sounded, sight unseen, like a man steeped in the doctrines of the Catholic Church and not at all shy about teaching and defending them.

catholic.com/thisrock/2005/0505fea5.asp

My path to the Church was relatively straight forward, if somewhat protracted. I was raised with no religion and during high school was rather militantly agnostic - actually I was an atheist but I knew that it is impossible to prove a negative. Then one summer night while staring absently out my bedroom window, something changed. The conviction that “Oh, I guess there is a God.” came to me suddenly and quietly - like a cat which has decided to adopt you.

That left me the task of picking a religion. My parents were indifferent. While doing some reading about the western fascination with either Hinduism or Buddhism (I have forgotten which one) I came across the statement of a leader in that religious tradition that westerners should explore their own faith traditions, rather than playing tourist. After mulling on this somewhat displeasing advice, I finally accepted it.

So, that left me Judaism or Christianity. The book on Judaism I found seemed to stress that converts were not sought and that they would feel a little out of place in a religion that has a shared ancestry as its focus.

So that left me Christianity. I did a bunch of reading on different branches and decided on Unitarian since that was very comfortable with my progressive outlook. But after a year, I began feeling dissatisfaction with its lack of form or substance… basically, each believer was free to make up their own religion.

And I began dwelling more on the Incarnation. It required a leap of faith - it wasn’t something that just came to me. But if God was willing to send His Son to reveal God’s Word - if the revelation was that important - then it made sense that God would also provide a safeguard of that revelation… which would be the Church.

The New Testament clearly indicated that the lived out experiences of Christian believers was part of an ongoing revelation. And I couldn’t understand how protestants could accept such lived out revelation, then jump 1400 years (or so) to the founding of their particular branch of Christianity. It didn’t make sense to me. What about the lived out experiences of all the Christians before the Reformation? Don’t they count?

So I was left with either the Roman Catholic Church or an Orthodox faith. And it just seemed more sensible to choose the one which was more common where I lived.

Looking back, I am amazed at how earnest I was about the whole search. But it made sense then, and now, 25 years later I still think I made the right choice.

 

[Ahimsa]

Guar Fan:

That left me the task of picking a religion. My parents were indifferent. While doing some reading about the western fascination with either Hinduism or Buddhism (I have forgotten which one) I came across the statement of a leader in that religious tradition that westerners should explore their own faith traditions, rather than playing tourist. After mulling on this somewhat displeasing advice, I finally accepted it.

I agree that, as a general rule, Westerners should remain with their own faith traditions, in part because (in my case) I’m already familiar with the language, the symbolism, the scripture, the theology, the institutions, and so forth. To really go into Hinduism or Buddhism would require starting again at step one (learning new languages – whether Sanskrit, or Japanese, or Pali; becoming involved in new communities, with unfamiliar customs, symbols, traditions, etc.).

I think the Dalai Lama, as well as Thich Nhat Hanh and a host of other Eastern teachers, recommend that Westerners don’t simply abandon their own traditions for the sake of ‘novelty’. A Hindu monk suggested to Thomas Merton that he read St. Augustine, a recommendation Merton found flabbergasting, but which led to Merton’s eventual entry into the Catholic Church.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Ahimsa:

I agree that, as a general rule, Westerners should remain with their own faith traditions, in part because (in my case) I’m already familiar with the language, the symbolism, the scripture, the theology, the institutions, and so forth. To really go into Hinduism or Buddhism would require starting again at step one (learning new languages – whether Sanskrit, or Japanese, or Pali; becoming involved in new communities, with unfamiliar customs, symbols, traditions, etc.).

I think the Dalai Lama, as well as Thich Nhat Hanh and a host of other Eastern teachers, recommend that Westerners don’t simply abandon their own traditions for the sake of ‘novelty’. A Hindu monk suggested to Thomas Merton that he read St. Augustine, a recommendation Merton found flabbergasting, but which led to Merton’s eventual entry into the Catholic Church.

We should not abandon our own faith for sake of “novelty” with another.

However, although Catholics hold that our faith is complete and true, other faiths have found ways to help people with certain problems and mindsets. The fact that eastern cultures and attitudes are different than western are no more a threat to unity than the fact that a woman is different from a man. There is an entirely different mindset, and even a different sense of identity and certainly what constitutes justice.

If one looks toward the Catholic apophatic tradition, one finds that the “Cloud of the Unknowing” is, essentially, anything we don’t know and maybe never even imagined. These mindsets that other people hold are different – each person from one another, and each group has its own characteristics. To explore these ideas, especially in a paced, controlled setting, cannot help but tease our fancy toward at least certain portions of the Cloud – thus solidifying our own understanding of the known, outside of either the Cloud of Forgetting or the Cloud of the Unknowing, signifying the past and future, respectively. In our world today with instant global communications I should think it behooves us to at least learn a minimal amount of how the other people we are inevitably gonig to have to deal with in our businesses and vocations, look at things. In the US we are particularly isolated with our own culture, much less diverse than many other places – therefore in the end we could be at a disadvantage for our remaining isolated.

Alan

 

[MikeinSD]

I’m here because I have devout Catholic family members. Unfortunately, we all have to meet in a few weeks. I guess I’m using this forum to innoculate myself. I’m learning the language, the attitudes, and the way to talk. I’m hoping to avoid a “misunderstanding” with some relatives which 3 yrs ago resulted in police and lawyers and court cases. They learned a very expensive lesson that all American citizens have rights. I’m hoping for a peaceful holiday season this year.

 

[PraRFLEsEkHm]

Hi all.

I am here because there was nowhere else left to go for the Truth. I started out in the Lutheran faith as a kid, left there shortly after I didn’t ‘have’ to go anymore, because it just seemed so dead. I wandered around various faiths, never really committing myself to anything because there was always something that just didn’t add up. Nowhere else have I found a truly Biblical Faith, if you look - you will find a solid Biblical Basis for all of the Church teachings, even if not [sometimes] explicity. The concept of the Trinity is not explicit in Scriptures - why do we need everything else to be? Anyway - after many years of bashing the Catholic Faith for what I was told it taught, I finally bowed to God and looked for myself. Within a couple of weeks I was amazed and ashamed. Here, after all this time - HERE and here alone is the Truth of God and Scripture. All the nagging questions I had over the years, all the doubts and hesitancy, all the parts of scripture that were homeless in other faiths: all are answered and illuminated here in the RCC.

I am at the point now, finally, of being in agreement with all of the Churches teachings…Mary being the hardest to get my protestant head around but that too has been accepted, and I am at peace. Come Easter Vigil I will finally be a convert to the catholic church. It has not, by any means, been an easy road - but it has been very worthwhile. I would encourage you to really search the teachings of the Church. Take your time and research everything you question - get good solid information because even within the Church there is faulty information {not FROM the Church - I mean from some people IN the Church} - even if given with the best of intentions and true belief on their part. People are still people - and misconceptions are to be found everywhere.

The CCC can be found online here check it out. It is NOT light reading, so use it for questions. {I made the mistake of thinking I could sit down and read it to find out what the Church all taught }

As for Mass I was completely lost my first time. EVERYTHING is different. But yet - compelling and beautiful.

People say ‘Welcome Home’ when you tell them you are converting. I feel, for myself, that is the best description of what this journey is all really about. The prodigal son, the Lost lamb, the missing coin - all are descriptive of where I once was at…away from home. It truly feels like I’ve come home now.

God Bless you in your search, and I hope to see you around here. Everyone here is very helpful with answering questions, giving support, and just generally being a ‘Family’ - which is what it’s all about.

Peace

John