FRIDAY August 26, 2011
2:30 PM Arrived in good order.
Room is lovely, sadly there is a charge for the internet which irks me but I paid it because I need it! It is frustrating to be at a conference for bloggers and others in media and be lacking free wifi. On the other hand, this is a VERY pretty hotel and the salad I ordered of heirloom tomatoes, balsamic vinaigrette, sprigs of mint and goat cheese. It is very very GOOD.
I am eating my lunch late and looking forward to running downstairs to sign in! Need to eat now–chat later!
4:00 checked into conference, am very excited.
The booklet has all the chanted music for Vespers and Mass in the Extraordinary Form and I am over the moon about it. Will need to go by later for my name-tag and to pick up a t-shirt.
5:30 went down and got my name tag, T-shirts will be available after vespers. I am so charged up I haven’t even been able to lay down for a nap like I was supposed to do after such a long drive. I am barely able to sit still.
VESPERS
Vespers at 7:00 PM this evening. Afterwards the vendors will be all set up and tomorrow promises to be fantastic!
8:45 OK! This is excellent–there IS free wifi for those of us at the convention! Whoop!!
The Vespers service was incredible. I find chant incredibly spiritual and uplifting and beautiful. I so wish I lived where there was a chant choir so I could join and learn to help make that sublime music.
AFTER VESPERS: Fr. Z’s TALK
Fr. Z of What Does the Prayer Really Say was the keynote speaker after vespers and his talk was very thought provoking. He spoke on a lot of topics, with humor and humanity, but his comments on being converts and first exposures to Catholicism brought back memories of my first contacts.
WHAT FR. Z’S TALK MADE ME THINK ABOUT My first contacts with Catholicism
There were several, the first was in elementary school, I wore a small crucifix to school and all my little friends had fits because Catholics wore crucifixes and Protestants like ourselves wore plain crosses because Christ was risen. I insisted I liked my crucifix and didn’t see why I couldn’t wear one too. The second contact with Catholicism came in high school when Karen Verstuyft invited me to Mass with her. I remember her explaining what they were doing and telling me I didn’t have to kneel during the consecration if I didn’t want to but I told her that I could kneel to honor God even if I didn’t believe the Catholic way and I waited for her to return from receiving Eucharist.
OTHER EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF CATHOLICISM
Those contacts were small and significant, but there were also the nuns who wore their habits with their rosaries hanging from their belts and how my Dad said it was a pity they wasted their lives when they might have gotten married and had families but that we should respect them a lot because they believed they were married to Jesus and they were very devoted to God. My freshman year of college my roommate was Catholic and ALWAYS went to Mass, sometimes even in the middle of the week! I didn’t really understand why but I was impressed with her stiff determination.
CHALLENGING GOD
Forward a few years. My kids were just starting Kindergarten and Pre-K at a Christian School. Our most recent Church home had had a split down the middle of the leadership and since all our friends were as regular as we were, half went with the young pastor and half stayed with the old pastor and each group considered the other group to have left the true path and you had to choose a group and lose the other half of your friends. If you didn’t choose you would lose all your friends. And it was the last straw in a long line of personal frustrations. I wrote a list of what I wanted in a Church and zipped it into my King James and told God I would go back to church when He showed me THAT Church. Of course, at the time I didn’t know that when I demanded a church where I could attend anywhere in the world and the theology would not change, and the church that interpreted His Bible the way HE wanted to interpreted, and where the teachings and theology were written down so everyone could read it and be in agreement on it, that I was actually describing the Catholic Church.
You know, when you challenge God like that, He tends to waste no time in answering. I began to feel out of place in church and to feel lonely and dissatisfied. Women at church told me either than I needed to quit thinking so much, pray more (I was praying a lot) and I would be happy; others told me to put the kids in daycare and get a job and I would be happy. I knew God wanted me a stay at home mom and to put my kids first but He also created me an intelligent thinking woman who needed some sort of challenge for her mind. It ate at me until I began to have difficulty sleeping and I would end up channel surfing in the wee hours of the night. I sat there, 1:00 AM, crying because I so badly wanted to talk to an older woman who understood my brain did not turn off just because I was a mother and who understood that my kids needed me at home.
ANSWERS FROM HEAVEN
So here I am, crying and flipping the channels and suddenly I come upon this really old fat nun with her Bible open on her lap talking about Jesus and this thing called vocation and she talked like women had brains and used them AND were serious about raising their children themselves. I’d found EWTN and a Catholic NUN was the answer to my need for an older woman who could mentor a thinking Christian in how to be a mom with a brain that didn’t turn off.
Next was a friend, Pam, who was Lutheran. Pam and I trained our dogs in obedience together and we went to dog shows together and we talked about God. Our Faith walks were very similar. Then one day she told me she had become Catholic. Now THAT was a shock, why would a good Lutheran become Catholic?? I was mind boggled. The question nagged at me. I’d read pretty much everything non-Catholics had said about why Catholicism was wrong and what Catholic supposedly believed, but my friend was no nut. She used her reason and followed Christ. I had to find out from a Catholic source what the Church believed because that would explain why she became Catholic, and I figured it would show me clearly where she had gone wrong. Oh, how little I knew!!
THE SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING
I hunted down a Catholic bookstore. Being that I had been through my fundamentalist phase, I wasn’t totally sure that those statues weren’t demon possessed, and I wasn’t totally sure that going into that store wouldn’t bring me into contact with the occult and lead to spiritual blindness and a falling away from Jesus (this is one of the reasons non-Catholics sometimes look scared when they go into a Catholic bookstore). Anyway, I prayed as I drove around the block a couple of times to work up my nerve and I went in and told the lady there that my friend had become Catholic and I had to know why. I spent $1.50 on a little booklet by TAN publishers titled “The Catholic Church Has the Answers” and I was sure it would quickly show me why the Catholic Church was wrong. Except it didn’t. It made sense. It showed the Catholic Church as BIBLICAL. It rocked my foundations. So I went back and purchased “Confession of a Roman Catholic” by the same publisher. I was totally shaken to my very core because it just made more sense and it was SCRIPTURAL. Ya gotta know that when a Bible Christian starts seeing the Biblical/Scriptural foundations of Catholic teaching is can really freak them out.
A major support for my struggles to understand came from an online source. The old Compuserve Catholic Forum was an early gathering place on the internet for Catholics discussing the faith. This was in the early 1990’s and my first foray into the internet. Compuserve at the time was like a small village in the midst of a wilderness of internet. There were some really awesome people on there. People like my friend Andrew Saucci and Fr. Zuhlsdorf. Eventually, compuserve merged with another service and the Catholic forum migrated to the internet proper and became Catholic Online Forum.
CONVERSION
I spent nearly three months reading. Neglected housework something awful. Hardly slept. Pam brought me a duffle bag of books to read. Books by David Currie and Scott Hahn and others. It felt as if the ground beneath my entire understanding of the universe had crumbled and begun to be reconstructed Catholic. I don’t know if anyone who has not had a total change in how they understand themselves and all that is most true and important in life so that not a single stone of one’s philosophical underpinnings remains the same can imagine the magnitude of my experience.
Every question I had about scriptures that seemed to contradict were answered with reason and faith. Imagine studying the Bible daily for YEARS and suddenly having your eyes opened and it begins to come together in ways that you never saw before, and it is consistent across the entire Bible without leaving out or fudging the meaning of any passage of the Bible. And it is CATHOLIC.
It came to this: Jesus stood squarely in the middle of the heart of the Catholic Church and I could either become Catholic or no longer follow the Lord I had followed since my childhood.
FULL COMMUNION WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Finally, I called the various parishes and found an RCIA class that met on a night when I could go. I went and when I walked in I told the lady that I had to become Catholic. She asked if I had been going to Mass, and I said no. She asked how I could know I wanted to be Catholic if I didn’t go to Mass yet. I told her I have been reading and I have to be Catholic. The following Easter I entered full communion with the Catholic Church.
In a way, God drop kicked me into the Church.
Saturday is going to be a BEAUTIFUL day!