Tomcatholic:

The question has been popped.

2010-07-18T08:26:00.003-04:00

Well, I have a big announcement. I'm engaged to be married! I've been engaged for just over a month now. My fiancee and I have finalized very few decisions but desperately need to do so soon. Like when to get married. We're thinking one of the warm months. Also where to get married: we're thinking a Catholic parish in southeast Michigan. Okay, we're currently considering two of them. Not surprisingly considering our age, we have moved around a lot and do not feel particularly attached to any one parish as a couple. My fiancee in particular doesn't since she just moved to a new city.... the same city where we will live after we get married.

I am sure many of my future posts will be about getting married in the Catholic Church.

5 Easy Steps to Gain a Basic Understanding of Catholicism

2010-07-12T23:18:00.000-04:00

A subject that has been on my mind lately has been the catechesis of the lay faithful. There seems to be a general consensus that there was a decrease in accurate knowledge of the faith among most Catholics sometime shortly after the Second Vatican Council (1965). I'm not claiming that there was a high level of knowelge before, just that many people seem to think it is less now than it was before. I personally have no idea, I was born in 1984 and wasn't Catholic until 2005. It is my observation that the level of knowledge of the faith is very low among a wide segment of Catholics. Too low, though at the same time I think it isn't as bad as some people make it out to be.

There are many Catholics who would claim to know little about the Gospels, but are very familiar with the mysteries of the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross, which between them cover the events of more than half the content of the Gospels. They might say they have not have memorized any Scripture, but they have memorized the Our Father, which is all Scripture, as well as the Hail Mary, of which the first half quotes Scripture. They are also likely to have memorized several other prayers that do not quote Scripture, but do convey great Scriptural truths.

Unfortunately, there are many Catholics who are not very familiar with those things either. There are many who seem to not even be familiar with the content of the Creed that we say at Mass. This is tragic.

I'm not going to pretend to be able to analyze how this came to be or to pretend I know how to solve the problem. I do have some simple, easy suggestions though, for those Catholics who want to take the initiative to obtain a basic understanding of the Catholic faith for themselves if the do not have one already.

Easy Steps to Gain a Basic Understanding of Catholicism, for Catholic Adults and Teens:

1. Read the Bible everyday: If you follow no other suggestion on this list, at least follow this one. As St. Jerome said, "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." Some time soon I will post more about reading the Bible, because that deserves its own post. In the mean time, pick one up or read the Bible online. If you've never read them all, all the way through, there can be no better place to start that to read all four books of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. If you read a chapter a day, it will take about three months.

2. Pay attention at Mass. Okay, definitely do this one too. Pay attention to the readings, prayers, creed, and songs. If you haven't read the Bible much, the readings will seem like islands in the middle of no where, so start paying attention so you can begin to connect the dots. The prayers have much to teach us also. Most of them are directly inspired by the Scriptures. They all have a rich, deep content that we can delve to learn about God. Hymns and spiritual songs often do as well. Older hymns tend to have rich theological wisdom. Ponder them. The newest songs today will often talk about how we are supposed to relate to God in love and worship, which is also an important lesson.

3. Read good Catholic books, magazines, and blogs. Now we're getting to the simpler, easier stuff. If your diocese has a good Catholic newspaper or magazine, that's often a good place to obtain useful knowledge of the faith, often for FREE! Also, your friends or relatives might receive the publications of the Knights of Columbus or a religious order. Not sure where to start? If you make mycatholic.com your homepage on your computer, you can personalize feeds with lots of different awesome Catholic content.

4. Talk to people who seem to be knowledgeable Catholics about the Faith. The more you hear it, the more you will absorb.

5. Don't be afraid to tell others about the Faith. Personally, I find that trying to figure out how to explain something to someone else is the best way to synthesize all the bits and pieces I've learned.

Bloglife reflects prayerlife?

2010-03-22T23:07:00.007-04:00

Considering that I have a really big mouth, I find it surprisingly difficult to blog regularly. I do better when someone else starts the conversation.

My prayer life can be the same way. It's just so hard to get started, it's hard to choose a topic and keep it going. There are times when the Lord is downright chatty, but at other times He is so quiet, I feel like I'm talking to myself. I'm blessed that there are times when I KNOW that I'm not talking to myself, but why are these times so inconsistent?

I know it's because I'm inconsistent, after all, the Jesus is always the same, but I'm not sure what I'm doing when I get it right that's so different from the other times.

Update: The Lord says the difference is when I am listening. I'm not surprised. I just wish I knew why I forget to listen so often.

The Angelus: the Christian Call to Prayer

2010-01-07T20:39:00.004-05:00

Today I stumbled across this awesome, short video: The Angelus.

My previous post could easily have included making the Angelus a regular part of your prayer life. At the very least, it is a traditional Catholic devotion that you should be familiar with. Note that during the seven week liturgical season of Easter, this Marian prayer in honor of the Incarnation is traditionally replaced by the Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven) prayer.

10 Simple, Easy New Year's Resolutions for Young Catholics in 2010

2010-01-01T11:40:00.014-05:00

Here are 10 ways to be a little bit better Catholic in 2010 that are simple and easy to do. Most of them take very little time or effort, or are fun, or reap benefits FAR beyond the effort (like #3). Note that this is not a definitive list and that there are lots of things we should all do as Catholics that are not on this list, and that some of those things are not simple or easy but we should all do them anyways; we can explore those for Lent perhaps.

1. Say Grace After Meals every day. Most Catholics regularly say Grace before Meals, but far fewer seem to say Grace After Meals any more. The way it traditionally works is that before the meal you ask the blessing, and after it you give thanks.

Like Grace before Meals, it's really short and east to memorize:

We give thanks for all your benefits, almighty God, who lives and reigns forever. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

It's a simple, easy way to pray a little more often, observe traditional Catholic practices, and regularly keep the souls in purgatory in your prayers. Spreading this practice amongst your family and friends will likely reap huge dividends some day after your own demise, since what goes around comes around and you reap what you sow.

2. Go beyond the rote at the table. I heard a good priest state that if you want your kids (or anyone else you influence) to know Christ personally you need to demonstrate that you do yourself. This shows that it's possible and not limited to living saints only.He gave some tips on doing that, the easiest was to say more than the rote prayers before and after meals. I like the idea of someone leading in a spontaneous prayer and then everyone saying the rote prayers together.

3. Go to Confession every month, more if needed. You only have to go to Confession once a year, and you need to whenever in a state of mortal sin, especially before receiving Communion. However, every single plan for Catholic spiritual improvement I've ever seen says to go at least once a month.

4. Update your parish registration if necessary. Lots of young Catholics are not registered at the parish they attend, if at all. The Church thinks it's important to belong to a parish, and to be registered at the right one. It helps the Church plan its ministries, it determines how much money each parish has to send the diocese. Register at the parish you attend most and/or the one you have the biggest stake in. When in doubt, register to the closest one to your home. Not sure how to register, email the parish secretary, perhaps you can even do it online!

5. Contribute money to your parish electronically. Our generation likes digital solutions that are quick, easy, and maintenance-free, so now that you've updated your parish registration, sign up to contribute financially via automatic withdrawal. My parish does this either weekly or monthly. I chose monthly. I never have to remember to write a check and bring it to Mass, and the parish doesn't ever miss my contribution because I was out of town. You can sign up for any amount. I signed up for the minimal amount I felt comfortable giving automatically. When able, I give more to special collections or different charities, but my parish always has what I can always give, and I don't ever have to think about it.

6. Serve at your parish. Do anything, big or small. Big: Teach catechism, be a volunteer assistant youth minister. Sing in the choir every week. Small: Lector, be an extraordinary minister of holy communion, usher, sing in a special holiday choir. Truly better than nothing: gather discarded bulletins after mass, put away stray hymnals after mass, just show up at anything beyond Mass and be cheerful and helpful. Ask your priest for other ideas.

7. Sing hymns and spiritual songs at home. Music has a profound effect on most people, and an easy way to contribute to renewing your mind in Christ Jesus is to play and sing your favorite hymns and spiritual songs when your at home, in the car, in the shower, or anywhere that you could sing without creating a (large) disturbance. If you haven't memorized any spiritual songs, google the lyrics. Not sure where to start? I think every Catholic should know "Holy God We Praise Thy Name," and be able to sing it from memory. Try that.

8. Create a Station of the Cross in your home. Buy, find, make, or otherwise acquire a crucifix and place it on a wall in your home. Whenever you walk past it, make the sign of the cross and lift your heart up to God. A very simple way to pray simply more often. When able, stop and pray at the crucifix more actively. Only have a few seconds. Perhaps you can say the Jesus prayer or the Glory Be, or the prayer from the Stations of the Cross that goes:

"We bless You, O Lord, and we thank You, for by your holy cross You have
redeemed the world."

Having a rough day? Maybe you can just recall Christ sufferings and offer up your own to him as you glance at your crucifix and mark yourself with sign of the cross of Christ.

9. Commune with the Saints. One easy method: Put up some pictures of the saints somewhere in your home too. Holy cards are cheap and can be stuck on a bulletin board or on the fridge. Get extra, shove one in your purse or wallet, place one in your car, use them as book marks. Whenever you see one you can just think "pray for me St. So and So." On occasion grab one and pray a little longer with that saint. Maybe you'll end up with a half dozen or more on your fridge and you can regularly say a mini-litany of the saints while you're waiting on the microwave.

10. Be catechized by Catholic media. Read Catholic blogs, subscribe to Catholic news and Catholic podcasts, listen to Catholic radio and Catholic CDs. Pick one or more that appeals to you. These are the easy ways I know to learn more about the faith without trying very hard. You probably should try harder also though.

List of Best Posts

2009-07-09T19:51:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note today to point out the new feature in the side bar. It's the list of "Best Posts." I've seen similar lists on other blogs and thought I'd give it a try. What do you think? Should different posts be on the lists, or did I choose well?

Prayer for the dead

2009-07-08T17:31:00.003-04:00

As I drove home from work today I took a slightly different route than ususal. This route took me past a couple of cemeteries. There were two, one on either side of the road. One was a Catholic cemetery and the other was not. I made the sign of the cross as I approached them and as I drove past each section of each cemetery I extended my hand in prayer and said a Hail Mary for the repose of the souls that had belonged to the bodies in all the graves that I was passing. A Hail Mary is a short prayer so it goes very quickly, I had time to say four before I was pass each cemetery. I concluded with a Glory Be to the Father as I drove away.

One of the many aspect of the Catholic faith that I love is our communion with the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering, souls in Heaven and souls in Purgatory. Those who have left this early life in friendship of Christ remain in our friendship as well, if we too are Christ's friends. As a Protestant, I believed that there was no point in praying for those who passed away. When someone died, I would pray for the bereaved family and friends the had left behind, but the deceased was beyond our Realm of influence.

Catholics know better. Death does not separate from God those who inherit eternal life, nor does it seperate from the Church her members. I love that we can pray for those who have passed from this life in order to assist them as they complete their sanctification to enter into the fullness of life eternal. To pray for them is a blessing, for it reminds us of our mortality and the need to pursue holiness in this life. The prayers we receive from them once they have, when they are Saints, are a blessing beyond all measure.

Catholics who read this, say a Hail Mary or an Our Father for the souls in Purgatory... or both.

God is love.

2009-04-05T23:05:00.003-04:00

I still haven’t worked full time for very long now, but I have been working full time long enough that I live for the weekends. Every week is a count down, 5-4-3-2-1 weekend! Most weekends fly by and I end them exhausted and dissatisfied. I ask myself, “where did the time go?”

I tend to jam-pack my weekends. There are things I want to do, places I want go, and people I want to see. I’m a people-person, so the people I want to see tend to be the top priority. My girlfriend is at the top of my list usually, followed by my roommates, other guy friends, my family lives in another town so I don’t see them that often, and my “old friends” I find hard to catch up with most of the time.

Each week, I usually feel torn between all the different people I want to see and spend time with.

This past weekend was totally different.

Alison and I have been making a concerted effort the last few months not to obsessively spend all our time together, so it was really nice this weekend to be able to spend more time together again but not feel as if we were neglecting our other friends.

We had a wonderful, enjoyable weekend that was very relaxing. Despite the fact that we went to a parish mission and an out of town party Friday, had dinner and a game night with another couple Saturday, attended a nearly 2 hour long Mass, went to an out of town group lunch, and then spent several hours in a store on Sunday.

We still took time to relax and just enjoy one another’s company. We retained our focus that we were going to share the weekend together all the way through, and things were just great.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it makes me think of how our life with the Lord should be. He should be our top priority, our focus should be on Him. We shouldn’t be divided in our attention or affections. If we purposefully share our whole lives with Him and take the time to enjoy His presence, things go much more smoothly and pleasantly, especially when there’s a lot to do.

I find that I always understand our life with God so much more easily when I compare it to loving relationships. After all, God is love.

Refuge In His Presence

2008-12-20T18:54:00.002-05:00

“God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress.” Psalm 46:1

For several days, the people of southeast Michigan had been warned: a big snowstorm would hit us in the arly morning hours on the Friday before Christmas. We were to expect 6-10 inches of snow to fall in less than half a day. Thursday night I parked my car so I wouldn’t have to back it up in the morning, and I set my alarm clock for extra early.

Sure enough, when I got up at 6am there were several inches of snow on the ground and the snow was coming down faster and faster each minute. I had to go to work, I couldn’t call off. My job involves helping save the lives of the elderly each day, I had to be there.

Suddenly, I felt keenly the fact that I had been putting off going to confession all week long. By “felt very keenly,” I mean I shed some tears and said an act of contrition and begged God to consider it good enough should I not be able to ever make it to reconciliation again. Then I bundled up and went and clear the snow off my little, old ‘92 Saturn.

My front-wheel drive car pulled out of the snow no problem, thankfully. The real problem was that my car’s windshield was covered with moisture because it wasn’t warm enough yet for the heater to take care of it. I had very little visibility. Thankfully, after a little while, the heater was going enough to clear the windshield. In the meantime, I kept wiping my windows off with a glove I had placed on the handle end of my ice scraper - the long arm helped get the whole windshield and the front side windows wiped off. Once the heat cleared up the windows things were a bit better, but still, the conditions were harrowing as I made my way to the highway, but not impossible.

Even though I didn’t have the greatest car for winter, I’m a pretty decent driver. I went 25mph and concentrated very closely to the 3 feet of road in front of my car that my bright-headlights managed to reveal to be totally snowy white. Anything further away was completely dark other than the taillights of the next car in front of me. I think there was usually just barely a car length between me and the ever-so-dim set of taillights ahead.

The snow started coming down faster and faster and I said a few Hail Marys for safety. Suddenly my car swerved to the left of onto the shoulder. I called out “Hail Mary,” tried to stop skidding, and laid on my horn hoping that the cars behind me wouldn’t hit me. Miraculously they didn’t. I also somehow managed to have my car pointing to the right, towards the road, even though I had swung left off of it.

Glad to be pointing in the right directions, I turned on my flashers and stepped on the gas and tried to get on the road again. My car didn’t move. After briefly fearing I would be stuck there for hours, I asked Jesus to help me and floored it. My car moved about half an inch and then stopped. Then about three cars whipped past me just a few inshes away. Over the next several minutes, I floored it whenever a sizable gap between sets of oncoming headlights appeared. After quite a few times of moving no more than an inch, I managed to get back on the road.

After that I drove even more cautiously. My experience earlier and the increasingly bleak and difficult conditions on the road were nerve wracking. I kept praying, but the whole “hour of our death” part of the Hail Mary was a bit unnerving at the time (remember I needed to go to confession). Eventually I decided the highway was too bad and that I should give the surface streets a try. I began looking for an exit-ramp and couldn’t find one. I wasn’t sure I’d see one even if I went passed it. The roads were very, very bad at this point. Much too bad for someone in a small front-wheel drive car with only a couple of winters of driving under his belt.

Honestly, I was very scared at this point because the roads were so terrible and I couldn’t find a way off the highway. I began to cry pretty hard and begged Jesus to help me find an exit. Then a sign for the Beck Road exit appeared and I gratefully tried to desperately figure out where the exit veered away from the right lane of the highway. I was still unsure if I was on the exit ramp yet or not when my car again spun sideats to the left. Miraculously, it stopped and that’s when I realized I was indeed on the exit ramp. I didn’t even think about it at the time, but I now realize that I spun around on an exit ramp but didn’t spin off of it. I was very fortunate.

I made my way onto Beck Road and headed south on it. The conditions were very slightly better on the surface streets. Sort of how the conditions were slightly better on the Titanic than on the Lusitania because it took a couple of hours to go down rather than 18 minutes. I realized, as I crawled down Beck Road towrds N. Territorial, that I was very close to Our Lady of Good Counsel (OLGC) Catholic Church, a large parish that I had visited a few times before. I knew that OLGC had 2 weekday morning masses each day, and that the first one was quite early. I thanked God that Catholic churches are almost always open, and went to OLGC where I could park and go inside.

Inside OLGC, I immediately bumped into the one parishioner there I know, a friend’s father, who happened to be there still after the early mass, about to leave himself. He told me that the Blessed Sacrament was exposed for Adoration in the sanctuary, like every morning. I called work and told them I wasn’t going to try to make it again until after it got light outside, and then I went and slipped into a pew and gratefully sat in my Savior’s presence, thanking Him for safelty bringing me there before Him.

After it got light outside and Jesus assured me I would be okay I went out and got on the road again. It being light outside made a huge difference and I made it to work safely, albeit very slowly, and very lately. I am very thankful to Jesus for keeping me safe, and I also have to chuckle a bit about how obvious He made it that He was watching out for me by making my place of refuge that morning be in His Eucharistic Presence.

I’m also going to Confession in the morning.

Conversion: it messes with your head.

2008-12-03T20:25:00.004-05:00

My friends say I'm a little obsessed with my identity as a convert to Catholicism, they might be right. What do you think? Consider this:

Last night I had a dream that I had to go to the Pentecostal church I used to attend for some sort of religious service. For some reason, I had to go, it was for some sort of milestone event that somehow effected my status in the (Catholic) Church. All my closest Catholic friends were there with me, but they had to sit somewhere else, I had to sit in a different area. I was rather uncomfortable, I didn't really want to be there.

Then I spotted my friend Paul sitting in a pew a few aisles behind me by himself. I was elated to see him, because he is a a seminarian currently spending a semester in Rome, and I hadn't seen him in some time. We made eye contact, and then I went to greet him, but after I made it through the crowd he was gone and I was very disappointed, I even went out to the vestibule looking for him, but he was no where to be seen.

Also in the dream they had communion, which was strange because my Pentecostal church very rarely had communion, apparently I can no longer really even dream of a church service without communion. What was stranger yet was that everyone processed forward, Catholic-style, to receive their wafer; which wasn't how we did communion, once again, apparently my dreams no longer conceive of another way.

I remember that in my dream I was horrified that some of my Catholic friends went forward to receive the Pentecostal communion wafers. I was unable to reach them to stop them before they had received, I was unable to tell them that it is gravely sinful to take communion outside of the Catholic Church until after they had done it. The friends in my dream (no one specific, they were just "good Catholic friends") were not well catechized, so they hadn't known.

So what's the verdict? Crazy obsessive Catholic-convert?

Disgusted

2008-11-09T14:49:00.006-05:00

I just want to say that I am disgusted by how I take for granted the abundance of wealth that I enjoy as a young lower-income modern American.

I was putting away laundry today and I did some quick counting: I own 44 shirts that I store on hangers in my closet. This is not counting the shirts I own that I keep folded in dresser drawers, T-shirts and undershirts mostly. I don't want to know what the total is when I count those, at least not today, it's too much to handle all at once. It's enough to realize that I own 44 shirts that I consider too nice to get wrinkled by folding them to store them. I own 15 long-sleeved button-up shirts alone, and I consider myself more of a polo-shirt guy.

To add insult to injury, when I moved last May, I made a serious effort to reduce the amount of clothes I own. I tossed or donated several large bags of clothes then.

Part of why I realized this today is because I hate putting away my laundry. I am terrible about it. It often sits in laundry baskets, not even folded, for day after day after I wash it, getting horribly wrinkled, because I don't want to put it away. I realized that part of my problem (beyond my laziness) is that I have too many clothes - and yet I really don't think that I have a ton of them. My half of the closet is not especially large, and is by no means bursting.

It's unbelieveable. Not too many years ago in this country, and in much of the world still today, a large family probably wouldn't have owned as many shirts as I do.

Reverence and romance

2008-10-18T21:53:00.001-04:00

I cannot emphasize enough how important I find it to pray regularly with my girlfriend. Without fail, whenever we go too many days without praying together, we have an argument. Usually the arguments are about little things, but because we're both more sensitive people, they seem very big to us, and can be very painful.

Also without fail, whenever we pray together after having had such an argument, it dramatically heals our relationship. It is truly miraculous, in my opinion, how consistent this pattern seems to be. You would think that we would learn and not let very many - if any - days pass without praying together, though.

I particularly enjoy "affectionate prayer," with my girlfriend. Meaning simply that we sit close, hold hand, or I put my arm around her, or we are in a hugging position more or less. As Catholics we know that posture sends a spiritual message, that's why it's so important when we celebrate the Mass. Kneeling with clasped hands is good, but it's not the only way to go.

I find that a "affectionate" prayer posture is really good for my girlfriend and I. The spiritual message it sends, in my opinion, is that we are comfortable bring God fully into our relationship with each other, and that we are comfortable bring each other into our relationship with God. It also send the message that we want our emotional and physical intimacy to reflect our spiritual intimacy, and vice versa. Obviously, this "intimacy," in all its forms, needs to be kept appropriate to our state in life (not married) - and it is.

I also find it important that we be ourselves, spiritually speaking, in prayer. We are both devout Catholics, of course, but we have different backgrounds and different dominant spiritualities. I'm a convert, and she's a cradle-Catholic who has always had a strong faith. My beliefs are much more in my head, wheareas hers are more so in her heart (which I tremendously admire). Also, I'm charismatic, and more conservatively traditional than she is.

It's an interesting mix, but it works well for us because we both have the same foundation of Catholic orthodoxy, have a similar level of committment to our faith, and respect the difference of the other person.

It's a bit hard to describe how it is that we let one another be ourselves spiritually together, The only example I can really think of is that she is okay when I want to pray in tongues. Indeed, she encourages me to do so with her because she knows that when I don't, there's a good chance I'm not really entering more deeply into prayer. I guess the chief way I support her is not presuring her to become who and what I am spiritually. There are other things, but they are either hard to put in to words, or are a touch too private for the internet.

This post has become a bit wider in scope than I originally anticipated, but I'll go for it.

Attending Mass together regularly is extremely important for us. This may be a better example of my supporting her in who she is. Most weeks, I would probably prefer to attend Mass at the nearby charismatic parish, whreas my girlfriend would rather attend Mass at our student parish at our university - and that's where we go most weeks. Sometimes I go to the other parish, and she does go with me many of those times, though sometimes I go by myself.

We are also both leaders in a student Bible study group at our student parish, and there are tons of opportunities for spiritual growth in that. Leading together can be a challenge at times, we usually don't directly lead together one-on-one, but sometimes we do. I really think that we have improved in our ability to lead together as time has gone by, and can imagine our team-leading in some parish ministry or lay apostolate someday, perhaps a religious education class for children, or an informal adult bible study group or something.

Anyways, it's great to have a relationship with a girl that is part of my relationship with Jesus, and vice versa. Prayer is absolutely key though, I cannot emphasize that enough.

First Marian encounter?

2008-10-16T19:01:00.000-04:00

A random comment I read about kids and Mary a bit ago made me remember this:

When I was in fourth grade, I think, I read a book about two orphaned Irish immigrant children from New York City who were sent to the western frontier to live with a pioneer family in Kansas. They were part of the orphan trains. Anyways, the children this book was about were two sisters. They were of course, Catholic, like more Irish people at the time (and now for that matter). The family that took them in was a Protestant family. They seemed a bit fundamentalistic, in retrospect, but I don't think the book really specified, and I wouldn't have known enough then to discern much. I do distinctly remember that the man who was the head of the Kansan family was anti-Catholic and he made some rather harsh comments to these young orphaned girls about their devotion to Mary and the Saints.

It seemed at the time to me, that they key difference between Catholics and Protestants was that Protestants didn't think that Mary and the Saints were special in any way, whereas Catholics did. I decided at the time, that Mary and the Saints were obviously special people, and that therefore I was Catholic. As a non-religious child, I had little understanding of such matters at the time. I was conscious of this idea for a few days at best, and then it slipped my mind, likely when I went back to reading the Hardy Boys mysteries.

Five years later I would be a devout Protestant who was strongly anti-Catholic. Six years after that, I would be a devout Catholic with my own devotion to Mary and the Saints.

Three years more yet, and I'm writing this post, wondering if that was somehow a teeny-tiny little seed that Mary and the Saints planted in my heart that kept me from being completely closed to the Faith of the True Church, if in that they may have managed to keep a crack open in my stony heart towards the Church, a crack just big enough for the Holy Spirit to slip into and soften it until the point when He could lead me all the way home.

It probably was.

Separation of Sex and State

2008-07-27T15:47:00.003-04:00

I just read an article online about teen pregnancy and the media. Below the end of the article there were comments from the news services subscribers (I'm not one). Most of the comments were horrendous, no surprised, but one was also amusingly inconsistent.

The comment came from a woman who insisted that educators and health care professionals who work with teenagers must be able to instruction on "appropriate contraception" (no this isn't the amusingly inconsistent thing I'm talking about). Then she said that we need to get the government out of the bedroom and talk seriously to our kids about sex.

Who else is already snickering?

This woman, who wants the government to "stay out of the bedroom" a.k.a. not to be involved in the sex lives of citizens, also wants government employees (most educators and many health care professionals) to teach children, in government facilities (most schools, many clinics) how to manage their sex lives.

Also, she said that we need to seriously talk to our kids about sex. I agree. However, she seemed to think that parents (I'll assume that by "our" she meant that parents should talk seriously to their own children about sex.) are currently somehow hindered in doing so by the government being "in the bedroom." Now, there certainly aren't any laws preventing parents from discussing sex with their children. Surely she doesn't think that there are.... right?

The only way I see the government having a presence in the bedroom that hinders parents when they discuss sex with their kids is because of educators and health professionals discussing sex with other people's children and teaching them values contrary to that of their parents.

Sex belongs in the bedroom, and I'm all in favor of keeping the government out of there. I'm also in favor of keeping sex out of the classroom. Now, I don't mean that biology shouldn't cover human sexual reproduction. There's a big difference between "kids, this is how humans reproduce" and "kids, this is how each of you, personally, should have sex."

I often hear derisive remarks against "abstinence-only" sexual education programs in the public schools. Critics say they don't work and that the motivation behind offering them is old-fashioned religious morality. As a life-long attendee of public schools, I partaken in much government-sponsored "abstinence-only" sexual education, some of it even occurring in actual formal programs that my parents were told about ahead of time.

In my personal experience, "abstinence-only" education began with a quick obligatory prologue reminding us that only abstinence was 100% effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases; then we rushed into the benefits of a devotion to different forms of contraception over the other, followed by a litany of symptoms of STDs so we would know when we got one that then, at that point, we should really considering abstaining from sex, at least during outbreaks.

The Bishop is Coming! The Bishop is Coming!

2008-05-19T17:58:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow my regularly scheduled co-ed faith sharing Scriptural-reflection group will be interrupted. During our time slot, the Most Reverend Earl Boyea, the Fifth (new!) Bishop of the Diocese of Lansing will be here at our parish celebrating the holy Sacrament of Confirmation for the young people of the parishes of our city.

This will be the first time most of our student parishioners will have had an opportunity to see our new Bishop, and it will be his first opportunity to see the student parishioner presence at our parish. Therefore, our pastor has asked us to attend Mass in hopes that our new beloved bishop notices us and sees the efforts of our parish to live out our principle mission: ministering to the university community.

Vigil of Pentecost!!!!!

2008-05-10T12:24:00.009-04:00

Come Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of Your Divine Love. Send forth Your Spirit and they shall be created, and You shall renew the face of the earth. Oh God, Who by the light of the Holy Spirit instructed the hearts of the faithful, Grant, that by the same Spirit we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolation. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday, so tonight is the Vigil of Pentecost!!!! Hurray!!!

I'm very excited. My home parish is a charismatic Catholic parish (yes, the Bishop had our parish founded to minister to charismatic Catholics). so we always have a huge Pentecost Vigil Mass. It's precede by a nine day novena of prayer meetings for the Holy Spirit to fill the hearts of our parishioners and all Christians.

I've worked most evenings this week, I wasn't able to attend the novena prayer meetings, but I wouldn't miss the Pentecost Vigil Mass for anything.

The picture above is the cake we had last year when I held a Pentecost dinner for my friends. I didn't have one this year because I moved this week.

Rain, rain go away

2008-05-07T20:08:00.004-04:00

So today I conducted the bulk of my move to a new apartment. I'm very happy to have moved. My new place is in a better location. Best of all I am now living with some very good friends, and they aren't never home. I hate living alone, and feeling like I do isn't really much better.

The challenge of moving today was the weather. It was muggy. Do all people use that term? It means it was very humid and sticky. It was also very overcast. This wasn't a problem really, though. The rain was however.

Repeatedly, it began to sprinkle as my new roommate and I loaded up his truck with my belongings. Therefore, repeatedly, I prayed and asked God to hold off the rain. He obliged me each time.

Just as we got the last few things that COULD NOT GET WET into the new place, I thanked God for holding off the rain for me.

Then it started pouring.

Convicted: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

2008-05-05T17:33:00.007-04:00

Yesterday at Mass, Father said something that I've heard several times before, but it really made an impact on me yesterday in a way that it never had before.

He posed this question:

"If someone else examined your life today, could you be convicted as a Christian?"

That really got me thinking. At that point yesterday, the only evidence "against" me was that I had prayed before I ate and that I went to Mass. The Mass I attended wasn't in the morning either, it was at 5:00pm. Quite a bit of the day had gone by, and the most the evidence could convict me of is being culturally Catholic. There definitely could have been "reasonable doubt" based only on the day's evidence as to whether I was truly devoted to Christ and His Church.

Father also brought up the fact that there could be evidence that might lead an investigator to conclude that you might not really be a Christian, such as sin. I wasn't pleased with myself when I thought of that line of reasoning either.

Like I said, it really got me thinking. More importantly, it got me praying. Last night I said evening prayer, and this morning I said morning prayer; it had been a long time since I had done either of those.

How about you: could you be convicted as Christian today beyond a reasonable doubt?

Welcome Bishop Boyea!

2008-04-29T20:24:00.006-04:00

Most Reverend Earl Boyea,

Fifth Bishop of Lansing!!!

May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you and guide you

as you lead the Church of Lansing, Michigan.

The Heart of Worship

2008-04-24T18:36:00.007-04:00

Last Saturday some friends of mine and I went to a regional youth and young adult event called "The Heart of Worship." It's an annual event, geared primarily towards high school kids. There's a lot of praise and worship music, and it's centered around Eucharictic Adoration. So, basically, it's amazing. It's always wonderful to see so many teenagers worship Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament.

The event is for our corner of the Diocese. It's been held annually for six years now. Most of the participating parishes are in my county, and a few are just over one border or the other. Even though I've only been Catholic for three years, I feel like I am acquainted with a lot of people from other local parishes, since so many of the devout young people participate in events at so many of the other local parishes. I sometimes feel as if I don't belong to a parish as much as I belong to the Catholic Church in Washtenaw County, after all, we are a single vicariate.

This year, the event was held at a little parish I had never visited before. I was surprised at how pretty it is, and how much parking space they have. Also their parish hall is huge, considering the size of the parish.

I love my diocese and our vicariate, it's a great place to live for Christ.

Linguistics & Faith

2008-04-23T16:33:00.004-04:00

Today I took the final exam for my Jewish-American literature class. I think it went well. It's always interesting to say a prayer in class before an exam, making the sign of the cross at the beginning and the end. It is especially interesting to do so in a Jewish-American literature course. It was an interesting class, but too easy. I'm long past being challenged by most 100-level classes, but I just needed to find any interesting class to give me credit, so I took this one.

The rest of the day is and has been dedicated to working on a paper for Syntax, which is a linguistics course. Syntax is more or less grammar. My paper is on linguistic incorporation in non-polysynthetic languages. I have a lot of work left to do on it. This class is the last requirement I had to fulfill for my program in linguistics. I liked the professor a lot, he's amazing, somehow I didn't seem to be able to focus most of the semester, I don't think I got much out of the course.

When I tell people that I study linguistics, I always have to clarify that I study language not languages. The university even class our program "English Linguistics" and we're part of the Department of English. The upshot of it all is that I have not learned to communicate in any different languages (in linguistics courses that is - I have had some Spanish elsewhere though). Linguistics is very abstract. We study the human language-ability from a scientific perspective. It really is amazing, by the way.

On thing I love about linguistics is how it complements my faith. To begin with, human linguistic abilities fairly shout the presence of an intelligent creator. We take it for granted, but truly it is miraculous. Linguistic studies have shown that the human brain is basically hardwired, from birth, in such a way that the human brain is genetically predisposed to learn language. I can't really go into more detail here, but it is truly fascinating. It's also, in my estimation truly miraculous. It constantly confirms my belief in the Creator's careful design humans.

The other way that linguistics complements my faith is how it creates a greater awareness of the nature of authority when we discuss things like the notion of correct grammar, the role of dictionaries, etc. The authority of dictionaries and prescriptive grammars, often popularly perceived as absolute, is in fact, subjective. Dictionary entries and the rules of grammar are made up by someone, and they are only as good as the person who makes them up (sometimes this isn't very good either).

So what does that have to do with my faith?

It helps keep me aware of the nature of authority, of how deeply I should believe in different things. Many people believe in the dictionary and in rules English teachers tell them without exception, some people believe in the Bible and rules the Church tells them without exception. However, the dictionary and the Bible, for example, don't hold the same claims to authority. The dictionary, unlike the Bible, does not come with any promise from God that it will never lead me wrong, even when I'm careful only to use it according to its purpose and in harmony with the scholastic tradition of the English language. The dictionary never makes any such claim for itself, and neither do any dictionary-experts!

Linguistics reminds me to never put absolute trust in anything that does not have divine authority.

Mass Math & the Agnus Dei & the Kyrie

2008-04-22T17:17:00.007-04:00

Sunday, I attended the 5pm Mass at my student parish. I was scheduled to be an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion (EM). As usual, not all of the other EMs showed up. This is largely because half the people on the parish's list of EMs don't attend Mass at our parish regularly anymore. This is especially true at the 5pm Mass, which is most popular with students and other young people who tend to move away on short notice, after a brief time.

Since we're almost always short-handed, it really doesn't make a difference whether or not I'm schedule to be an EM. Almost every time I attend Mass there, I end up being an EM. Weeks that I'm not scheduled, I do Mass math during the Agnus Dei.

As I stand there singing the Agnus Dei, I do addition. I add up the cups (there's usually three), the cups that hold the Precious Blood, and then I do multiplication. For each cup there is also a plate of Hosts. Multiplying the number of cups by two gives me the number of EMs we will need (usually six). Then I do subtraction. First I subtract Father, since the priest is the ordinary minister of Holy Communion, of course. Then I subtract our deacon, if he's there. After that I subtract the number of other EMs who have appeared in the sanctuary. At this point I calculate the difference between the number of ministers in the sanctuary, ordinary and extraordinary, and the number that will be needed to hold each plate and cup. If the difference is zero, all is well. This rarely happens. If the difference is one, I go up to be an EM. If the difference is more than one, I try to find other EMs to go up with me, and then I go up into the sanctuary to be an EM myself.

All this occurs during the Agnus Dei, which, as every Catholic knows, is a very short song. The Agnus Dei is the Part of the Mass after the Our Father also known as the "Lamb of God." Agnus Dei is Latin for Lamb of God. My student parish has a new music minister who likes to do the Agnus Dei in Latin, before we always did it in English, but I knew it in Latin already from my home parish (which is where the new music minister is from, actually).

A few weeks ago, one of the other EMs, a middle-aged woman, after hearing me sing the Agnus Dei confidently in Latin, told me she was impressed with me. "You've only been Catholic for three years and you already know Mass parts in Latin! I still don't really know them and I've been Catholic all my life."

I didn't have the heart to tell her that I committed it to memory the first time I ever attended Mass. In all fairness, I am a Linguistics major and languages really interest me. I try to remember that whenever I tell people that I like to do the Kyrie in Greek, and then they say they've never heard it in Greek, and ask me how it goes. Then I tell them it is "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie elesion." (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.)

Then they say they do know that and that they had thought it was Latin.

A few times I've made the mistake in asking them if they knew the Latin for "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," which is "Benedictus qui venit en nomine Domini." Or I've asked about "Adoramus te Domine" (we adore you Lord).

It's a mistake to have asked that because people sometimes say yes. When they say yes, I then ask them how come they never noticed that the word for "Lord," in those Latin phrases (Domini/e) doesn't appear in the Kyrie. To me, it was obvious from the very beginning that the Kyrie isn't Latin. Apparently, observations such as those explain why I ended up being attracted to Linguistics.

Guardian Angel Alarm

2008-04-21T10:40:00.004-04:00

Today is my last day of classes as an undergraduate!

I say as an undergraduate because I may attend graduate school, I'm not sure yet, the Lord has not yet informed me of whether or not I am going.

Anyways, exams start tomorrow and of course I have a ton of studying to do, as well as a ton of work for projects I really should have done a very long time ago. I may not be posting very much or very often this week.

Before I go today, let me tell you, that whole praying to your guardian angel thing about what time you get up in the morning - it works. Well, it did today at least.

I was up until 4:00 am last night, working on an essay that is due this afternoon. Before I went to bed, I set my alarm for 10:00am, the latest I could get up today for my 11:00am class. I really felt however, that I needed to get up earlier in order to accomplish other things I needed to do before class.

So I prayed to my guardian angel, and asked him to wake me up early, in a good place in my sleep cycle, at which point I could wake up and not be utterly exhausted all day.

This morning I woke up at 9:15 am feeling refreshed and ready to face my day.

Thanks Guardian Angel!!!

Papal Quote

2008-04-19T17:47:00.004-04:00

The Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, said this when he celebrated ass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City during his 2008 apostolic journey to the United States, Christ Our Hope:

“As we give thanks for past blessings, and look to the challenges of the future, let us implore from God the grace of a new Pentecost for the Church in America. May tongues of fire, combining burning love of God and neighbor, with zeal for the spread of Christ’s Kingdom, descend on all present!”

And let the whole Church say Amen.

Pope's Response to Sex Abuse Scandal Demonstrates Christ-Like Leadership Model

2008-04-17T19:10:00.010-04:00

All across the Catholic blogosphere (and elsewhere I'm sure) people are discussing the various statements the Pope has made about the scandal of the sexual abuse of children by priests in the United States, and the way it was mishandled by not a few members of the Church hierarchy. This scandal rocked the Church in the United States a few years ago, and we're not nearly done with dealing with the aftermath.

I converted to Catholicism a short time after the worst of the scandal, and I also don't have any children (yet). Naturally, my perspective is limited. I did want to share some of my thoughts on the way the Pope is responding to the sexual abuse scandal now during his apostolic journey to the United States.

I confess that the thoughts are recycled. I composed them for the comments-box of a post on Amy Wellborn's blog. They were first published there. They are republished here in slightly edited form. So, without further ado, I quote myself:

I think the Pope is doing a great job addressing this issue in the right tone.

We must understand that the Pope follows the teachings of Christ in regards to leadership.

Matthew 20:25-28

But Jesus called them to Himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. “It is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”

He is not here to exercise his authority by lording it over us. He is here to serve.

He seems to think the greatest service he can be to us in response to the sexual abuse scandal is to acknowledge the pain of victims, the guilt of those responsible in the Church, and the need to have reconciliation (not revenge) while protecting children and working to create a society (as well as a Church) of individuals who respect the dignity of the human person (body and soul).

I think his approach is best in the long-term, and that he is wise to take that approach rather than one that might more greatly please some Americans. Some of those who are greatly displeased seem either to desire vengeance, or unable to deal with not receiving instant gratification in this matter.

Reflections on the Papal Mass in DC

2008-04-17T11:21:00.007-04:00

You know that you're a really geeky Catholic when listening to the Gloria at the Papal Mass in Washington on the radio while you're driving makes you bawl your eyes out.

Also, you know you used to be Pentecostal when you can almost perfectly follow along a reading from Acts chapter 2 in Spanish, even though you barely speak Spanish.

To be continued:

More Reflections:

(I watched the Mass on EWTN Live online at the student center.)

I love that they included the Greek Kyrie in the Penitential Rite (fyi: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison is Greek, not Latin).

I like how they did the first few lines of the Gloria in Latin, and the rest in English. My home parish often does it similarly on holy days, and I like it.

I liked that a lot of the music was upbeat, helping to diminish our image of being dull and stodgy in the eyes of non-Catholic observers. I appreciate the multi-cultural emphasis of the music in that setting for this occasion.

While much of the music wasn't the best, I appreciate what they were trying to do, even though I might prefer that the multi-culturalism be presented in a less performance-orieted way. It might also be nice if we took more from the traditional Catholic culture of the various ethnic groups of American Catholics. As I've heard it said elsewhere, salsa is not the musical basis of the liturgical traditions of Spanish-speaking Catholics.

Like I said though, I appreciate what they tried to do. A national Catholic celebration in the United States should embrace the diversity of the Church here. Furthermore, a multi-ethnic nation of immigrant peoples like the United States is an ideal setting to demonstrate the catholicity of the Church: our unified diversity. We obviously don't do image this perfectly (not even close!), but when we try, we can give a valuable perspective.

I would not want the same sort of multi-cultural hodgepodge at a typical American Sunday Mass however. Multi-culturalism is important, but it is not so important that it should regularly be a main focus at every mass in every community, even in the United States.

More thoughts may be coming.....

Happy Birthday Holy Father!!!

2008-04-16T14:51:00.006-04:00

Today, it is truly beautiful in southeast Michigan, I'm even wearing shorts. My theory is that the nice weather is a gift to the Pope as he celebrates his birthday while he is in our country. As much as I love the fact that the Pope is visiting us for his birthday, I kind of wish he could have came next month, after finals were over. I so would have headed to the East Coast if he had, and I know plenty of other college students who I would have taken that road trip with.

Oh well, maybe someday I will be able to afford to visit him at his place. You never know.

I had become fully Catholic a week before John Paul II died. It was a bit scary, as a brand new Catholic, waiting for the new pope to be elected, hoping he would be a good one. I was at work and a friend called and left me a message on my phone just after the words "Habemus Papam!" were declared on television.

On my break, I listened to my friend tell me that our new Holy Father was Cardinal Ratzinger, the candidate that so many had speculated was too conservative to be elected. I was overjoyed. I literally jumped up and down, laughing and clapping and shouting, "Ratzinger is the Pope!" Keep in mind I was still at work at the time.

I may be part of the JP2 generation, but I was in the last RCIA class of his papacy, I had a week in his church, the week he was dying. As wonderful as John Paul the Great was, I'm a B16 Catholic.

I love Papa Bene, almost every Catholic day of my life, he has been my Shepherd. I've only read a few things he has written, and I don't really keep very close tabs on him, but what I've seen I've liked. I like the direction he seems to be gently steering the Church in. I pray that he is able to accomplish all the good works God has prepared for him in Christ Jesus during the remainder of his papacy.

There He is.

2008-04-14T17:24:00.009-04:00

Okay, I'm over due to write about about my supernatural experience with the Eucharist. I promised last week, and I didn't come through. Let me just say that the end of the week got very busy for me. I had to work a lot and had tons of meetings and such. My better excuse is that my post entitled "First Steps to Full Communion" was originally the promised post. However, as I was writing the final paragraph, something horrible happened. The internet ate most of it.

It had been quite long, and I didn't have time to re-write the whole thing, so it became the post it is now.

Anyways, that Tuesday night I described in "First Steps to Full Communion," James and I left pre-RCIA inquiry in a jubilant mood. That parish's LifeTeen group has a prayer meeting on Tuesday nights, so James and I decided to drop in, even though we were a bit old for that crowd.

James and I slipped into a pew behind the teens, and as I entered the pew behind James, like him, I genuflected, and in the back of my mind, something clicked. I knew why Catholics genuflected towards the tabernacle - because the tabernacle contains the Blessed Sacrament, and the Church teaches that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament: body, blood, soul, and divinity. Like I said, as I genuflected something clicked - I knew what the Church taught about the Real Presence, and I knew that I had just come to believe that everything the Church teaches is true. I realized, dimly, that therefore I myself believed in the Real Presence.

James and I joined the teens in singing praise to our God. As I worshipped, the Divine Person of God the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart. There have been times when the Lord spoke to my heart and I believed it was Jesus, and other times the Father. This is the only time I ever identified the Divine Person speaking to me as the Holy Spirit in particular, and yet I was absolutely sure of Who it was.

He (in less words) said to my heart, "Thomas, you have longed to truly be in the presence of Jesus for years now; you thought it would not happen until Heaven. Well.... (the Holy Spirit, despite having no body, somehow gestures to the tabernacle) there He is."

At that moment, I was slammed with the sense of the presence of Jesus. I was floored.

After a minute or so, I managed to relay the gist of my experience to James, who promptly suggested we go up closer to the tabernacle in order to be closer to Jesus. I was momentarily taken aback at the thought of such a privilege, but James assured me that it was okay, after all, we weren't at Mass.

James and I knelt before the tabernacle for about ten seconds before the Spirit compelled us to lay prostrate upon our faces. In the presence of the Holy One, I was suddenly acutely aware of my sin, that I was unworthy even to lay of my face before Him. I cried out in repentance - I wouldn't have my first confession for months - but if I have ever felt perfect contrition, it was that night. The sense of sin faded away, and I basked in the presence of God.... I was still unworthy, because it was such a great privilege, but it was okay, Jesus wanted me there. I've never felt closer to Heaven than that night laying prostrate before Jesus with tears of joy running down my face.

Global Catholic Perspective

2008-04-11T10:51:00.004-04:00

Catholicism is a global faith. There are large numbers of Catholics in many nations, and at least small numbers in most. Converting to Catholicism definitely broadened my perspective. The Church is not based in the United States. Americans do not dominate the Church. We're important to a degree, of course, after all, we are a large country with many Catholics, but there are many large countries with many Catholics, as well as many smaller countries with smaller numbers of Catholics, and in many of those nations, the Church has a much longer history than it does here.

I think it is important for all people, especially Catholics, to have a global perspective, so it's important to know your geography.

I rather pride myself on my knowledge of geography. Not because it is objectively extensive, but because it looks so good when compared to that of so many other Americans, We tend to be a geographically illiterate people.

I say all this to introduce this quiz that lets me declare:

85

I take issue however, with this claim. I can name more countries in five minutes! It's just that I can only type the correct spelling of the names of 85 countries in five minutes. I could name more, I swear.

The First Step to Full Communion

2008-04-09T12:45:00.010-04:00

Today I want to tell the story about how I joined RCIA, it's kind of a follow-up to the My Conversion Story series. It's also useful as background for the post about my supernatural experience involving the Eucharist that I promised I would post about this week.

The day I told the Lord I believed in the Catholic Church was a Thursday, and actually it was night-time, perhaps even technically Friday morning. The next day, as planned, I met with several of the guys from my new Catholic Bible Study for lunch. We were used to all going to a prayer meeting hosted by a Protestant ministry on campus early Friday mornings. We went for both the expressed reason, to pray for the conversion of souls on campus, and for the unexpressed reason to demonstrate to the participating Protestants that we were real Christians.

Anyways, the semester was over and there wasn't a prayer meeting that mornin, so instead we got together for lunch. Before treking to the nearby restaurant, we met at the Chapel for a few brief minutes of prayer beforehand. That was when I told the guys, my new Catholic friends, that I had decided to convert. I was convinced, I believed that the Catholic Church is the only Church of Christ, and that all that She teaches is revealed by God.

My new friends were thrilled, of course. One of the topics of conversation for lunch was about getting me into an RCIA program. RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) is a series of classes for those entering the Catholic Church as adults. The idea of not being able to instantantly join the Church was frustrating to me. All I had to do to become a Protestant Christian was to believe in it. Now, I understood, even then, why the Catholic Church made the process a bit more complicated, nevertheless, I was still a bit impatient.

The was a further problem. I had decided to become Catholic on December 16, 2004. Most RCIA classes begin in September, and continue until the spring, with baptism (if necessary), confirmation, and first Holy Communion occuring at the Vigil Mass of Easter. To make things more difficult, Easter was early that year, it fell in late March, like this year. I had already missed half of RCIA that year.

A lay minister at the student parish had led me to believe that I wouldn't be able to join RCIA there until the next fall (he later claimed that this wasn't true - but I know what impression I received).

So my new friend James, the leader of my new Bible study group, took me to his home parish in the adjacent town on the following Tuesday. This is the same parish that I went to for my first Mass. This parish regularly held pre-RCIA inquiry sessions.

The director gave me the third degree. He asked about my religious background, my baptism, my practice of my Christian faith, why I wanted to be Catholic, just what I thought the Catholic Church taught about various topics, what problems I had with Church teaching (this one was sort of a trick question), etc. Apparently I passed the cross-examination, because he decided that I was fit to be admitted into the RCIA class at their parish. I did have to agree to have a couple of extra tutoring sessions with him, so I could catch up.

Since James was there with me, he was appointed to be my sponsor. We left pre-RCIA inquiry that night in a jubilant move, I had made the first step down the road Christ's One True Church, and just three months later, I would enter into full communion.

Young Catholics Adoring the Blessed Sacrament

2008-04-08T13:51:00.011-04:00

Tonight my small group Bible study fellowship of college students is having a Eucharistic Adoration "Empowerment Night." (We blatantly stole the term from a local LifeTeen group). This is still a new program for our group. We've done this once before this semester, and once the preceding semester. We hope to have Adoration maybe once a month next year, though scheduling conflicts with the school year may mean we can only do it three times a semester.

Anyways, basically, after a prelude call to worship song, our deacon will expose the Blessed Sacrament as we sing O Salutaris Hostia in both Latin and English. The we will sing a series of (English) praise and worships songs together, as we adore the True Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Then, our deacon will give a Gospel reading we've selected. This week we've selected the Gospel from Mass for next Sunday, John 10:1-10.

After the Gospel, we will have 15 minutes of silence. This is an increase from previous times. We're trying to slowly up the silent time. Slowly because we don't want the silence to last so long that some of the people are so uncomfortable that they don't even enjoy Adoration. So long as we're all making real progress in our ability to truly adore the Blessed Sacrament, we don't mind taking baby steps.

After the silence, our deacon will read us in the Divine Praises and Benediction. Then we will all sing Tantum Ergo, in both Latin and English, as he places the Blessed Sacrament back into repose in the tabernacle. Then we will sing a final closing song.

The first time our fellowship group's leadership team planned Eucharistic Adoration for our group, we were quite nervous. We weren't sure if the others would like it, and we didn't widely advertise to our members that we were going to do it. We should've known better. All some two dozen members of our fellowship love it. We weren't even sure that we were going to schedule it for tonight, since it is near the end of the semester, scheduling is difficult for us right now. However, a few weeks ago, when we asked everyone if they wanted us to plan Eucharistic Adoration for tonight, we received a resoundingly positive response.

It's so awesome to see so many members of our fellowship group grow in their love for the Blessed Sacrament. Keep in mind that they are all college students, Young people want the truth of the faith, they want the Sacraments, they want Jesus, They want the real deal. Sure, maybe they might want to sing praise and worship songs too, which I know that not a few members of the Catholic blogging community dislike....

... but which would you rather have? Young people clamoring to sing "Open the Eyes of My Heart," while they adore the Blessed Sacrament, or the middle-aged singing "As a Fire is Meant for Burning*," at Mass? Truly, those seems to be the main options at my school parish, each end of that spectrum exists, and there is very little in between, mostly people singing "I am the Bread of Life," who, after Mass, go vote for pro-abortionists on their way to volunteer in a soup kitchen.

* This "hymn" explicitly states in its lyrics that the mission of the Church does not include preaching our Creed or customs.

My Conversion Story - Part 3 of 3

2008-04-07T14:17:00.005-04:00

This third and final installment of the "My Conversion Story" series, "Finding the Church Amongst Catholics," could easily be the longest installment of the series by far, if I allowed it to be. That's really saying something, because the two preceding posts are tremendously long. I am going to try my best to avoid being long-winded as I relate the tale of how and why I became Catholic. Becoming Catholic involved a tremendous shift of my entire view of Christianity and the world, and frankly it would be quite impossible for me to explain every facet of that shift.

When I left off last on the tale of my spiritual journey, I was a freshman in college, finally validly baptized, and a member of a wonderful little nondenominational evangelical Protestant ecclesial community. I learned a tremendous amount about being a more mature Christian with a healthy emotional and spiritual life during this time. Life was pretty good.

Before very long, I became the primary instructor of the middle schooler boys' Sunday school class. It was great, I loved it. The kids at that church, almost all homeschoolers, were amazingly mature and spiritual for their ages.

Most of the kids who were raised in families of our church tended to be baptized around the age of twelve. A couple of the boys in my class had already been baptized, but most had not. Realizing that most of the boys of my class would be baptized within a year or two, I decided to do a "confirmation prep" style series of classes. Not that we had confirmation in any form, but that was the basic idea.

Our church was governed by a constitution that included a series of basic articles of faith, I think there were eleven. My "confirmation prep style" series of classes were spent looking at each article, what our church constitution said about it, reviewing the many Bible references the church constitution said supported that article of faih, and discussing different views others had on these matters (Catholics came up often) and why they were wrong.

The first article of faith basically amounted to Sola Scriptura: the Bible alone is the sole and supreme source of Christian beliefs. Christians must have a religious belief in everything the Bible teaches, and must not have any religious beliefs not taught in the Bible.

My class and I discussed this article of faith and why we believed in it. We discussed how Mormons and Catholics didn't believe it and why they were wrong. We also reviewed several passages of Scripture that our church said taught this article of our faith. When we did so, I made a discovery, one I kept to myself at the time. None of those passages of Scripture taught Sola Scriptura. Sure, they all talked about how the Scriptures were great and inspired by God, but none of them said that Christians were only to have religious beliefs based upon the explicit teachings of the Bible.

Like I said, I kept quiet at the time. I wasn't going to get myslef in troubl by saying anything to the boys in my class. Also, the Bible said it was inspired, and sure, maybe it didn't say that it was the only inspired source of Christian faith explicitly, but what other source was I going to use. All real Christians (aka Protestants) only used the Bible.

Winter semester of my second year of college I took a college course called "History 379: Christians History amnd Traditions" (yes, I attend a state university). The class was taught by a devout mainline Protestant. I learned a lot in that course. Mainly that "the great Catholic heresies" had clearly infiltrated Christianity much earlier than I had previoulsy believed. Very early on, there was a Church hierarchy and liturgical worship and other sorts of Catholic things.

I learned the most from my fellow students in that class. I was arguably one of the three most outspoken Christians in the class. Another one was a Lutheran guy, and the third was a Catholic girl. In any class on the breadth of Christian history, Catholicism is going to come up a lot, so this Catholic girl had lots of chances to pipe in (honestly, she did so too much).

I had known Catholics before of course. I went to school with many of them. I had a Catholic girlfriend when I was 14, Iand attended a Catholic youth group with her for a year. Nonetheless, this girl was the first Catholic I ever knew that I could tell that she was a both a passionately devout Christian, and a well-informed, orthodox Catholic who knew her stuff.

She, the Lutheran guy, and I would often get together after class and argue doctrine passionately. True ecumenism (just kidding). Another factor that plays in to all this is that it was early 2004, when there was a great uproar about John Kerry and other pro-abortion Catholic politicians recieiving communion.

Through my class, arguing with the Catholic girl, and the political climate of the day, I came to understand that Catholicism is a package deal. That Catholics do not have the right to dissent from official Church teachings. That the Church interprets Scripture (and Tradition), and that what the Church says go. In other words, I began to get "the concept of Catholicism." I still didn't believe in that concept, but I began to get it.

The semester ended, the class ended, and I lost touch with the Lutheran guy and the Catholic girl (this was just a little before facebook swept my college). Throughout the summer, I found myself participating in religious message boards online. There I ended up conversing with lots of Catholics. One in particular, a lay minister from Kansas, helped me a lot. He was very well-versed in apologetics.

He explained to me the arguements for Christianity being intended by Jesus to be a Church-based religion, not a book-based religion. Sometime I will talk about this. He also talked alot about how Catholics view the issues that Protestants so often most vehemently object to (like Mary, for example). He was very compelling. It all made alot of sense. maybe Catholicism wasn't as bad as I had thought it was. It didn't occur to me at the time that perhaps that meant I should consider joining it.

While it was tremendously importantly that he and the Catholic girl from class gave me my intial exposure to some of the basic apologetic arguements for Catholicism, more than that, the biggest thing they did for me was make me aware that here were some. I know it may seem silly, but it had never occured to me before that Catholicism could hold up under even the slightest amount of scrutiny any Protestant could offer. I had thought that Catholicism was completely indefensible, and that people only believed in it for cultural reasons, and/or because they were superstitious. I had also thought that any "real Christians" who might happen to belong to the Catholic Church only did so for family and cultural reasons, and that they of course dissented with Church teaching, holding more evangelical Protestant views on many issues. The girl and the Kansan also corrected this view.

When fall came, I headed back to college. Every Septemeber, we have a student organization fair, and I always go to it. That year, I approached the Catholic organization's table for the first time. I felt the Lord say to me "You need to look at Catholicism with an open mind, and settle the issue," so I signed up to be on their email list. Then I went home that night and thought about what had happened. I could see no reason for the Lord to encourage me to investigate Catholicism, unless He wanted me to join the Catholic Church!

The more I thought about the more certain I was. The Lord wanted me to be Catholic. I thought about giving up my church and my friends and joing what had long been in my eyes the most corrupt and vile major religious organization in the world, and rebellion rose up in my heart.

"No!," I told the Lord, "No!, I will not look at Catholicism with an open mind! You're going to try to make me become a Catholic, and I won't do it!."

And thus began my season of active rebellion against the will of God. That was not a good idea. In a short time, I completely lost the joy of my salvation. My spiritual life died. I became very depressed, and I developed social anxiety, something I had never experienced before (well, more than in the normal sense). I started skipping church frequently, I who had never missed a single service or Bible study ever. I just couldn't deal with seeing people, especially people from church. They would ask me how I was doing, and I couldn't bear it. I was depressed all the time, and I was tired of telling them so, and I couldn't hide the truth from them, at least not in person. I also skipped classes a lot, and failed college classes for the first time ever.

That season of my life lasted about three months. It was perhaps the worst three months of my life. Towards the end, I was semi-suicidal, and ready to give up on Christianity altogether. I was so wrapped up in my misery that by that point I wasn't really even consciously aware that it was connected to my refusing to bid the Lord's command to consider Catholicism. I say consciously aware, because all through this, on several different occasions, I would find myself sitting in the parking lot of the Catholic church near school, wishing I had the courage to enter it.

The last day of November 2004, I wrote in my journal to the Lord. I told Him He had to do something, and quickly, or I was going to give up being a Christian, because I just couldn't take it anymore. I just didn't have the spiritual energy (the spiritual life that comes from abiding in Him) to keep going, I was about to completely die inside, and then just live spiritually dead.

It's risky giving the Lord ultimatums, thankfully I didn't realize that was what I was doing, I was just being honest with Him. The Lord did not fail me, the very next day He acted.

The next day, December 1st, I went to the grocery story, and I happened to walk through an aisle containing a rack of cheap books. I almost never bought books anymore, I got them from library. I had been so down in the dumps though, that escaping into a story seemed nice, and there was this Christmas-y book there, so I bought it.

This book was about a family that happened to be Catholic. Not necessarily very orthodox Catholics, but they were practicing. It totally had to be grace that caused me to say to myself "Catholicism? Wasn't I supposed to be looking into Catholicism?"

It was definitely grace that caused me to immediately get up off my but and go to the library and check out three books on Catholicism, two of them written by Protestant converts. Before reading those books, I hadn't even known that Protestants convert to Catholicism, and that it really isn't uncommon. I had always thought it was unheard of.

Those books addressed exactly the issues I had. I read them voraciously. I finished two and a half of them that night, and I got up and began reading the rest of the third first thing. I went to all of my classes and then I went to the Catholic church near school and went inside. I spoke to a lay minister who urged me to visit the college student bible study meeting later that night.

I went to the library that afternoon and checked out ten more books on Catholicism. I read voraciously until it was time to visit the Catholic bible study group. I had never been involved in campus ministries before. I had visited several, but I didn't like them, besides, I had my own local church where I was highly involved . To my surprise, I loved the Catholic college student group.

The lay minister I had spoken with earlier had said I should go to Mass sometime soon to see what it was like. I didn't want to go alone, that was too scary. The guy playing the guitar while we sang worship songs at the Bible study group seemed to be a good Christian. He was a leader, he led songs that clearly worshiped Christ. His name was James.

I asked James if he would go to Mass with me the following Sunday. I figured any sort of Christian leader couldn't refuse me. He said no, but only because he wasn't going to be in town that weekend. He did go find two other guys, brothers, to go to Mass with me that weekend though. I think James realized that God was working hard on me, and didn't want me to wait an extra week.

The brothers were going to mass at a different parish the following Sunday. James thought that would be a good place for me to go to mass, because it was charismatic parish and I had been a Pentecostal. The parish was very popular amongst the young men of the campus college student Bible study.

So the next Sunday I went to Mass for the first time. It was December 5, 2004k, the second Sunday of Advent, and the Diocese was hosting "Welcome Home Sunday," (to the best of my knowledge, they haven't again since). Sure, it was aimed primarily at lapsed Catholics, but I understood by that point that if Catholicism was true, that the proper home of all Christians was the Catholic Church. It all seemed prophetic. The brothers even said so at the time.

My first mass was wonderful. I had read enough about the Mass that I wasn't really surprised by any particular segment of it, none of it seemed strange, even though I had never really experienced liturgical worship before. I remember that I didn't touch the holy water, genuflect, or make the sign of the cross, but that I did kneel for the consecration, telling Jesus that if it was wrong to do so that it was because of Him I had even came to a Mass so He could deal.

I liked the Mass. It wasn't dull, like I had thought it would be. That next week I kept reading voraciously. I even went to Mass at a different parish (the one with the youth group) by myself for Immaculate Conception. I wanted to see what Mass was like in a regular, non-charismatic parish, because if I became Catholic I wouldn't just be possibly joining a charismatic parish, but the entire Church Universal.

Now that parish was more in the direction of dull, but it was still nice (this parish is perhaps the dullest in town actually, I know now).

A few weeks go by, and it's late mid-December. The semester ends, and the Bible study group has an end of the semester party. After the fun has winded down, we sit around on the floor and discuss theology. Two other Protestants were part of the Bible study group at the time, and the discuss becomes somewhat heated. I was having a side debate with one other Protestant.... and I was on the Catholic side.

I went home that night and got down on my knees beside my bed. I looked at the Lord, and I knew I couldn't say to Him that I didn't believe in Catholicism. So instead, I told Him that I did.

I joined RCIA within the week.

***********

I feel like I haven't done this third installment justice. I tell you I did a lot of reading, had a lot of conversations online, etc, but I didn't share what it was that swayed me, at least not much. That's because I can't do it justice, not in this one entry. There are so many reasons to be Catholic, it boggles the mind to think that I had missed them all before. I think I may need to have a recurring post theme of reasons why I became Catholic. I won't write them regularly, but they will pop up every so often. Look for them (in the future), they will have been tagged "Conversion."

Sometime this week I will write about the supernatural experience I had the day I joined RCIA. It involves the Eucharist, and it's pretty awesome.

My Conversion Story - Part 2 of 3

2008-04-04T13:19:00.006-04:00

This post is the second installment of a three part series. You can find the first installment here.

"Part 2 - Finding the Trinity with the Evangelicals."

When we left off yesterday, I was 15 and I had gave up on the Catholic youth group and had broken up with my "unbeliever" Catholic girlfriend. Two days later, I was baptized by full immersion for the remission of sins in the name of Jesus Christ, not in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The Pentecostals I had become involved with were non-Trinitarians. They are known as Oneness Pentecostals. My denomination, the United Pentecostal Church, is the largest of several Oneness Pentecostal denominations. They have about two million members worldwide. Most Pentecostals are Trinitarians, but a significant minority of them are not.

In some future post, I will discuss Oneness Pentecostals further, and reflect on my experiences as one. Today my purpose is simply to chronicle my continuing conversion.

My family life was especially unstable in high school. We moved, back and forth between two cities, several times during my junior and senior years. In each city, I would find a Oneness Pentecostal ecclesial community. In the second city, I didn't like the churches very well. Also, moving so much was very hard on me spiritually. After all, I was also a teenager, and my family extremely disliked my religion. The moving was not helpful.

I became less well attached to Oneness Pentecostalism. I had a couple of short seasons of "backsliding." During this time, internet research began to call my beliefs into question. I had naively thought that since Oneness Pentecostalism was so small, that most people who thought they were Christians hadn't ever really heard our message, and that if they did, they would convert. I was wrong. Sure, few people did know about us, but there were those who knew all about us, and thought we were all wrong. People clearly well acquainted with Scripture, who loved Christ.

As a naive teenager, that really rocked my faith. I was in a bad place at the time. The Lord came down and rescued me. It was really all Him.

I had a teacher at school who was a devout, nondenominational, trinitarian, evangelical, Protestant Christian. Even though the fact that she was a trinitarian meant to Oneness Ppentecostals that she wasn't saved, I respected her as a Christian. I could tell that she knew and loved the Lord and the Scriptures. One day, after school, in April of my senior year, I asked her if I could visit her church with her.

I had never been to a trinitarian church before. I liked it, although that first time I refused to sing the line in "Holy, Holy, Holy," that went "God in three persons, blessed Trinity." Over the nest month I kept attending that church, and one of their weekly Bible studies. I also met with a member who had been given the task "to disciple" me, and studied in the Scriptures the doctrines of trinitarianism and other doctrines Oneness Pentecostals disagree with evangelicals about. I came to agree with the evangelicals.

In all honesty, at that point I was still simply believing in whatever I was told. I was young, I didn't know better, I was easy to convince.

Thankfully, the evangelical church was wonderful and they definately steered me the right way on the Trinity. Relating to God as Trinity, to Jesus as the Son only, led me to a much firmer conviction in the truth of the Trinity. I felt like my relationship with God became three-dimensional instead of flat (interesting how three pops up there too).

The evangelical church required baptism by full immersion of adult believers in order to become a voting member of the church (they have a congregational system of church governance). They had nothing in their guidelines that addressed the words of the baptismal formula. Baptism was just a symbol of belief in Christ in their theology, not a sacrament. The pastor decided my Jesus' name baptism was good enough to allow me to become a voting member of the church, even though he would never have baptized anynone that way.

A few months went by. The issues of my baptism was bothering me. I felt that my being baptized in the name of Jesus may have been a sufficient symbol of my belief in Christ, but that it had also functioned as a symbol of rejection of the Trinity. Now that I believed in the Trinity, that didn't sit well with me, and I also felt that it didn't sit well with the Lord. With time, I began to feel that the Lord wished for me to be re-baptized, this time in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, to symbolize my belief in the Trinity.

My pastor was fine with re-baptizing me. I was the first (and probably will ever remain the only) baptism he gave to someone who was already a voting member of his church. I was 19 at the time,

I am very glad now that I was baptized then. I would not have liked to have been a catechumen in RCIA, I had followed Christ for more than six years at that point. Also, I wouldn't have been able to join RCIA in December if I hadn't already been a validly baptized practicing Christian.

I kept attended the evangelical church for two and a half years. It was great. I learned a lot, both about the Scriptures and about being a (more) mature Christian.

Come back soon for my next post, the final installment of "My Conversion Story Part 3 of 3 - Finding the True Church Amongst the Catholics."

My Conversion Story - Part 1 of 3

2008-04-03T19:36:00.011-04:00

Recently I have read a couple different conversion stories on various blogs, and I've realized I need to post mine. This will be a very lengthy post, but I've always wanted to write this out in full detail.

This is Part One. "Finding God with the Apostolics."

I wasn't raised in a religious home. My father has Baptist relatives, and some Baptist preacher ancestors, so he considers Baptists "normal religious people." I've never been a normal religious person in his eyes. My own immediate family however, is not Baptist, no matter what my father may tell door-knocking evangelists. Neither of my parents have ever been baptized, as of today, and there is no future baptism in sight either.

My family, besides being non-religious, is very poor and very poorly educated. They do not manage to come off as virtuous peasant types though, we're more "poor white trash types." We have lived in trailers, and not nice ones, and that has been the high point of my parents various living situations.

Given the life my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and childhood neighbors have, I should be a very different person than I am today. But for the grace of God, I would likely be a high school dropout, a pothead, an unwed teenage father, on welfare, and perhaps have been convicted of some petty crimes. I would also likely be somewhat violent, fatalistic, bitter, overly sarcastic, irresponsible, uncouth, etc. I really shouldn't go on because it is rather dis-honoring of my family, but it is the truth.

God had other plans for me. I must admit that the first thing God seems to have been to shape me into a somewhat nerdy, cowardly bookworm. This kept me from forming many friendships during my childhood with the neighborhood children who would later have been a very bad crowd to be in. Instead of being out in the street I was at home with my nose in a book. At school, I loved to learn and got good grades, instead of fighting on the playground and being rude to my teachers in class.

I'm very grateful for all this now, even though I sometimes wish I was cooler, more athletic, and less fearful.

The other early of God's grace in my childhood is that I had a strange interest in religion. My family believed in God, and so did I. I've never been an atheist, and neither have my parents, we just didn't know anything about the God we all believed existed. I wanted to know more though. I occasionally asked to go to church, but my parents never took me. A neighbor had a picture Bible, and I looked at it so much that she eventually gave it to me for Christmas. I would take walks outside and talk to God sometimes, even though I didn't know who He was.

After puberty hit, my hormonal desires kicked in. Instinctively, without knowing how, I knew that there was something wrong with the nature of my desires. I also knew that God didn't like it, and I would ask Him to forgive me and to help me get over the bad part of my desires. I sometimes watched the 700 Club on television, an evangelistic Protestant program. At the end of each episode, they would pray "the sinner's prayer" and ask people to pray it along with them.

So, on several different occasions, I parroted back the words they said, telling God I was a sinner, that I was sorry, and asking Him to forgive me and come into my life. Nothing happened then at the time, but I believe that God honored those prayers, and considered them permission to come into my life when He did.

On Tuesday, March 3, 1998, I was 14 years old and in the eighth grade. I had started going out with a Catholic girl in February. She had invited me to go with her to her youth group on Sunday, and I was planning to go. However, she had given me an idea. My bestfriend and I had been growing apart, and I wanted to be closer to him again. He had been going to a youth group at his church every Tuesday night that school year. I called my friend and asked him if I could go with him. Of course he said yes.

I had never been to any sort of church before, and didn't know anything about how various ones were different really. Once, in fifth grade, my bestfriend had said his church was "Apostolic." At the time, I had interpreted that as "Episcopal," because I had only ever seen Episcopal written, not pronounced. I had seen it listed at the predominant religion in England (it should have said Anglican, of course).

On that night in eight grade, I looked up the predominant religion of England (from the book I had seen it in when I was in 5th grade), and went and told my parents I was visiting the youth group of an Episcopal church, which the same as the predominant religion in England. Now my parents didn't know anything about Episcopalians, but I think they figured if most of the people in an entire country belonged to this religion, it couldn't have been too strange.

I was surprised, as we drove up, to see the word "Apostolic" on the church sign, not "Episcopal," but I quickly realized that I had simply been mistaken three years earlier. Below the church name on the sign, it said "A United Pentecostal Church." I later learned that United Pentecostal (and other Oneness Pentecostals) like to call themselves Apostolics, because they believe that the practice Apostolic Christianity, that they follow Jesus the way the Apostles did, as best they can. I had heard of Pentecostals only once before. Another friend of mine at school went to a different Pentecostal church with her family, and they were really nice people, so I wasn't concerned.

I probably wouldn't have been concerned anyways. I had never been to a church before ever and I had no way to know what to be concerned about. This youth group was ran like it was a church service, it was all religion, all the time. It was huge. In a church of about 500, they had about 60 teenagers at youth group. Much larger local churches with "fun" youth groups were lucky to have 30 teenagers come most of the time.

The church was in the middle of a revival with a visiting evangelist. He even came to the youth group. He was there that night when I first came. First there was a prolonged time of prayer and singing. I tried to follow along and participate. I stood when the others stood, and I sat when they sat. When they sang, I clapped when they did and tried to catch onto the words of the songs and sing as best I could.

Then the evangelist gave a long message. I don't remember what it was about very well, something about letting Jesus mold you like a potter molds a clay pot. He said we needed to be soft in the hands of Jesus, not like a hard, dried out pot. I remember that he took a crowbar to a clay pot and busted it to demonstrate what it was like to not be soft clay in the hands of Jesus. This didn't disturb me by the way.

At the end of his message, he told us that we all needed to soften the clay of our hearts before Jesus, and place them in his hands. That we needed to repent of our sins, and then just begin to praise Jesus. The musicians started playing again, the lights dimmed, and we were given time to do as the preacher said.

As I said earlier, I was already fully aware that I was a sinner and had no problem with asking God to forgive me, so I readily followed the preacher's instructions. I'm not sure, but I think that was the first time I directed this prayer, or any prayer, to Jesus. I had always just approached a vague notion of God before then. So, perhaps for the first time, I told Jesus I was sorry for my sins, and then I tried to follow the next instruction, to praise Jesus. I had no idea what that meant. I raised my hands, like the others around me, and then I think I told Jesus that He seemed like a really nice guy, from what I had heard.

Then why life changed forever in that moment. The room and the people around me faded away, and I was aware of something, Someone, that completely captivated my total attention. My upraised hands felt like an electric current had began to flow into them, down my arms, into my heart. I knew that the current was the love of God, and that it was flowing from His fingertips to mine.

It was overwhelming. Tears streamed down each of my cheeks. I was awe-struck. The experience seemed to last a long time, maybe it did, maybe it didn't, I have no idea. I did not speak in tongues that night, perhaps because I didn't know to open my mouth. The next time I went to the youth group I did open my mouth, and I did speak in tongues that week, The United Pentecostals might disagree with me, but I believe I was baptized in the Holy Spirit the first night (I will talk about my current theological thoughts on this another time).

When I left the youth group that first night, I knew I wanted to come back again every week. It was really unfortunate that the catholic youth group I visited the following Sunday couldn't hold a candle to the Pentecostal youth group. There the spirituality consisted of passing a candle around a circle and sharing an attention, and then saying an Our Father. Most of the teenagers there seemed to share intentions about sports teams and hamsters, and you could tell they thought they whole prayer thing was a joke. Everything else we did was simply fun. That was nice, but none of it made me want to consider the Catholic Church.

A year after my first church experience, after attending both youth groups all year, both Pentecostal and Catholic, I was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins. Oneness Pentecostals don't believe in the Trinity, and they baptize in the name of Jesus, not in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. They do believe that baptism washes away sin, but that it has to be by full immersion.

Two days before my baptism I broke up with the Catholic girl because she was an unbeliever. In all honesty it was pretty much mutual, she didn't really like her boyfriend turning Pentecostal.

My Catholic readers can rest assured that I know that my first baptism was not a valid sacramental baptism, and that I took care of that well before I even considered becoming Catholic.

This entry is so long, I think I will have to stop here and continue this story next time.

So keep checking back! I think this will be a three part series. Soon I will post the "Part 2 - Finding the Trinity with the Evangelicals."

A home in the church

2008-04-02T19:36:00.001-04:00

This is my final semester of college. God has not yet revealed to me much in the way of big changes in my life that are coming, but just the fact that I won’t be attending classes anymore is huge. I’ve had to take it slow in college, primarily for financial reasons, and it’s take me six years to finish. Add to those six years the thirteen years of school I attended before college, including kindergarten (I didn’t go to pre-school). I have spent at least two-thirds of every year of the past nineteen consecutive years in school.I’m twenty-four years old. That’s 79% of my whole life since birth.

Also, I don’t remember anything from the first three years of my life, so for 19 of the 21 years I remember I have attended school. That’s 90% of my life that I am able to recall. Quite frankly, I don’t remember the remaining 10% very well at all either, since it occurred when I was between the ages of three and five.

In the eyes of the world, I will soon be seen primarily as a worker, rather than as a student. I could expound on this further, but I actually want to post about the next biggest change in my life, being on the verge of loosing my current small, close-knit faith community.

My community now is a wonderful Catholic Bible study group for college students that meets weekly at the Parish near my college. I will remain in this area after graduation, at least for a while, and therefore I may be able to continue to participate in this group as an alumnus for a little while, others have before me. However, nearing graduation has made me realize my days in this community are numbered.

It has also made me realize that ever since my very first day as a Christian, I have always been part of a small, close-knit faith community that met weekly. I turned my life to Jesus ten years ago at a Pentecostal youth group when I was 14, the first time I ever attended a religious function. I remained part of that youth group for the next four years, attending every Tuesday night. I went to their ecclesial community’s service twice on Sundays, and to Bible Study night on Thursdays, but there I sat with the youth group (in the front ). Since my actual family didn’t go to any church, the youth group was my church family.

After I left Pentecostalism, I immediately began attending a small non-denominational Evangelical Protestant ecclesial community. It was so small, the whole church was very close knit,, but I had more there too. Every member of the congregation belonged to one of several different small Bible study groups that met in someone’s home. Mine met every Monday night. My Monday night Bible study group was my close-knit faith community for two and half years.

Then, when I was almost ready to become Catholic, I visited my current small Bible study faith community for the first time. I came back the next week and every week after, every Tuesday night during the college school year for three and a half years. In this “big scary” Catholic Church I’ve become a member of, it has been my home, my anchor. I’ve even been a leader in it for the past two years.

I’m very grateful to God for having provided me with each of these homes within each of the ecclesial communities and parishes I’ve been a member of these past ten years. I very much hope that when the time does come to let the current one go, that He will provide me with another one. I cannot more highly recommend being part of a good small, faith fellowship group, it has does wonders for my spiritual growth and well-being.

Seminarians, our hope

2008-03-31T20:42:00.002-04:00

Well, Divine Providence week may be over, but I still have a bit of divine providence news. On Saturday I went in to work at the new job to finish up the computer-based component of my training. That took about two hours, as I had expected it to. Then they asked me to work longer, and they gave me some odd jobs no one else wanted to do. I ended up logging in more than seven hours. That will be very nice whenever I start being paid from this job.

In other news, today I contacted a priest at another local parish about possibly beginning spiritual direction. He responded saying that he was interested in meeting together to determine if we would be a good match for each other.

This priest is a good one, I’ve met him a few times, although I don’t know him well. Nonetheless, he has a very good reputation with the seminarians of our diocese, which I take as a good sign.

Our diocese has quite a few seminarians (considering the size of our diocese) and I’ve met most of them, and I think they’re all wonderful, so I value their opinions highly. I hope and pray that many, many of these wonderful seminarians become wonderful priests for our diocese. If they do, I’m very excited about the future of the faith here, because so many of our parishes will have excellent pastoral care.

One of my best friends, is in the seminary, and he is the one that has been urging me to begin spiritual direction. I have tried to before. It always tanked. It is hard to find a faithful, orthodox spiritual director who isn’t already booked past the Final Judgement. Which is why we need more good priests, which brings us back to my joyful hope about the future of my diocese, especially if we can keep up the encouraging number of vocations we’ve been getting the past few years.

Pray for an increase in vocations!

I once heard my bishop say that he served as an assistant under pastors at parishes for nine years after his ordination, because there weren’t any pastorates available, and so many other priests were ahead of him on the list waiting for a parish.

St. John Vianney, we need more parish priests, pray for us!

The Liturgical Days of Our Lives

2008-03-24T20:50:00.007-04:00

Today is Easter Monday aka Monday of the First Week of Easter. For all non-Christians and all the Separated Brethren not-in-the-know, Easter is not just a day. It is a liturgical season that last seven weeks, from the first Sunday of Easter (which was yesterday) until Pentecost, which is the Sunday after the Sixth Sunday of Easter. This year, it will be on May 11th, which is also Mother's Day. The liturgical calendar this year had many difficulties, this is the least of them.

Anyways, I doubt I need to tell any of that to most of my readers. I just love sharing fun Catholic facts. When I converted to Catholicism it was like immigrating to another planet, a whole new world opened up to me, so much was so different, and that included the calendar. Seriously, from fall through spring each year, when I think of the calendar, I think of the liturgical calendar first.

For example, I'm giving a big presentation on Friday for my university's undergraduate research extravaganza, and there is a luncheon that follows. I've known I would do this since mid-December. I was told that it would be on March 28th, and I immediately converted the date to "Friday of the First Week of Easter." Not only did this help me orient the date in my head, it also let me know that I didn't need to request a vegetarian meal, which I would have if it had been a Friday of Lent.

Also, I had to meet with my presentation's sponsoring professor to go over a few things. Originally she suggested last Thursday. I asked to have a different day, because it was Holy Thursday, and I was already very busy that day.

I'm already upset that I probably won't be able to invite most of my friends to have Pentecost Dinner and attend Vigil of Pentecost Mass with me at my home parish because they will be at home visiting their mothers for Mother's day.

After Pentecost, it become Ordinary Time, which will stretch all the way to Advent with only a few holy days here and there to liven things up. I am looking forward to Corpus Christi (Body and Blood of Christ) however.

Speaking of Corpus Christi, last year, I had to be out of town on Corpus Christi. I was disappointed, because my home parish has a Corpus Christi Procession, and I had never been able to attend for it, because my first two summers as a Catholic I spent as a camp counselor in Indiana, where the parish was essentially a Sunday obligation fulfillment station for the local summer people. Anyways, I desperately wanted to attend a Corpus Christi Procession, not very many parishes have them these days (God forbid we be public about our faith!), but mine does. Then I had to go out of town.

Anyways, I went to a parish that did not have a procession scheduled. During the homily, the priest spoke (as is appropriate) on the True Presence, and then said that when he had been putting the final touches on his homily the previous day, he had felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to have a Eucharistic Procession for Corpus Christi, even though none had been planned. Now I'm sure God did not arrange a Eucharistic Procession at this parish just for me, but it sure felt that way.

The procession was wonderful, by the way. I was one of the few people who could sing Tantuum Ergo in Latin without a songsheet, and I was so loud that everyone heard me. After the Procession ended, the parish's ushers demanded that I join their parish choir. They were not dissuaded when I told them I lived an hour's drive away. They were dissuaded however when I added that I also did not have a car at the time.

Tomcatholic

2008-03-18T17:08:00.002-04:00

So this is my blog. Welcome.

I suppose that the first post is a good place to post a little information about me, the blogger, so we can get to know one another.

Hi, I'm Thomas, but when referencing me as a blogger you can feel free to call me Tomcatholic if you so desire. Or not. I really don't care either way. Thomas is fine.

I'm currently 24 years old. That makes me a young man to most (read: older) people. I'm in my last semester of college now. I took things slow, mostly due to financial reasons, which is why I'm older than a final semester college senior should typically be.

I'm Catholic, as you may have guessed. As you would not have guessed, most likely, I'm a convert from Protestantism. Well, I'm actually a Christian who used to be in imperfect communion with the Catholic Church who has now come into full communion. It is easier to just call myself a convert however. Considering that I was not raised religiously and didn't have any sort of Christian faith until I was fourteen years old, and wasn't baptized until I was nineteen years old, I was originally a convert to Christianity anyways.

For all those who are curious, I was Pentecostal, and then a nondenominational Evangelical before I became Catholic. I was devout, I was well-catechized, I called myself born again, and I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. Then I made a well-informed, Spirit-led decision to become Catholic, which I will blog about sometime in the future.

Coincidently, I like cats, and males are soemtimes refered to as a "tom." Like a tomcat, for instance.

Anways, all those factors went into the name of this blog.