My Adult Conversion

My Adult Conversion: The Kid Conversation

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Photo by Josh Willink

Although I officially entered the Catholic Church three years ago, my conversion did not end when I received the sacraments. Quite the opposite. I am still learning and growing in my faith as I suspect I will for the rest of my life. One blaring difference I’ve noticed since converting is my attitude toward children. I’ve known that I wanted to be a wife and mother from the time I was learning to walk. Despite our lack of faith in my upbringing, the importance of family was among the first lessons to be taught in ours. My childhood was truly blessed with an abundance of love from my mom, my dad and my big sister. 

That kind of close-knit family unit seemed to me the ultimate recipe for perfect happiness, not too big and not too small. I grew up with so many reasons why four was the ideal number for a family. Although we bickered like siblings, I loved having a sister and I know she feels the same. We didn’t always get along but I wouldn’t have wanted to go through childhood with anyone else, especially in comparison to our classmates’ sibling relationships. When we were little we played together with the neighbors and when we got older we developed that strange unspoken communication that only two sisters who love each other can. This came in particularly handy during some sticky social situations or when we started being interested in boys. I was convinced that more siblings would have diminished our sisterly friendship and felt lucky to only have one amazing big sister. I figured that there was simply only so much love to go around in a household. 

I could not have been more wrong. When my husband and I started Catholic marriage prep the priest asked us how many kids we’d like to have and for the first time I was completely happy to tell him we wanted two or three. After being married for two years and now with our first baby girl in the mix I’m singing a very different tune. “As many as God will give us” is my new answer. I can think of no greater joy than to nurture a large loving Catholic family. There may be a finite number of rooms in our house but the love I’m capable of feeling for my own children has shocked me over the last few months and I have yet to find its limit. 

Mustard Seeds

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Photo by Akil Mazumder

For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. – Matthew 17:20-21

When asked why I converted to Catholicism it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment when my understanding blossomed into true belief. I’ve often said that there wasn’t a single instant which led me to the faith but many moments, both big and small, over the course of many years. Upon reflection, I think the first seeds of Catholic understanding in my life were all planted by my two wonderful parents, though we may have all been unaware at the time. 

My very first exposure to Catholic teachings and literature did not come from the Bible. I first heard and fell in love with these teachings through the eloquent writings of JRR Tolkien in his tales of Middle Earth. Bedtime stories were always a must in our house growing up and Tolkien’s were our favorite. Even before any of us were Catholic and well before I myself could read, my dad spent countless evening hours sitting between my sister and I with The Lord of the Rings open in his lap, causing the letters to come alive with his various character voices as my mom sat close by knitting in her comfy armchair. To this day, my sister and I still eat up these stories, epic recounts of the eternal struggle between good and evil and all the rays of light that can still be found in a world falling into darkness. Tolkien’s work is bursting with Catholic messages and imagery.  

My mom also planted slightly more literal Catholic seeds later when I grew up and moved away to Indiana. She gifted me with a small metal crucifix and a tiny car rosary. I was not Catholic at the time and had no intention of coming to the faith but my mom was not deterred. These she hung in my life with care and without my permission, the crucifix rather prominently displayed in the middle of my apartment living room and the rosary dangling from the rearview mirror in my car. Long after she returned to Colorado and left me to my new life in the Midwest, my crucifix and rosary still hung where she’d left them. In part, I was grateful for the prayers which came with them even if I myself didn’t subscribe to the faith they represented. They were little reminders of my mom’s love for me. I also knew that she’d look for them whenever she visited and never had the heart to explain why I’d moved them so they were left as they were, Christ on the cross watching over me wherever I went.  

I would later find myself defending Catholicism during good natured religious debates over lunch with work friends. At the time I knew close to nothing about the faith except what my parents had told me since their return to the Church. I always felt compelled to correct the more blatant anti Catholic arguments on behalf of the two intelligent and loving people who raised me. Now I understand why. Looking back, all of these seemingly insignificant moments were indeed guiding me to the faith, one slow inch at a time. 

My Adult Conversion: Skeptic to Enthusiast

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Of course, with the knowledge that I have now, I wish I’d been more open and willing in my journey to faith but the truth is my investigation into the Catholic Church was initially driven by pride and spite rather than a deep sense of morality. I didn’t begin learning about God out of a desire to know Him better as I suspect is the case for many Catholic converts. 

I began going to church because I wanted to be able to have an educated conversation with my parents about why I was not Catholic. In short, I wanted to be able to better argue my case. I spent my days pondering the faith and trying my best to poke holes in it. Eventually, in addition to attending Sunday mass every week I also began participating in Right of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) at my home parish in order to dive deeper into the scripture and truly understand the Catholic perspective. This was one of the best decisions I could have made at the time as RCIA is designed to educate skeptical non-Catholics like myself as well as guide them through the process of being received fully into the church through the Sacraments of Initiation.

Here there were no silly questions and I was encouraged to voice my concerns and hang-ups about the faith. Each week we dissected the Sunday liturgy to give context to the Bible readings before diving into a group Q&A. Through this process I realized that all of my resistance to the faith could be boiled down to just a few questions which I’ll be discussing on this blog soon. However, on the whole, my values were very much in line with Catholic teachings. I already actively sought to live a generally Catholic life despite my previous lack of formal worship, particularly on topics like marriage, the right to life and Catholic virtues.

During my high school years I sometimes attended weekly mass with my parents and on one of these occasions I took a good look at the people there. I was struck by how similar they seemed to me in dress and mannerisms. Even then I knew that it was a crowd in which I could easily fit in but I would have been doing it simply to make my parents happy. That seemed a poor and dishonest reason to convert to the faith and was quickly dismissed. Years later in RCIA I was hit with the same realization but with a much stronger understanding of the faith. I still generally looked and acted like a Catholic but now had a solid basis for doing so beyond the fact that it was just how my parents raised me. 

I do believe that God intended for me to be Catholic despite the first 21 years of my life that were spent without worship. Although some church teachings were harder learned than others, I’m happy to have had the opportunity to come to the faith as an adult and to truly choose God with my whole heart. 

My Adult Conversion: Baby Steps

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Although it’s fun to imagine finding God as a momentous occasion punctuated by a colossal clap of thunder or flash of lightning as one might see on the big screen at the theater, my Catholic beginnings were much more humble. I didn’t suddenly wake up from a Godless life in an instant of understanding and fall to my knees then and there. There wasn’t a single moment that brought me to faith, but many moments over the course of many years. 

Consciously or not, my parents successfully seeded Christian undertones throughout my upbringing although we were Chreasters (Christmas and Easter Christians) at best. When I was in high school they both returned to the faith and our family dinner table discussions about religion became much more intentional. My sister always had a knack for debate and firm conviction in her idea of right and wrong which made for some interesting dialogue. Despite my parents’ lack of organized religion during our formative years, they were always our greatest cheerleaders and my sister and I both grew up believing that we were capable of anything we set our minds to. 

We both made it through high school and difficult technical college degrees through our own grit as well as constant encouragement from our parents. Only now, upon reflection, do I realize that all of those wins in school were actually answered prayers that my parents had sent up on our behalf. Long before I consciously accepted God into my heart, He was there with me in my struggles. This realization was the first of many to lead me to the Catholic church. 

No matter what trials I undertook in my life, things always seemed to work out the way they were supposed to. When I was little I would’ve said that I was the luckiest person on Earth. This belief persisted into my early 20s when I suddenly found myself living, working and even thriving in the flatlands of Indiana, over a thousand miles away from all of the friends and family that I knew and loved in Colorado. How could I be so lucky to have come this far and still found success and happiness in such an unfamiliar landscape?

There were two possible answers to this question. The first and more unlikely answer was that I had solved the riddle from the start and actually was the luckiest person on Earth. I’ve always considered myself a generally good person but hardly the best of them. When compared to the average generally good person there was nothing that set me apart from the crowd. If luck had anything to do with karma, there was no reason for me, a shy, polite 21 year old engineer, to be granted the ultimate lottery. Therefore, the only logical alternative was that there is a God and He loves me. 

I always accepted that there was some higher power at work in the world watching over me. During my childhood, that was sufficient. It was enough to know that things would eventually work out for the best. However, it took being on my own to begin to wonder exactly who it was I had to thank for all of the wonderful things in my life. Thus, for the first time in my memory, I got myself to church on Sunday.