Catholic Convert

If you are a credentialed teacher, you are usually required to do a certain amount of professional development by your employer.  At the Catholic school where I worked, I was required to do that in what is referred to as Catechist hours.  These were hours devoted to learning the teachings of the Catholic church.  We weren’t required to be Catholic to teach there, but we were required to uphold the teachings of the church.

By the time my hours were coming due, I was struggling with burn out and my health.  I put off getting those hours done as long as I could and had found myself in a position where I wasn’t going to get them done on time.  The alternative to getting those hours done was to go through an actual catechism as an adult.  This is the process of becoming Catholic.

Given my history with Christianity, I struggled with this decision.  On the one hand, my job was at stake.  On the other hand, my integrity was at stake.  I was an example to those young women.  I cannot pretend to believe things that I don’t believe, certainly not in front of impressionable young people who may be struggling with the same doubts that I did.

I talked to some dear friends of mine who were part of my Renaissance Faire guild.  Their names are Talib and Olivia.  I haven’t had an opportunity to talk much about them in this story, because it’s been focused primarily on my romantic relationships.  I consider this story that I’ve written here to be a first draft.  My second draft will feature a lot about them.  They are two of my favorite people in the world and I love them like family.

I talked to Talib and Olivia about my struggles with Catholicism.  Their beliefs were not so far removed from mine.  I shared my issue with things like the virgin birth and the Catholic belief that when we take communion, the bread turns to the body of Christ and the wine turns to the blood.  They, like me, believed that these things were a matter of faith and not fact.  I decided to go ahead and go through the process of catechism and Talib became my sponsor.  If I had been a child, that would have been my Godfather.

I loved the process of catechism.  I loved exploring the ideas of the Church thinkers and I loved asking questions.  I was afraid that my questions might annoy them.  I had several and they were deep.  In fact, they loved my questions.  We had good discussions, and by the time we were nearing the end of the process, I was feeling confident in my decision to take communion and become a Catholic.

The Nicene Creed, which is part of the mass is a profession of what we as a community believe.  I felt that I couldn’t sincerely profess my faith through the Creed without knowing for certain that I wasn’t expected to believe that these things were literal fact.  I went to speak to our priest.  He was known to drop the F-bomb on occasion, which was so different from the forced and often artificial “perfection” expected by the church of my past.  I told him with all honesty that I wanted to be a Catholic, but I can’t pretend that I believe these things are literal.  He told me that to believe that these things were fact, there was a certain amount of mental gymnastics involved.  He said other things but the description of mental gymnastics seemed so appropriate to the contortions my brain had tried to do when I was trying to be a good evangelical.  He also told me about the Primacy of Conscience, which is that God lives with us and thus we can find truth within ourselves when we are uncertain.

Adina was becoming increasingly bitter about my choice to become Catholic.  Considering that our rejection of evangelicism had been the thing that brought us so close together, I understood how she might feel betrayed.  But I’d never claimed to not believe in God.  I’d always been very clear that I considered Christianity to be the culture that I’d been raised with.  The stories were sacred to me.  Even when she told me that she considered herself an atheist, I questioned that and she admitted that she just didn’t know.

It hurt me that she didn’t trust me to not become judgmental like the church people we’d both experienced.  I didn’t feel like I was doing anything to contradict anything I’d said.  But her resentment was palpable and it made me sad.

On Easter of that year, I took communion for the first time and became a Catholic convert.