2004-05-05 - 4:51 p.m.
(i've been working on an explanation of why i became a catholic for some time now. it is not finished, but this will do for a beginning)
This is the testimony of my journey to the Roman Catholic Church. I do not attest that the Catholic Church is where I met the person of Jesus Christ; His hand has been upon me from before I could speak the words "eucharist", "confession" or "catholic". I do not renounce my upbringing as a protestant; it served to teach me essential Christian doctrine, and it was in that tradition, if I may call it that, that I had my first real experience of God. Becoming Catholic, for me, represents rather a coming into a fuller understanding of the ways in which God has revealed himself to the world, and my transition into Catholicism has not been so much a coming to new beliefs as it has been an articulation of so many things that I felt in my heart to be true even before I could put words to those intuitions. And I think this is why my conversion has been so silent and understated. It came while I was doing so many other things. it didn't come as a flash of inspired insight but as growing understanding that hardly seemed to need to be spoken of - it was common sense. This task, the writing down of a conversion experience is difficult because it entails so many things. It is, and forgive me for stealing this from Chesterton, like explaining why a person believes in representational government or personal freedom. There are, of course, arguments for it, but the question is so overwhelmingly large and entails not only intellectual arguments but also personal experience, and when it comes down to it, personal preference. But I think that I will take the chronological approach, because it seems to that the best way of beginning is, well, to start at the beginning.
I owe much of my conversion to the reading of books. My first year of college, I read a book called Father Elijah. This was the cracking of the door that would eventually swing wide. In it, I found a profound glimpse into a very real and very Catholic spirituality. At the time I did not have a category for this sort of encounter. My understanding of the Catholic Church was that it was a cult, and, like every other cult, was outside the realm of Christianity. But in the reading of this book and in the subsequential meeting of the author, I found that my concept of the Roman Church was simply not accurate. Not only was he very much a Christian, but his sharp spiritual insight was something I had never encountered in Protestant writers. But I had many other things with which to occupy my thoughts and just let the matter be. That year I also did a lot of reading of early Church Fathers (most notably St. Augustine) who also were profoundly christian, but also undeniably Catholic. In my spare time the following summer, I read everything I could by C.S. Lewis, an author with whom I had fallen in love, and after that I began to read G.K. Chesterton. I wish that I could summarize these authors adequately and explain the impact that they had on me. I would say that Lewis was the bridge between the Catholic and the Protestant world. He, though not Catholic himself, held many of the controversial Catholic doctrines (such as purgatory) in common with the Roman Church. His writings were profound, convicting, and life-giving. Chesterton was everything that I loved in Lewis, only more so and with more life and joviality. Later I read Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkein, Walker Percy, Dostoyevsky, Josef Pieper, Rene Girard and many others. And what I found in common with all of these authors, who were almost exclusively Catholic, was an sacramental and incarnational understanding of the universe that I simply did not find in the Protestant world. For them, the world means something. The whole world is infused with the presence of God. The visible world is of course itself and ought to be loved as such, but it also is a part of a representational story. Each person, animal, tree rock, is a word from God to us and it is speaking. These authors also communicated a world in which people are both entirely broken and yet still vessels of God's grace. The image of God upon man has not been fully taken from him and that everything is in a process of redemption or at least stands within the possibility of redemption. The world God created, though fallen, is still very good. And life, at its core, is a Comedy, (in the Divine sense of the word). I found that these Catholic authors had a love and appreciation for the physical world, and especially for art, that was founded in their understanding of the Incarnation. The subtleties and nuances expressed by these writers where things that I would not have even thought to express but when I encountered them, my spirit concurred, not as a thing newly learned, but as a truth made explicit. And I did not, and have not, found a Protestant vision that could rival the profundity and universal cohesiveness i found among Catholic authors.
If I can use the analogy of a set of railroad tracks, I will say that while the aesthetic/artistic represent one track leading to Rome, the other track is the more cerebral, reasoned aspect of my journey. As much as I love the liturgy and the Catholic worldview, I would not become Catholic if I felt it were an intellectual compromise. In fact, it would have been much easier for me, if I could have been convinced of remaining outside the Catholic Church, and simply joined one of the more "high church" denominations. But as I searched out this question, I realized that the compromise would come by staying in a tradition whose tenants I do not and cannot hold. To be a Protestant means to be protesting something. It is a rebellion against something. And not all rebellion is a bad thing, but to be responsible, one ought to know and agree with that rebellion. And the two principle premises of the protestant tradition, sola scriptura and sola fide make no sense to me. Sola fide I find unacceptable because the Bible itself speaks against it in James. And sola scriptura I find absurd because it borrows from the tradition which it is hoping to debunk. Shouting "sola scriptura," not only demonstrates a complete lack of understanding concerning how we got our Bible, but it also takes away the traditional safeguard that have kept the Holy Scriptures sacred. The Sola Scriptura mantra also puts some fairly fundamental Christian doctrines at risk, such as the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, because these doctrines are not explicitly found in the Bible. To be an intellectually honest Protestant, I would need to dedicate my life to the discovering just which of the doctrines we take for granted are real and which are not; which of the early (and late) heresies were actually heresies, and for that matter, which of the various gospels and epistles floating around in the early church were valid. If I am going to debunk tradition, I need to be willing to put as much thought, study, meditation and emotional commitment as the early Church fathers did. I am left to construct what it means to be a Christian with some epistles and a few gospels, not leaving out, of course, the gospels of Thomas, James, Mary Magdalene, Philip, the Secret Gospel of Mark, Bartholomew, etc., because if I have debunked the process that gave me the cannon, I cannot, in good conscience, accept that cannon as either complete or accurate, without a thorough examination. As a Protestant, I cannot (should not) simply accept the doctrine of the Trinity, the role of the Holy Spirit, the person of Jesus Christ, just because I happen to like those particular doctrines or because they have been taught to me from a young age. If it took the early church close to three hundred years to come to the clarity of the Apostles' Creed, who are we to flippantly assume that that those doctrines are so easily deciphered with nothing but the Bible.
So that is, in brief, an account of why I became Catholic... in case you were wondering.
