First of all, I should say I didn’t want to “become Catholic”. I wasn’t in search of an identity, or belonging, or seeking membership in an exclusive club. I had read and prayed and meditated and dreamt my way to faith, including some interior experiences that I will never share with anyone again, given the profound spiritual abuse I experienced in ever deepening levels of social and spiritual hell. I had always wondered about the Crucifixion after being in churches for weddings, baptisms, confirmations of my cousins, funerals.
Let me spell that out before I go further:
1 – First was waiting to be baptized 2015 to December 8, 2017.
2 – Then I was baptised but told to get lost and it was made clear to me I wasn’t welcome. That started the week after I was baptised when I didn’t know whether to go back to Mass where I was baptised or back to the parish that had rejected me. That was December 15, 2017 through 2018.
3 – Then a Trespass to Property Notice cut me off from Eucharistic Adoration and the small group of prayerful people I had gotten to know. That was March 2019.
I don’t even want to talk about what happened after I had the italki team delete my profile in August, 2019.
Conversion was about:
-an experience of saying yes in a dream with religious imagery I had never had before
-a book called Path to Salvation by Theophan the Recluse. I did some of things in this book and it lead to an opening, a relationship, a settling into almost a marriage or a ‘home’ that just always is.
-doing a life review after discovering a website with an Ignatian Review, especially relationships that had gone wrong – at work, personal life. I really thought about myself with a brutal honesty. This is mostly connected to a pitch contest I had done that didn’t go well. The fact that I did this, and was never allowed to speak it, and then mobbed and humiliated on purpose by the priest whose job it was to hear me … as Bishop Bourgon said it was a sacrilege. Playing games with Sacraments where people are at their most open, most trusting, most child-like, most exposed, most vulnerable is … evil. Despite all the shortcomings, I still had that new connecting with God, whose voice I heard inside me a few times. I’ve being exploring the metaphors and images and parables ever since then.
-finding a Psalm on Youtube – both the music and the words worked together, for me. I realised how old the Psalms were and it hit me that the people who wrote those words so far back in history, and from another part of the world I had never felt connection to … we were more similar than different. That was a big realization.
–an act of perfect contrition (I found that term later on, in the CCC, and I was amazed to find vocabulary for what I instinctually had done / was doing.) I do think young priests (under age 35) can be resentful, or perhaps jealous or territorial or simply skeptical towards lay people with developed spiritual instincts.
-realizing there was a devotional path in Christianity. The first book that resonated was Path to Salvation by Theophan the Recluse (for some reason) and later, the Imitation of Christ. I already had mindfulness, self-awareness, an inner voice, compassion. I just never had placed that within a narrative, and / or the narrative of my own culture. After a few years in Peterborough, I realized clearly why so many Canadians had rejected the Catholic Tradition: in neglected, under-resourced parishes it had become nothing deeper than judgement, hierarchy, respectability, conformity, repression and valorizing endurance of suffering.
After conversion:
-Sobornost, Catherine Doherty, Madonna House, “I am third”, Mass in their forest chapel with no pews
-the Imago Deo as primary to our tradition of human rights
-the Trinity, the Filoque (from Canonical Orthodox groups)
That’s enough for today.