Suffice thine own thing, though it be small;
For the horde hath hate, and climbing fickleness,
The crowd hath envy, and richness blinds overall.
Savour no more than what behoves thy stall;
Rule well thyself, that others cannot thee chide;
And truth shall deliver, there is no dread.
Tempest thee nought, all crookedness to redress,
In trust of Fortune who turneth as a ball.
Much joy stands in little busyness;
Beware therefore of kicking against an awl;
Strive not as doth the crock pot with the wall.
Daunt thyself, that dauntest others dead;
And truth shall deliver, there is no dread.
That thou art sent, receive in submissiveness;
The wrestling for the world asketh a fall.
Here is none home, here is nought but wilderness.
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Know thy country! look up! thank God for all!
Hold the high way, and let thy soul thee lead;
And truth shall deliver, there is no dread.
Therfore, thou Cow, leave thine old wretchedness;
Unto the world leave it now to be thrall.
Cry Him mercy, that of His high goodness
Made thee of nought, and in especial
Draw unto Him, and pray in general
For thee, and also for others, heavenly made;
And truth shall deliver, there is no dread.
The reason this poem speaks to me so much is because of the sentiment captured especially in the last two stanzas. Even before I became Catholic, I appreciated the way Catholics call their communities "parishes," because parish comes, through Old French and Latin, from the Greek παροικος ("paroikos"), which means (especially in early Christian writings) "sojourner" and is derived from the Greek words that mean "near home". In this name for Christian communities, we learn that, though we are near our eternal home, we're not there yet. We're merely sojourning, doing our best to follow "the Way" (which was the first name for Christianity) until we finish the journey and arrive at Home. It reminds us, in the words of Chaucer, that "Here is none home, here is nought but wilderness." In modern culture, life is often described as a journey, and I suspect this is the result of two millenia of the Christian ethos shaping that culture. Another ancient sentiment that is still quoted to this day is, "All roads lead to Rome." My own journey took nearly 30 years to get me to Rome and is─I hope, resolve, and pray daily─still leading me to my heavenly Home. Nevertheless, when I did make it to Rome (i.e. to the Catholic Church), I knew, with an illocutible certainty, that I was, in a very real sense, Home. I felt more at home than I had ever felt before... and I still do. But I'm getting ahead of myself; that's the end of this account of the story, not the beginning.
I was born Robert Benjamin Kolk at the end of June, 1981, and grew up in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), a Calvinist denomination in the Dutch Reformed tradition. I went exclusively to Christian Reformed schools and colleges, aside from a two semester stint at a community college. I cannot express how much I learned from this faith tradition, nor the inexpressible value of that foundation in my life. If it had not been for my parents' dedication to Christ and to teaching me to know and love Him with all my being, I have no idea where I would be now, but I doubt I would be as dedicated to Jesus and His Truth as I am today. Thanks to my parents, I fell in love with Jesus at a very young age; I still remember asking Him to come into my heart around age 6 or 7. I also learned to take Scripture very seriously and to allow It to shape my life, rather than let my life shape my understanding of It. I remember, in high school, making a commitment to read the Bible every morning before I went to school. I don't remember exactly how long that lasted─like most Christians, my life is a constant tale of spurts of zeal intermixed with stretches of laziness─but it did occasion one of the first times I ever became aware of Catholic teaching.
One Saturday, I realized that I had neglected to spend time with God in prayer and meditation on the Word for probably the entire preceding school week (I love sleeping in... probably too much.), so I decided to make it up to God. I thought of it like a loving relationship (because that's what it is): I had neglected to spend time with my Lord and God, the One who calls Himself "the Bridegroom," and asked myself, if I had a girlfriend, how would I make up for forgetting to spend time with her as planned? The answer, of course, was that I would take the time I had now to take her on a special date, giving her the attention she deserved. So, since I'd neglected God in the very same way, I decided to spend the better part of that day making it up to Him, spending several hours in prayer and Scripture study. (As it turns out, my primitive, natural understanding of penance as working together to fix a relationship is actually fairly accurate, which is why I never had any problem accepting that practice upon becoming Catholic, but that's a topic for another time.) After a while, my mom came upstairs to check on me. I explained what I was doing and why. She told me it wasn't necessary, but I insisted on doing it anyway. For whatever reason─I assure you, she was not at all prone to emotional outbursts─she said in a somewhat loudish, almost tearful voice, "We're not Catholic! We don't believe in penance!" and turned away, closing my door and going back downstairs. I pondered that statement for a moment, fairly perplexed. I had no idea whether what I was doing constituted penance or not, but what I did know, and what I believe I may have even said aloud to myself and God, was, "Well, if this is penance, I do." Content with that assessment, I went back to my Bible-reading and praying. When I was done, I went downstairs and tried again to explain my reasoning to my mom, and we resolved the very minor tiff we'd had. To this day, though, I have no idea what she'd been doing before she came upstairs or why the prospect of my doing some sort of self-imposed penance upset her so much.
Another minor experience I had with Catholicism was that our family went to a Catholic wedding in Chicago, and the wedding took place within a Mass. In our CRC services, we celebrated the Lord's Supper once a month, and my brother had already begun receiving, so my mom, rather responsibly, told my brother that there was going to be Communion, but that she and he (I don't think my dad was there), couldn't participate because, "We don't believe what they believe." I was not of the age that I would have received (that happened in my early teens), but this stuck with me. I learned on that day that, because we don't believe all the same things as the Catholics, we did not share in their celebration of the Lord's Supper. We could clearly go to their services (though, I remember it feeling a bit odd, decidedly different than what I was used to─though not a ton different), but Communion was somehow different, and therefore we could not share it with them or they with us.
Aside from those two memories, all I knew of Catholicism, until I began deliberately learning about it in the latter half of 2006, was what I was taught in school about the "Protestant Reformation." I was told the standard Protestant history lesson, about how Luther started straightening out the crooked Church by posting the 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, and from there a fire-storm of zeal to return the Church to its historical roots was lit. When I was in the 6th grade, we were first taught, in very basic form, the errors of the 16th century Church, and I remember that, for that year and that year only, we had a Catholic student in class whose name was Matthew. I honestly don't remember all that much about what exactly was taught, but I do remember that Matthew, a very tender-hearted boy (to whom I wish I could apologize because, although I do not for the life of me recall how, I know I was insensitive to him during that time), felt so embarrassed and singled out because he was Catholic and we were pointing out all the things that─at least 500 years ago, anyway─were wrong with the Catholic Church. I remember him crying not a few times. The teacher did his best to be loving, to reassure him that we were not picking on him, or even his Church, but rather discussing errors that used to plague it, but it was easy to tell he still felt like the odd duck out in the Protestant pond. I think what I learned from this, though, is that Catholics are definitely still Christians. In fact, I think the teacher even told Matthew and the rest of us that these problems within the Catholic Church had since been resolved.
The other interesting thing about Matthew was the way he reacted whenever we would read the book of Matthew in class. He got terribly excited and would often pipe up, saying, “that’s my name!” At the time, I took this to mean that he’d never read the Gospels and was surprised that one of them was called Matthew like he was. Now, though, I would wager that he was excited because, to him, St. Matthew wasn’t just the name of someone who lived 2000 years ago and wrote a book of the Bible; to him St. Matthew was alive, his personal patron and friend. I get the same surge of excitement when someone mentions one of my patrons (St. Macarius of Jerusalem, his deacon St. Cyril, his friend St. Helen, etc.), now. Later, in high school, I would come to love the beginning of Hebrews chapter 12, especially thinking of the “great cloud of witnesses,” but even then it was just a mental image to me, a picture of a stadium full of strangers cheering me on. To Matthew then and to me now, those witnesses are real, vibrant people, people I know, who are actively interceding for us in the spiritual realms. They are our friends, allies, and brothers. But I completely misunderstood Matthew’s reaction at the time and so dismissed it is naivete.
For years, I forgot all these things and went on with my life. As far as I know, young Matthew was the only Catholic I ever knew till after I graduated from college (which took me six and a half years and three different institutions to do. It still saddens me that I couldn't quite reach the elusive perfect-seven years. Those are God's numbers, you know: 3 and 7. How sweet would that've been?). In high school, I was a very enthusiastic young Christian. I knew the Bible astoundingly well, I prayed all the time, and I was in the worship band in Youth Group.
At my first institution of higher education, Dordt College in Sioux Center, IA, I tried practically every church in the small city. They were almost all CRC, but I nevertheless had the toughest time finding a church in which I felt welcomed or even noticed. Eventually, I stopped trying and for about two and a half years, suffered through a very dark time in my life. I kept praying, but mostly just to beg God to make my life better (which is to say, I begged Him to let me meet and fall in love with my future wife) although not exclusively. My favourite way to pray was to take walks in the middle of the night and talk to God aloud under the stars. I also expressed myself to God in poetry, a lot of which I still have. By the end of it, there were two things I knew: 1) a (very) small group of friends wasn't enough; I needed to actually attend church regularly or I would be stuck in a self-destructive cycle, and 2) I hadn't met my future-wife yet; in fact, the girl whom I'd been infatuated with for... six? years─sometimes consciously, sometimes not─had finally explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that she would never, ever be interested in me.
Number two sent me into a bit of an angry depression, and then my fourth year started and one of my classes required me to read Heart of Darkness. I had the presence of mind to see that that book was probably the very worst thing I could read when facing a depression. That, coupled with the unexpected news that I would not be able to graduate by the end of that school year, made me decide to pull out, pack up, and go home to Seattle to re-evaluate my educational goals... but not before taking a wonderful class-trip to Wisconsin for a Shakespeare double-feature.
Like Jack, I grew up in a loving, vibrant, faithful Christian home. My family's faith tradition was a bit more mixed. My mother went to a variety of churches growing up and in her college years settled on a non-denominational bible church that from stories I heard later sounds like it was fairly fundamentalist and legalistic. My father grew up Episcopalian but was an athiest when he met my mother. Eventually she won him over and by the time they married he was attending the bible church with her.
I was "dedicated" in this church (a believer's only baptism alternative to infant baptism), but around the time I was three my father decided to challenge the pastor gently but publicly on some hypocrisy. The pastor and church board threatened him with excommunication and so my parents left. After a bit of searching they landed at Ypsilanti Free Methodist Church. This was the church I really saw as my home tradition for the next twenty years.
From my mother and that church I was given some pretty awesome treasures. They taught me about the love of God, about what Jesus had done for me, and about how much God wanted to have a relationship with me. Around the time I was three I prayed with my mom to ask Jesus to come into my heart. Around the time I was six, I remember making a similar prayer at the Wednesday night children's activities we had - I remember being so happy that night that I couldn't stop singing. Growing up my mother also taught me to have a deep love of scripture. We read the bible together every night when I was younger; by the time I was in high school we had read the entire Pentateuch at least once, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Esther, all four gospels, many of the New Testament letters, and even the book of Revelation. Perhaps we read more but those were the ones that stuck out to me. She taught me to memorize scripture and over the course of three years during my youth I went through a home scripture memory program. I still remember most of those verses, and where they’re located, to this day. This love of scripture was supported by my church: in High School our Sunday School class took one book a semester (or year) and delved into it deeply, mining it for as many treasures we could find collectively. I remember studying Genesis & Exodus, Romans, and one of the Gospels (Matthew perhaps) in this manner. While I might not remember all of the books, I will never forget the lessons, particularly about how to study scripture.
My teen years, in particular, were full of the same cycle: I would have spiritual highs, usually on retreats, where I would “recommit my life to Christ” and then get back into the daily grind of life and let that relationship slip away. Particularly in my teen years I would have lofty goals of daily bible study and prayer, like I witnessed from my mother every morning, but would soon forget or get busy and let life push God out of the way. By the time I graduated High School I was very fed up with this cycle, mostly frustrated with myself for constantly “backsliding”. Sometimes I was even reluctant to go on youth retreats because I didn’t want to have another high just to experience another low.
I didn’t know a lot about the Reformation growing up. While my church growing up is Protestant in its heritage, it really wasn’t doing much protesting any more. I didn’t hear anything at church about Catholics one way or the other. And at home, my mother who had some Catholic relatives, would frequently defend them to other Protestant Christians. She was the one who taught me over and over that Catholics were still Christian, even if we didn’t agree with some of the things that they believed. In practice, though, some of those differences of belief could strike a little close to home. I remember that we had moved away from Michigan for a while and when we came back, Al Kresta, who had been a radio host on our favorite Protestant radio station, had reverted to the Catholic church. I think my mom viewed it as almost a betrayal─at least that was the impression that I got as a pre-teen. I remember her nearly yelling at the radio, unable to understand how someone so intelligent could believe that Communion became the body and blood of Christ- when it obviously still looked like bread and grape juice (that was what we used at my church), even under the microscope. But aside from that blip on the radar, I had nothing but positive things to say about Catholics, and when a zealous fellow student began trying to convert the Catholic kids at my school, telling them they were going to hell, I stood up and defended them.
This brings me to my own college experience. For years I’ve wanted to be a physician, so my primary focus in choosing a school was in finding one that would best prepare me to get into Medical School. Ultimately I settled on Calvin College. As I said before, I had very little exposure to a culture of “protestantism” growing up. I’m not sure I had heard of Martin Luther, I know I had never heard of the 95 theses, and I doubt I had ever heard of John Calvin. (As such, the very idea of celebrating “Reformation Day” was completely foreign to me until I experienced it my first year at Calvin.) I didn’t have much of a clue about the differences between Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Methodism (although I knew at least some of the differences between “Free Methodism” and “United Methodism”) and I had certainly never heard of the five pillars of Calvinism, commonly known as “TULIP”. I had heard of predestination on the radio before - there was a radio preacher that we hated listening to growing up (I would even ask my mom to turn him off) because he was fixated on the doctrine, and because of him I knew that I didn’t believe in predestination - but that was about it.
Calvin’s week of orientation changed that. Part of it was definitely devoted to an introduction to Calvinism and I figured out pretty quickly that I was not a Calvinist and never wanted to be one. That made me much more nervous about the requirement that we take two religion courses to graduate. I was faced with a choice: I could do an in-depth study of one theological point and an overview course of the Bible or I could do an overview of theology and church history and study one particular part of the bible. Thinking that I would get less intense indoctrination with the second option, I chose to start with the overview of church history and theology. I had no idea the path it would send me down.
God’s hand was definitely present in the selection of the professor for that course. She is one of the most amazing professors I’ve ever had, and the course I took with her was the only one of these overview courses that she was teaching that semester. On the very first day she told us that we would be studying systematic theology through the eyes of a theologian of our choosing and through the lens of church history. Every week we had a reading assignment from a two-volume textbook that walked through Church history (“Reclaiming Our Roots” by Mark Ellingsen) and we had theological questions that we were to investigate from the perspective of our theologian. I was overjoyed - this presented me with an opportunity to get to know my own faith. As I said before, I knew very little about the differences between various denominations and I knew very little about who John Wesley was or what he and his brother Charles taught - so John Wesley was a quick and easy choice. Instead of being “indoctrinated” with Calvinist thought, I was going to be able to study the founder of my own faith.
I learned a ton in that class, both about Church history and Methodism. It was in that course that I was introduced to the Early Church Fathers (ECFs). I had never realized that we had the writings of people who were taught by the apostles. To be honest I had never given any thought to church history, period. If I thought “back” at all I never got farther than John Wesley (and from there skipped to the apostles), and my pastors hadn’t quoted (in my memory) any theologian who wasn’t still living, so discovering the ECFs was a huge shock - and gift. I fell in love, especially with Ignatius of Antioch. I started to realize that heresy was really only recycled, that we deal with the same heresies now that they did in the first few centuries and that some of these amazing thinkers had already refuted them. I picked up Ignatius’ book “Against Heresies” in the library, just to read for fun. Also through studying Church History I learned about the Reformation, and my heart broke. It seemed so senseless to me and I could see how awful our witness is, fighting with each other about which denomination was “right.” I think it was at that point that God made my prayer that of Jesus: “that they may all be one” (John 17:21). God gave me a heart for ecumenism.
Learning about John Wesley’s theology was also a huge development for me. I had never studied systematic theology before (the best I had done were the bible studies I mentioned earlier with my youth group and Sunday School, but they were never systematic in any way) and I found in that class that I both loved studying it and that John Wesley made a lot of sense. Very quickly I found myself aligning with him, not just on free will against the predestinationist reformers, but on the outpouring of grace in Communion and the necessity of receiving that grace as often as possible. Previously, if anything, I had taken a more symbolic approach to Communion but I found his words, and reasoning, quite moving. It was no longer sufficient to just see it as a memorial - I saw the working of God’s grace poured out on those who receive. Wesley wasn’t much more detailed than that. I think he took the position of “I don’t know how it works but I know it’s really important so don’t ever miss an opportunity, and receive weekly or even daily if that is at all possible.” For me, this became the foundation for believing in Transubstantiation, but I didn’t know it yet.
In taking that course, I found that I loved studying systematic theology. My professor noticed my love for it too (and aptitude for it) and tried to convince me to be a theology major. When she failed at that (I was still set on medicine) she tried to convince me to be a theology minor. She almost succeeded, but I didn’t want to give up my music minor and when I added up the requirements I realized that adding a second minor would take at least another year. I wasn’t willing to commit to five years of undergrad, not with four years of medical school to follow, so I made a bargain with myself: I wouldn’t get a theology minor but if I had an opportunity to take a religion course to fulfill one of my other requirements, I would do it.
One of those opportunities came through the music department. We had a certain number of electives that we could take as music minors, and one of the options to fill them was a course that was offered by both the music and religion departments: Christian Worship. I should pause here and mention that my tradition growing up was neither sacramental nor particularly liturgical, at least in the classic sense. We had an “order” that never really changed but it really held little if any resemblance to the ancient liturgies of the church. And when I started looking for churches near my college, I would leave and never return to any church that even felt remotely “liturgical.” It was probably one of the worst things I felt like I could say to describe a church, at least before I started that class.
I remember sitting in class during the first week and having our professor begin to show us the biblical roots of the ancient liturgy. He took us to Isaiah and the Old Testament descriptions of the Covenant Renewal services and showed us how the liturgy is a conversation between God and the People of God; how every part was either God speaking to us or us responding to God; how every movement was initiated by God and how each time it became a greater self-gift from God to us. The scales fell off and I fell in love. From there the discoveries were even more amazing: most notably his explanation of the Greek word αναμνησισ (“anamnesis”) to us. Now I find it almost amazing that I learned all this from a Protestant professor, but he was the one who taught me that the term αναμνησισ is far more than just remembering. It was from him that I learned of the early pilgrimages to walk the Via Dolorosa during Holy Week and participate in the Passion of Christ, and it was from him that I learned that in Jewish culture the yearly celebration of Passover is really a participation in the original Passover. It was from him that I learned that αναμνησισ isn’t a mental recollection but a participation in what is being “remembered”; in the case of Communion a participation in the death of Jesus on the Cross. It blew my mind, but it also totally dovetailed with John Wesley’s theology. This was more of the “how” that he hadn’t addressed.
Two more things stand out to me from that class: that Pope John Paul II died while it was going on (and therefore we talked about the conclave and papal election and even saw the Mass where Benedict XVI became the new Pope), and the requirement that we attend three worship services from traditions that were different than the ones we grew up in and write reports on them. I chose to attend a pentecostal-type church, a local Antiochian Orthodox church, and a Catholic church. I was home the day that John Paul II died and that day seemed like an appropriate one to go to Mass so I talked my mom into coming with me. We had just studied all of the possible meanings of Communion (a communal meal, a reference to the Supper of the Lamb, a memorial of the Last Supper, a memorial of the Cross and Resurrection, a communion with each other and the great cloud of witnesses, etc.) and as I listened to the Eucharistic Prayer I was amazed that I heard practically every one of those referenced. It was the first time I had ever been to a Communion liturgy where more than two of those meanings had been mentioned, so to hear so many blew my mind. The other thing that I noticed was just how evangelical, and not wrong, the priest’s “sermon” was.
There were a lot of other things I learned in that class and at my time at Calvin, but these are the ones that stand out as being major steps toward the Catholic Church although I didn’t know it at the time. It’s for these reasons that I often say, only partially in jest, that Calvin College made me Catholic.
Overall, this experience left me with a lot to think about, especially regarding the church and tradition that I had grown up in. It started with a critical look at the church I had been attending while at college. The local Free Methodist church, where I had settled, was only offering the Lord’s Supper four times a year. After reading Wesley, I went to the pastor and his wife and asked why, taking with me quotes from our “founder” saying that we should receive as often as possible. Their response was more or less along the lines of “nothing really happens so it doesn’t matter how often we celebrate it.” They pretty much lost me at that point - I started looking for a new church, although I liked the people so much that I continued to attend on occasion. After the Christian Worship class, I started looking for a church that would have that beautiful conversation with God that we call the liturgy.
These themes stuck with me as I moved back to closer to my hometown for medical school and had the opportunity to begin attending the church of my youth. I could see pretty quickly that I couldn’t stay there forever. I needed a church that recognized that the Lord’s Supper was more than just a symbol: that it was a delivery mechanism of Grace that connected us like a wormhole to the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ and His presence in Heaven. I needed a church that had the liturgy, that amazing, ever deepening conversation with God. I needed a church that somehow embodied Jesus’ prayer that all would be one. Finally, I needed a church that somehow recognized that Christianity began more than 50 years ago and more than 200 years ago, and actually quoted theologians long dead. So while I continued to attend the church of my youth because I loved the people, I started my quest for “home.”
Around this time, I had started medical school, and I had been introduced to this novelty called “podcasts.” One night, in a fit of experimentation, I opened up the iTunes store and started looking for interesting ones. I’m not sure how I found it, probably the hand of God again, but I ran across one called “Catholic Answers Live.” The description said it was a call-in question-and-answer show that taught what Catholics believed and why. My experience of Catholics at this point was still fairly minimal. I had found myself defending calling communion a “sacrifice” in my Christian Worship class, under the principle that if we really believed that through αναμνησισ we were present at the Cross, at the one sacrifice of Christ, then it was perfectly appropriate to say that this experience was truly that one sacrifice present for us. I had argued with a friend who tried to tell me that Catholics re-crucified Christ. I had also had several positive experiences at Catholic Masses by this point. I was attracted to finding out “what Catholics believed and why” - I wanted to be “fair” (as G.K. Chesterton says). I realized before downloading that very first podcast that I had been told some things that they didn’t believe and so I wanted to know what they really believed.
I have to admit, I was completely and utterly shocked by what I heard. I found out that some of the things I had been taught they believed, for example some of the Marian doctrines, just weren’t at all what the Catholic Church really taught. Even more astonishing was that the explanations for those doctrines made sense! They were Biblical, Historical, and Logical! It honestly blew my mind.
I had started my college career as a pre-seminary English-Writing major, based on my love for writing and for God and the Bible. Before the end of my first year, I had dropped the pre-sem label and switched to English-Literature because I didn’t enjoy the theology classes I’d taken (a basic Bible overview class, and Calvin’s Institutes) and I enjoyed the older language-based side of English more than the writing classes with more emphasis on my work than on the classics like Chuacer, Shakespeare, etc.
When I left Dordt, I was growing tired of being called “Robert” by many people, all of whom didn’t really know me. I’d always been called “Rob” by family and friends and to suddenly become known as “Robert” without being asked if I liked it was very annoying. Plus, I didn’t like how shy and withdrawn I was, so I began toying with at least coming up with a pen name to help me force myself out of my shell. Near the last month I was there, I had created the first name “Jackford” because I liked the apparent strength of the name Jack, and the added “-ford” ending (usually pronounced “ferd”) made the whole thing feel British somehow. But at that point, it was nothing more than a nomme de plum.
I returned home, got a job at Target for the Christmas season, and began taking a few classes at Shoreline Community College. While at Dordt, I had visited Calvin College a couple times because my brother was going there, and learned that they had recently created a Film Department. I was an avid movie watcher and collector, so I decided to take a film class and a theater class at Shoreline Community College while I was home in the Seattle area to see if I might be able to pursue either of those as a career, since being a writer held rather nebulous prospects, financially speaking. (Theatre and film weren’t a whole lot better, but at least they each had actual industries attached to them where people would hire you before you’d “made a name for yourself.”) I enjoyed the film class immensely and at that point decided to transfer to Calvin to pursue Film Studies the following semester, but in the mean time I began getting called “Robert” in the theatre class, again without my input but this time because there was another Rob in the class whom they decided to refer to as “Bert” or something. That was the final straw, and so I told my parents about my desire to become known as Jackford (writing a letter to my mom in which I referenced Simon/Peter and Abram/Abraham, and said I wanted to redefine myself and become more assertive), they were a bit confused but accepted it, and so I went to Calvin and introduced myself to everyone as Jack or Jackford.
Orientation at Calvin didn’t surprise me in its Calvinistic leanings; I’d learned “all about” Calvin at Dordt, which was also a predominantly CRC school, and had even begun referring to myself as a Calvinist (more because at Shoreline Community no one had ever heard of the CRC, but most had heard of Calvin, than because I knew exactly what Calvin taught and agreed with it). As it turned out, a friend of mine from Dordt, Tom, had just begun attending Calvin Theological Seminary, which shares a campus with Calvin proper, so I resumed hanging out with him. In talking to him about what he was learning, I was introduced a bit more concretely to the meaning of the “TULIP” doctrines and began to realize that I disagreed with at least some of them slightly. Ironically (or perhaps providentially), I had actually failed my Calvin’s Institutes class at Dordt for two reasons: first, for each class we were required to write and submit discussion questions about the assigned segments of the John Calvin’s opus, but I understood what he was saying and so didn’t feel like I had any questions about it; and second, I found it very dry and unappealing, so I had a hard time motivating myself to finish reading the assignments. Now, when I say that I understood the few readings I finished, I mean that the arguments he made in each small section made sense, but I do not mean that I could see and accept the larger arguments he was putting forth. I absorbed the very general ideas from the lectures, but I did not really appropriate them into my personal spiritual life. I didn’t feel like I disagreed with them, which I thought meant I agreed and therefore led to my comfort with calling myself a “Calvinist,” but that’s about as far as they went at that point. In talking to Tom, however, I began to learn the finer details of “five-point Calvinism” (FPC).
“TULIP” stands for (T)otal Depravity, (U)nconditional Election, (L)imited Atonement, (I)rresistible Grace, and (P)erseverance of the Saints. According to the doctrine of Total Depravity, ever since the Fall into sin in the Garden of Eden, people are completely and utterly sinful and are therefore entirely incapable of doing, or even wanting to do, anything good without the grace of God to help them. I began to think that this position was far more extreme than mine, especially the way that Tom espoused it and the way I’d heard it occasionally mentioned growing up. Based on this, the CRC taught that on this side of heaven we could not hope to become truly good and holy people in this life. We would just have to muddle through, failing and sinning at practically every moment of our lives, and wait to die, at which point we would instantly become perfected and commuted into Heaven. I provisionally accepted that, because I figured a theologian like Calvin would know better than I, but it didn’t really jive with my sense of the Christian life. I had a sneaking suspicion that, with God’s help, we really were capable of reaching a very high degree of holiness in this life.
Unconditional Election, also known as Predestination, teaches that those whom God chooses to be saved will be saved no matter what they do in their lives. It is tied very closely with Calvin’s understanding of Covenantal theology. As Tom seemed to believe it, when a Calvinist was baptized, they were grafted into the eternal Covenant and would therefore go to heaven no matter what. I would later hear him espousing Double Predestination, which says that there are also those, based on their not being pre-destined to salvation, who were predestined to damnation. This, as he explained it to me, I simply could not accept. It gave little to no room for Free Will, denying the human any willful participation in the Christian life. It follows from Total Depravity because if we cannot so much as want to do good apart from God, then of course we’ll never be able to muster any kind of meaningful participation of our own will with God’s perfect will for our lives. I knew, though, that, even when I felt the most sinful, even when I had just moments ago stumbled into the sin I most struggled with and could not overcome apart from grace, every fiber of my being longed to overcome it, longed to do what was right and not what was wrong. Like St. Paul, I said often, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. … I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Romans 7:18b,22-23). But, if I could will it, as Paul could, then I could not see how Total Depravity was correct. And if Total Depravity was wrong, then Unconditional Election was unnecessary.
Limited Atonement never made any sense to me. It, again, was necessary according to TULIP; if God actively chooses to send some to hell and others to heaven. If man had no choice in the matter, then the atonement of Jesus on the Cross was no good to those destined to damnation, therefore His atonement must be limited only to those who were “Unconditionally Elected” by God, simultaneously therefore never even offered to those who were Unconditionally Condemned. But not only did this utterly contradict my understanding of God as a loving Creator, a “Saviour who loves to save” (as my future first parish priest, Fr. Ed Fride, would constantly put it), but it also directly contradicted Scripture. The Word of God says, “we have an advocate with the Father, Christ Jesus the Righteous, and He is the expiation for our sins, and not ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (I John 2:1b-2, emphasis added); “This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the Truth. For there is One God, and there is One Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all” (II Timothy 2:3-6a, emphases added), etc. If Jesus is declared by God to have been sacrificed for all men throughout the whole world, then Limited Atonement was a lie. When I realized this, I knew I could not align fully with five-point Calvinism.
Irresistible Grace, the doctrine that when God gives grace, the recipient wi incapable of rejecting it, was also clearly founded on Total Depravity and Predestination. If we were incapable of choosing good, the only way God could save any of us would have to be by depriving us also of the ability to reject His saving gifts. But this flew in the face of my experience even more than did the idea of Total Depravity. I had been offered the opportunity to do good and yet rejected that and chosen to sin instead plenty of times in my life, yet God says that he will never tempt us beyond our capacity to overcome it, meaning that I must have been given sufficient grace to say no to the sin and to choose the good. Yet I sinned. Even Paul sinned! But if grace, the power to do what is right, to do what is in perfect union with the will of God, were irresistible, then no one who was Elect could possibly resist the opportunity to choose the good. We should all be perfectly holy, not imperfectly holy. So this too was clearly wrong.
And finally Perseverence of the Saints: the idea that no one Elect of God could fail to end up in heaven. If Unconditional Election were true, this too must be true. But was this five-point Calvinist view of Election true? I had come to doubt that, so how could I not doubt this too, at least in the FPC understanding of it? The Bible certainly spoke of “the Elect,” but it also spoke very highly of Free Will. And then, of course, there was Hebrews 6:4-6 to consider:
“For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account and hold Him up to contempt.”
So much of this passage flies in the face of FPC. First, if those who cannot be restored “have once been enlightened, … tasted the heavenly gift, … become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come,” then either they were among the Elect and therefore, according to FPC, cannot ever fail to be restored (which contradicts the passage), or they were never Elect in the first place, thus making God an evil trickster who not only deliberately wishes utter torment and damnation upon those who have no choice but to sin (because they never had any chance of pleasing God in the first place so it cannot be said to be their fault), but He goes above and beyond that kind of heartless condemnation and makes their torment eternally more painful by forcing them to taste bits of Heaven before tossing them back into the Pit of Hell. Thus, I either had to accept the conception of the Perseverance of the Saints that was being presented to me, and in the process believe that the God I loved and whom I thought was all-loving, was actually far, far more capricious and hateful than any of the ancient Greek and Roman gods, or I had to reject the Calvinism that my friend so closely clung to and which I thought I had believed all my life.
As I spent the next 2 and a half years at Calvin, these were the realizations I was ever so slowly coming to. As a good Protestant, I knew that I could question every tenet of the faith that I had been brought up in and still be a good Christian, so as I occasionally became aware of each of these objections─never all at once and never to the point that I actually, fully realized that final, profound either/or decision looming over my head, but instead occasionally and disjointedly, each issue more or less separate from the others, flawed but not enough to collapse my internal “systematic” theology (which was in reality not at all systematic)─I never questioned my relationship with God, nor His love for me, and I never posed these objections to Tom. I pondered them in my heart, slowly and unconsciously ceasing to refer to myself as a Calvinist, but never re-labelling myself. I knew I objected to FPC, but that didn’t make me anything other than some uncodified type of Christian.
And then Tom began dating my future wife’s roommate. (That was a “romance” made to save them Purgatory time. Those two were not at all right for each other.) Tom, a Seminarian, wanted to fall in love and settle down. Rebecca, who, like my wife-to-be, had less than a year left at Calvin, therefore wanted to have fun with no future commitment whatsoever. Still, they dated for a couple months before Rebecca admitted that to Tom, which meant that he and I hung out in their on-campus apartment a lot, watching movies, doing homework, and talking. Tom and Elisa, my future-wife, were practically theological opposites. They would debate TULIP, and especially Predestination, up and down. That’s when I really started to realize that I didn’t believe any of these “five pillars of Calvinism.” In walking with the two of them as they made their cases to one another, listening and trying to understand both positions, I found myself not only unable to defend the Calvinist position, but uninterested in doing so. I began making arguments in favour of Elisa’s position, pointing out the inconsistencies and ramifications of Tom’s as I saw them. It was at that point that the either/or proposition regarding Calvinism first began to dawn on me. But, again, the looming question was not completely existential to me; it had been slowly building in my subconscious for ages. I was realizing that, whatever it was I believed, it was not purely Calvinistic, but I knew it was Christian. I merely wanted to believe in the Truth of God and I knew with growing certainty that Calvinism was not it. It was the Truths of the Faith that my parents and teachers taught─more specifically, the Truths about who God was─that were the foundation of my rejection of TULIP. I knew that the God I loved, the God who loved me first, so much so that He willingly offered His Own Son in my place (cf. I John 4:8-10), could not do the things that Tom was ascribing to Him. I knew that His love would not allow Him to commit such callous treatment of His beloved creations, His adopted children and those to whom He offered adoption, even if they rejected it.
When Tom and Rebecca stopped dating, I kept spending time at her and Elisa’s place, mostly because I didn’t like my roommates and wanted a place to spend most of my time away from them. Rebecca let me use her computer for homework, which was in the living room right next to Elisa’s computer. The two of us were night owls, which Rebecca wasn’t; we stayed up very late completing projects and talking about everything and fairly soon we started dating. Around this time we began going to church together, and because of Elisa’s love of liturgy by that point, we mostly attended a nearby CRC congregation called Church of the Servant. Their liturgy was structured according to the basic structure of the Mass (though I doubt they knew it), but most of the parts were written or at least tweaked weekly.
Like Elisa, at the beginning of my college career, I had been turned off by liturgical worship. It felt impersonal and forced, and so I’d never attended a liturgical congregation more than once. I’d even attended Church of the Servant once when I first transferred to Calvin and had avoided it from then on. But when I began spending time with Elisa, she began, little by little, explaining what she’d learned about the meaning behind the liturgical structure. She explained about the back-and-forth conversation between God and His People, and so I began to open my mind to it. It still felt odd at first, especially at Church of the Servant where I didn’t know who had chosen the words that the congregation would recite and those changed week after week. She tried to explain the different parts of the Liturgy to me at that time, but they wouldn’t sink in till much later. But I did learn, and begin to appreciate, the idea of a give-and-give-back conversation between us and God.
Then, Elisa graduated and moved back to the Ann Arbor area while I stayed at Calvin to finish up one final semester. That’s when life really started getting interesting. We were 2 hours apart, but we talked over the phone and via instant messaging every night and I drove out to see her most weekends. Being from different faith traditions, we had talked a little about which we would raise our kids in, but since I had become dissolutioned with Calvinism, it seemed a fairly simple decision... at first. She was definitely Wesleyan, and I tended to agree with what she explained to me about that tradition, so we would be Free Methodists... But then she discovered Catholic Answers Live.
As you might have guessed based on the fact that it took me 6 and a half years to finish college, doing homework and getting good grades was not a piece of cake for me. I needed to work hard and stay focused, or I wouldn’t do well. Meanwhile, Elisa was fascinated by what she was learning from Catholic Answers Live, and so, because we were dating and were already very much hoping to spend the rest of our lives together, she wanted to share this fascinating information with me. Thus, she sent me podcast after podcast, saying, “You have to listen to this!” To which I would respond, “I don’t have time; I have too much homework to do. Could you just explain it to me?” So, on issues like Purgatory, Mary, the Papacy, etc, usually when I’d visit her during the weekends, she’d explain the Catholic viewpoint to me, always preface it with, “Well, I’m not sure I agree with them, but... here’s what they believe and why.” She did such a great job laying out their reasoning that I almost always responded with, “Huh. That makes perfect sense.” I think I was more resistant to the Marian doctrines, asking more clarifying questions along the way, but once I understood the Catholic case for each teaching, I saw no reason not to accept it. Looking back, it’s plain to see that she talked me into the Catholic Church before she talked herself in. But, somehow in my heart, I could tell fairly early on that she would give her assent sooner or later as well. I knew that she really did agree with all that the Church taught, she just wasn’t ready to leave her faith tradition, and more especially her faith community, yet. I, on the other hand, had been hundreds of miles away from my childhood community for years, and my parents had since stopped going to that church anyway, instead attending a Pentecostal church, and had even, as I said, begun to distance myself from Calvinism as well. So the only interpersonal reason for me to remain non-Catholic was Elisa and her family. Intellectually, I just wanted to follow the Truth, and it was clearer day by day that God’s Truth was found in the Catholic Church.
Like he said, I talked him into the Catholic Church before I talked myself in, largely due to Catholic Answers. Really, there were a lot of contributors during this part of my faith journey, but most of them have one common denominator: Catholic Radio. Through Catholic Answers, I found our local station, Ave Maria Radio, and its locally-produced programs (many nationally-syndicated through EWTN). For one thing, I re-discovered Al Kresta. He had moved to that station from the Protestant station where I knew him to run it sometime after his reversion. Hearing him was like re-discovering an old friend. His program, Kresta in the Afternoon, was wonderful in the way he addressed current issues from a Catholic Worldview. At Calvin I had become quite acquainted with the idea of a “worldview” so it was nice to see this Catholic Worldview I had started learning about on Catholic Answers put into action.
Another significant influence was a program called Christ is the Answer. It is composed of talks given (mostly) by a local priest, Fr. John Riccardo, on a variety of topics. I think one of the first ones I heard was his RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) series - where he was explaining the broad points of the Catholic Faith to non-Catholics interested in the Church. I know the first program of his that really spoke to me was his study on the story of the Prodigal Son. His explanation of the love of God touched my soul deeper than anyone had ever done with that parable and deeper than I had been touched in years. I started to eat up his programming too.
Sometime in this period, I hit my first real roadblock. At Easter, hungering for more Easter hymns after attending the “traditional” service at my church, I decided to take Jack to the Catholic Church near my parents’ home. It was a better bet at hearing hymns than the “contemporary” service at my home church and it meant I wouldn’t have to hear the same sermon twice in one day. For me it was a win-win. I’ll never forget, though, sitting in my parents’ living room after: my mom walked in the door and the first thing out of her mouth was “you’re going to become Catholic, aren’t you?” I think it was the tone of her voice that said very clearly that the “correct”, “acceptable” answer was “no.” At this point, becoming Catholic wasn’t really something I had seriously considered - I was just trying to be “fair” to them. But as she asked, I also didn’t feel like I could say “no.” I didn’t think I was going to be Catholic, but there was enough of a kernel there that I knew I couldn’t honestly say that it was an impossibility. The silence was probably only momentary but it seemed eternal before I stammered out something like “I don’t think so.” She didn’t seem to be satisfied with that answer, but it was the end of the discussion, at least then.
It only took about 6-8 months of Catholic Radio (so sometime shortly after that incident) for me to see that I was on a trajectory into the Catholic Church. Perhaps part of it was fueled by introspection stemming from my mother’s blunt question, perhaps part of it was just coming to an intellectual realization that I saw Truth in the Catholic Church. But whatever it was, I began to see that I was headed there... eventually. But at the same time I would still say when explaining most doctrines “well... here’s what they teach, here’s why they teach it. I don’t know if I believe it yet, but it sure does make sense to me.” I found myself arguing with non-Catholics in various forums, seeking to correct misunderstandings and show them why that particular Catholic Teaching was biblical, historical, and logical. I was impressed by the coherency of Catholic Teaching, especially when it came to moral teaching. It was the first time I had really run into a philosophical system that was so well developed and so internally coherent and non-contradictory. Whether on contraception and sexual ethics or abortion and the death penalty, I could see just how consistent it was, and I found that highly appealing.
I too was realizing that the Catholic worldview was probably the most internally consistent and coherent system I’d ever run into. And the common thread I kept seeing in each topic was the Catholic conception of the Biblical idea of the Body of Christ. From reading the Bible, I knew that, primarily, the Body of Christ referred to the Church as a whole, the entire Christian community, but I always thought it was just a title, like “Church” or “community”. But in listening to Catholic radio, I began to see that it’s much, much more than that. The Church taught that we truly, mysteriously become members of Christ’s Body just as certainly as each cell in the human body is a member of that person’s body. And because of that super-reality of our unity with Christ and through Him with each other, the Catholic understanding of every other doctrine made even more sense.
For instance, because we are metaphysically members of the same Body, our prayers for each other here on earth are actually the prayers of Jesus, the “One Mediator between God and men” (I Timothy 2:5), the Head of the Body (cf. Ephesians 4:15-16). Not in that we pray and Jesus relays those prayers, but in that we actually are Jesus's Body praying as He prays. And for the same reason, the prayers of “those also who have fallen asleep in Christ” (I Corinthians 15:18) are also the very prayers of Christ, and we are still in communion with them through the hyper-unity of the Body of Christ, because “He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (cf. Matthew 22:32, Mark 12:27, & Luke 20:38). Just as Jesus calls Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob─long dead by the time of His ministry─“the living,” so too are the great cloud of witnesses who’ve gone before us even now among the living, and if living and united to Christ, even bodily death cannot stop them from participating in the life of the Body through the same intercession of Jesus’ prayers to the Father.
I repeatedly saw how this teaching shaped practically every other teaching of the Catholic Church. It shaped her understanding of Baptism, of Communion, of the ministerial priesthood. Everything. And, with this new, deepened understanding of the Body of Christ, I likewise finally saw how all the seemingly disparate things I had previously believed as a Protestant were all linked and gained a new fullness. I had believed them all, but they had seemed disjointed, unfinished. But now, whatever questions I had about them were answered and fulfilled by this (literally) unifying theory.
For me, the pivotal doctrinal turning point was “Scripture Alone.” I think deep down for years I had felt like this was inadequate; I had been in many theological discussions where both sides quoted Scripture. My debates with Tom were a prime example. We were both prayerful, passionate Christians seeking the Truth. Presumably we were both reading Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which was supposed to protect us from error. Despite all that, here we were fighting about something that seemed pretty fundamental: were we saved without any ability to reject that gift or did we have to say “yes” to God? This didn’t seem like a “non-essential” to either of us; I think on some level we both worried about the other’s salvation, and certainly the true nature of salvation has some pretty big consequences. We both used Scripture to try to convince the other (numerous and long passages, not just a single verse or two) and accused the other of misreading Scripture or ignoring parts of it. The problem was that there was no one who had the authority to settle our dispute. So a major turning point in my own conversion was when I heard an apologist say that “Scripture Alone” wasn’t in Scripture.
I suppose at this point I should explain what I believed by “Scripture Alone.” There are almost as many formulations of this doctrine as there are Protestant Denominations, but the formulation that I held to was “anything essential for Faith should be found (clearly) in Scripture.” I put “clearly” in parentheses because how clear it had to be really depended on the doctrine. And if I were to admit it now, much of what I believed (and how I read Scripture) was definitely shaped by what I had been taught. I wouldn’t admit to having “tradition”, but if I were honest with myself, I really did. By the time the apologist asked that question I had already seen just how much Scripture I had missed, not because I hadn’t read it, but because I had read it with blinders on. For instance, while I had read 1 John 5:17 and even memorized the first half (“All wrongdoing is sin”), I had never noticed the second half (“but there is sin that is not mortal”), despite having read that letter at least 5 times. It was heavily highlighted in my bible, but I had never even considered what that phrase could mean - until an apologist pointed it out. I had never noticed 1 Peter 3:21 (“Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you...”), or reflected on what implication that had for my symbol-only beliefs regarding baptism. So when the question was asked, I was probably well primed to really think about it.
I thought pretty seriously about the question and realized that despite having believed it my whole life, I had never once heard it defended from Scripture. It was what philosophers call an a priori assumption. It was the foundation for everything else I believed, and formed much of the basis for the questions I had been asking in challenging Catholic teaching, so it seemed like a reasonable question. If “Scripture Alone” is to be adhered to, if Catholics had to prove from Scripture all the doctrines they said were necessary, then Scripture Alone should be in Scripture. The Protestants this apologist asked (on more than one occasion) couldn’t give a coherent answer, so I started looking myself. To this day, I have yet to see a coherent defense of Scripture Alone from Scripture.
That isn’t to say that Scripture isn’t inspired or infallible: it is all of that. As 2 Timothy says “all scripture is inspired by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). But while Scripture is all of those things, it does not claim to be the ultimate authority, and it certainly doesn’t claim to be the pillar and bulwark of the Truth. In fact, Scripture teaches that the Church is the Pillar and Bulwark of the Truth (1 Timothy 3:15), and that when we have a dispute with our brother, we should take it to the Church (Matthew 18:17). Letting go of Scripture Alone also doesn’t mean that doctrines can contradict Scripture: no Truth will contradict Truth. Remember, it was that consistency and coherency that attracted me to the Catholic teaching in morals, and nothing the Catholic Church teaches contradicts Scripture. But Scripture needs an Authoritative interpreter. Being a prayerful sincere Christian didn’t guarantee right interpretation; my conversations with Tom were enough to prove that to me. As the Ethiopian charioteer told Philip “How can I [understand], unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31). But letting go of “Scripture Alone” did mean that my first question didn’t have to be “where does the Bible say that?” Instead I could ask “Why does the Church teach that?”, and as I did so I discovered that I always got a satisfactory answer.
By Early Spring of 2008, I was convinced that the Catholic Church held the fullness of Truth. I believed in Transubstatiation, I believed in the efficacy of all of the Sacraments (and longed to go to Confession), I believed that the Popes had been given the charism of infallibility, for those rare instances when they chose to exercise it, and I was even convinced of all four Marian dogmas (“Mother of God”, Perpetual Virginity, Immaculate Conception and Perpetual Sinlessness, and the Assumption). Intellectually I was a Catholic but I wasn’t ready to convert. What held me back was the idea of leaving the people from the church that I grew up in. They were family to me, and that church had been home in a very real way. Despite being incredibly unhappy with the services there, despite longing for the Catholic Sacraments, the thought of leaving that home just wasn’t bearable. I knew I would, but I wasn’t ready; not yet.
That Spring, I was listening to Catholic Radio pretty heavily and near the end of Lent, I began hearing about the Liturgy called Triduum. Everyone who discussed it kept saying how cool it was, and talking about how it was a three-day liturgy that didn’t end in between, they just “hit pause” and started again the next day. For those who don’t know, Triduum is the liturgical celebration that begins with the memorial of Holy Thursday, in which the Church commemorates the institution of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, carries through the Good Friday memorial, and ends with the conclusion of the celebration of Easter (usually with the Easter Vigil). From everything I was hearing, I thought I should go, so that’s exactly what I decided to do. I was awed by the beauty of the Holy Thursday Mass, confused (and amazed) by the Good Friday Liturgy, and that brought me to the Easter Vigil.
As Elisa said, the Good Friday Liturgy is the one part of the Triduum that can be confusing to a non-Catholic. Because of its focus on the Crucifixion, the Liturgy includes a section called the Veneration of the Holy Cross. Because of Its utmost importance in the salvation of all humanity, the True Cross of Christ is the only thing, save Christ Himself in the Eucharist, to which it is proper for Catholics to genuflect (genuflexion is when we kneel down on one knee while crossing ourselves and reciting, "...in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" to recall our Baptism). During the Veneration of the Cross, the priest holds a crucifix up at the front of the church, and the congregation processes forward so that everyone can have a chance to kiss the feet of the corpus (that is, the sculpture of Christ's Body) on the it. We do it because in our hearts─and of course through the αναμνησισ of the Mass─we are standing at the very foot of the True Cross on the night that Jesus is dying on It, and as we stand there next to John, whom Jesus loved, and Mary, His mother, watching our beloved Lord die, we show Him our love by kissing His Feet. We are not worshipping the man-made carving, but the God-Made-Man that it represents.
In Christ the King Parish in Ann Arbor, though, the Veneration of the Cross is slightly longer because they actually have a relic of the True Cross that was found by St. Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, in Jerusalem in the 4th century and then brought to Rome. Generally, this relic is kept in the Eucharistic Chapel behind the sanctuary of that church, but on Good Friday they bring it into the sanctuary so that the congregation can venerate the actual True Cross at the appropriate time during Mas, while most other parishes only do so vicariously.
That year Elisa and I had spent a fair amount of time in the Eucharistic Chapel praying. I had learned, of course, that the Church believed that the Eucharistic Host in that chapel (and everywhere around the world) truly became the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ at the moment of Consecration in the Mass, but I hadn't yet been able to wrap my heart or mind around that. I had also noticed the reliquary in the corner of the chapel, which encased the relic of the True Cross in a cross-shaped stand with brown stained-glass panels on the arms, but I didn't know that inside it was a piece of the True Cross. So when Fr. Ed brought out the relic and told us what it was, I was struck to the heart.
For months, I had sat in the chapel praying, trying to convince myself that the large circular wafer in front of me was Jesus, often praying, "Lord, I don't know if that's You, but if it is I adore You in It," all the while deliberately not looking at this "ugly" cross in the corner because, while I knew it was probably meant to help people think of Christ's loving self-sacrifice on the Cross, it's ugliness seemed only to distract me from Him. So to suddenly find out that this thing that I had disdained and avoided had actually touched the very Skin of my God made me feel utterly ashamed and remorseful. Something that was crucially involved in the very moment in human history at which our God died so that we might live not only still existed, but had stood just a couple feet from me, reaching forward in time to connect me to Him, and I had ignored and even despised It! I suddenly felt more like the Jews cursing Jesus as He died for them than I ever had before. I wept that night and never forgot that moment. It would become even more important to me later, but I'll tell that part of my story in a moment. For now, it’s time for the Easter Vigil.
Of all the parts of the Triduum, the only part I had really heard of was the Easter Vigil. We had talked about it in my Christian Worship class (my professor had even recommended that we attend one at least once in our lives), so I knew that in the Early Church, the Easter Vigil had been when new converts to the faith were baptized, confirmed, and received their first Communion. I also knew, from Catholic radio, that this was what the Catholic Church was doing now. I had heard that during Lent, they didn’t sing the Alleluia or the Gloria and that the Easter Vigil was when these two beautiful parts of the ordinary were reintroduced to the Liturgy. None of that knowledge, though, prepared me for exactly what I would experience.
If you haven’t been to an Easter Vigil, I also recommend you go, at least once. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll see. It begins in the dark, after sunset. No, the Church isn’t behind on their electrical bills; this is intentional. Before the Resurrection, the world was in a figurative darkness, and while Christ is the Light of the World, His light had been seemingly snuffed by the Crucifixion. Similarly His followers, like the world of the time, sit in darkness. Outside the Church a large Candle, called the Christ Candle, is blessed and lit from a bonfire. Just as Christ is our Light in the darkness, the Candle is processed in, dispelling the darkness in the Church. Just as Christ gave His life, the Candle is consumed as it burns, giving itself so that there can be light. From that candle other candles are lit and the flame is passed throughout the church until everyone present is holding a lit candle, the light from the Christ Candle being the ultimate source. Similarly we are called to bear the Light of Christ to the rest of the world.
Next, after the most beautiful poem I’ve ever heard is canted by one of the deacons, salvation history is proclaimed. I had heard rumors that Catholics don’t read the bible, and while I’d never really believed them, any sense of that was put to rest during the Liturgy of the Word at the Easter Vigil. We literally start with Genesis 1 and the story of Creation, then we hear about the Fall (Genesis 3), Noah, Abraham, and Moses and the Israelites at the Red Sea. From here, the readings can be a bit different from year to year but they always encompass some of the prophets. My favorite is when a passage from Ezekiel comes up because of the beautiful imagery it uses to prefigure baptism. Between each reading is a responsorial Psalm and a prayer. Finally our candles are blown out and we sit for a moment or two in silence and darkness.
I’m sure the next bit happens in a similar way at other Catholic Churches, but at ours out of the darkness you hear bells. This is followed by a lone male voice chanting the opening line of the angel’s hymn: “Glory to God in the Highest and Peace to his People on Earth.” As the rest of the choir, and ultimately the congregation, join in, the lights are slowly, incrementally turned on, and the women of the church bring in flowers to fill the sanctuary and linens to dress the altar. The liturgical candles are lit. The Gloria is when the Good News of the Resurrection starts to sink in again. To this day, I get chills and tears when it happens, or even when I listen to the music. The Gloria is followed by the Alleluia (with music nearly as beautiful as that of the Gloria) and the Gospel Reading, and then, of course, a homily. It was that year’s homily that was the next step in our journey.
As I mentioned, it was the sense of “home” and “family” that was making it difficult for me to leave my own church and enter the Catholic Church. My head had converted but my heart was finding it difficult. That year, our pastor, Fr. Ed Fride, stood up and spoke of coming home. His words touched my heart, as though they were meant just for me as he urged us to come home. It was then that I knew. I turned to Jack, and with tears in my eyes I told him I was ready to come home, and that a year from then I wanted to be entering the Catholic Church.
For the most part, I had been the one most sure that we would one day become Catholic, but there were days that I was less sure. But that night, as Fr. Ed spoke of his own conversion, of his own supernatural sense of being home when he too attended his first Easter Vigil, I knew that this─the Catholic Mass─was a truer, deeper, more illocutibly magnificent sense of Home than I had ever before or could in this life ever experience. So when Elisa turned to me, I was at the exact same moment turning to her to say the same thing. I could wait no longer. Chaucer’s line, “Here is none home; here is naught but wilderness” had applied to everywhere I had ever been before that moment. Every experience, every relationship, had been missing something. Sometimes tiny, sometimes huge, but always something. But in that Mass, when the veil between Heaven and Earth is lifted, when we were made present as the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple is torn from top to bottom by the Hand of God, “Here... Is... Home!”
For the past two years, as I learned about Catholic teaching, as I realized the hyper-reality of the Body of Christ, of the reality that the Mass is a participation in the Eternal Now and of God’s Holy Presence in Heaven, I had come to feel more and more, every time that I walked into Mass, the presence also of the great cloud of witnesses as real, live, vibrant, loving people. As we travelled around the state of Michigan and visited Catholic parishes, some with a clearly vibrant Sacramental life and some not, I experienced something I had never known in any Protestant church. No matter where we were, no matter whom we could see around us in the physical church, I knew with a sense explicable only as a knowledge of the soul that the same Saints were always around us, always worshiping God along side us. That, to me, was what made the Catholic Church truly catholic (which is the Greek word for universal), as well as truly one. That night, at the Easter Vigil, all that and so much more was even more real than it had ever been before.
So, after the Easter Vigil, we kept a lookout for how to sign up for RCIA classes at our parish, and when we could, we did. We had learned most of what they would teach us in class, but what we gained in the classes was a family of Catholics and soon-to-be Catholics to help us internalize Catholic teaching and culture. It was refreshing and exciting to take what we had learned privately and mostly intellectually into the context of a local community, and seeing the friends we made in that class always brings to mind the excitement and joy of that time in our lives.
Part of the process of RCIA is choosing a Confirmation Saint (more commonly known as a Patron Saint), and for most of the nine-month class, I couldn't decide. I liked St. Joseph, step-father of Jesus, but I also liked St. Francis de Sales, who was also a great champion of living a holy life within a family setting. Occasionally I would find others whom I also considered, but those two were my mainstays. As the time to finalize our decisions grew closer, though, another Saint presented himself to me. Elisa was signed up to a "Saint of the day" email list and would get emails telling her about a random Saint each day, and including at the bottom a list of other Saints to look up if you wanted. For whatever reason, one day she forwarded me one of those emails (I don't even remember who the featured Saint was), and at the bottom was listed someone called "Marcarius". I would later learn that they had misspelled his name, but it nevertheless intrigued me, especially because it sounded very Latin and I've always loved Latin, so I clicked the link.
St. Macarius (that's the correct spelling) was the bishop of Jerusalem in the early 4th century. He built a famous church there called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and attended the First Council of Nicea. But that wasn't what struck me about him. The main story about him on the website was that, when St. Helen had come to Jerusalem looking for the relics of the Crucifixion, St. Macarius had been there to help her. In fact, when they found three crosses at the bottom of a cistern─one from Jesus, the other from the good thief, and the third from the bad─it was St. Macarius who suggested they take the crosses and touch each one to a dying woman nearby to determine which one was the Cross of Christ. They did so, and when the True Cross touched the woman, she was completely healed. When I read this, I immediately remembered the moment from the Good Friday Liturgy when I was struck to the heart by that same story, except that Fr. Ed hadn't mentioned St. Macarius. I realized that St. Macarius' presence and openness to the Holy Spirit back then had made that moment possible, so I immediately knew that he was meant to be my Patron. A couple years later, I also added his name to my own when I finally updated my legal name: Jackford Robert Macarius Benjamin Kolk.
A year after our first Easter Vigil, we professed our own faith, were welcomed into the Church, and received our First Eucharist. Although being Catholic hasn’t made our problems go away (of course it never claimed that it would), it has given us a new perspective to view them from, Sacraments to give us strength, and a family to help bear the burden. We’ve not regretted our move to the Fullness of Faith once. It’s good to be Home!
Amen to that!
