Signs

Though they hardly constitute “proof”, and perhaps they reveal me to be a kook, several signs accompanied my path to Catholicism. Here are three.

1. The Sacrament
2. The Beggar
3. The Saint
   1. Asthma
   2. Arizona
   3. Atheism
   4. The Song of Bernadette
   5. The Thorn in the Flesh

1. The Sacrament

Sunday, the 9th of January, 1994, was the first Sunday back at Northern Arizona University after the Christmas holiday. I rose early, bundled up, then walked 20-30 minutes across snow-cleared sidewalks, arriving at Nativity Church.

I hadn’t darkened a church door since well before leaving Virginia, and it had been years since I attended with anything resembling regularity. Yet something compelled me to phone the parish office several days before and inquire how one learns about the Catholic faith. The secretary told me to come to the 9am Mass, and then, about halfway through, follow a group of people dismissed for something called “RCIA”.

“9am”? Are you mad?

Rise in the middle of a service, drawing everyone’s attention? Are you mad?

I rose anyway, arriving with time to relax and spend a few minutes in prayer beforehand.

Introit

Nativity is a strange-looking church on account of its facade of locally-quarried pink rock. Otherwise, it’s built in the Gothic style, with a belltower, honest-to-God gargoyles and angels.✠Later I would learn that this church was fairly closely tied to the wealthy, influential Babbit family. That was no longer the case by the time I crossed the threshold, and at the time of this writing the church is now sadly shuttered due to the need for structural repairs. Upon entering, the visitor beholds an old-style high altar backed by a glorious altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary’s birth. Statues of St. Therése of Lisieux and St. Anthony of Padua stand on either side of the sanctuary, itself separated from the nave by an honest-to-God altar rail.✣Not in use during communion. They weren’t that traditional. Gorgeous stained glass illuminates the nave, along with a traditional Stations of the Cross and an Infant of Prague.✦I still don’t know what that’s about.

I’d been to many a Catholic church before, both in the States and in Italy. Beautiful though many of them were, none overwhelmed me with emotion. If anything, I’d have sided with the Spiritual Franciscans on that matter, and once irritated my mother by making a disparaging remark of a similarly-beautiful church in Gaeta. I had the same experience here: impressed by the art, but not especially moved. I did feel as if I were in God’s presence, and attributed it to the ambience.

Roughly halfway down the nave, I chose a pew, then knelt down to pray, and breathed a prayer that has stuck with me ever since, “Thank you, God, for bringing me here today.” As if in reply, I felt — not heard, but felt — the words, I was taken aback. As noted already, I hadn’t attended regularly in years. I wondered if I was really hearing God’s endorsement of this visit. Don’t get me wrong; God doesn’t generally talk to me in Church, but that certainly stood out.

RCIA

Sure enough, halfway through the Mass they dismissed a group of people, who stood and began to leave. Averse as I was to stand up in front of so many people and do the wrong thing, they had said something about “RCIA”, so I followed them. We entered the rectory and sat around a large table to read the Gospel of the day, the Bread of Life discourse from John 6, to hear the leader’s exposition of the Church’s interpretation of it as the biblical foundation for the Church’s teaching on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and to discuss it. I could see what they were saying, but I was not especially convinced; it didn’t seem like an iron-clad logical proof.✢An attitude that amuses me when I look back on it. After some discussion whose details I don’t remember at all, we split into small groups. My group was led by the deacon, Doug. I don’t remember much of that discussion, either, only the first thing that he said:

“When you walk into a Catholic Church,” he began, “you feel something you don’t feel anywhere else.” This caught my attention, as I had just felt something so unusual when praying right before Mass. “That feeling is the true Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.”

I have not seriously doubted the Real Presence since then. It has proved a helpful spiritual medicine, a companion in darkness, an icon of the Lord I love.

2. The Beggar

After becoming Catholic, I adopted the practice of daily Mass, a habit I have sorely missed as scheduling issues have gotten in the way. I’ve always found daily Mass rewarding, and for me it’s yet another sign that I, who had rarely attended any sort of church in the years before, was now attending daily — rising before 6am now, never mind 9, to trudge 20-30 minutes each morning, often through driving snow, to hear God’s Word and to receive Him in the holy Sacrament. The change was not just in my customs, but in my behavior and my attitude.

Graduate students are not exactly well-paid, and I had a habit of squandering what little I made, so I found myself one Wednesday morning with all of $1 in my pocket. Payday was not until Friday, and I had only enough food for one peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich: two slices of bread, a bit of jam, and barely any peanut butter.

Just $1. This was the mid-90s, before grocery stores came to accept credit cards; otherwise, I’d have used mine at the Safeway.

After Mass, I walked out to a lovely morning. Crossing Cherry Street, I came to its intersection with Beaver, where I passed a middle-aged Native American with a young boy.

“Hey, mister,” he asked, “can you lend me a dollar? I don’t have enough for both me and my boy to take the bus.” And he showed me the few coins he had left, not enough for even one to ride the bus. Keenly, painfully aware of St. Paul’s warning, I fingered the dollar in my pocket, handed him the dollar, then turned and headed home. I’d have a hungry couple of days, but it wouldn’t be my first.

At home I worked on homework and prepared to teach College Algebra. Round about midday, I said a prayer, packed my things, and enjoyed that last peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich. I then headed out the door. I walked down Blackbird Roost, startling the locusts as always: they leapt up and smacked into the wooden fence. Turning left on Route 66 to the University, I crossed the road, stopping at at the traffic light across from the Flamingo Motor Hotel. (“Free Carports”!) I pressed the button and waited.

The morning had been calm and beautiful, but the wind had since picked up. (Windy days are not unusual for Flagstaff.) A small piece of paper blew down the sidewalk and came to rest on the side of my foot. It was a $1 bill.

It rested there. Notwithstanding the wind.

I bent down, picked it up, gazed in amazement, and glanced about to see if anyone was chasing it. No one was in sight.

Exactly $1.

Enough to go to Safeway and buy myself a loaf of bread.

3. The Saint

I’ve written about St. Bernadette elsewhere, but not about her role in drawing me to the Church.

Asthma

My first asthma attack was around 10 years of age. I remember lying in bed and being asked if the pain was in my belly or my lungs. I answered that it was in my belly, not because it was true, but because I didn’t know, and that’s the answer they seemed to want to hear — it’s funny how often you do that as a child. I also remember holding my face over a pot of boiling water and trying to breathe in as deeply as I could. It didn’t help, and the steam stung.

They called a family doctor — literal family, as in, a blood relation — who gave me a shot of epinephrine. My hands were soon trembling, which I would come to recognize as a side effect of that particular medicine which helped us all breathe easier — the patient physically; his caregivers, metaphorically.

At one point my mother had taken water from a bottle and rubbed it on my head and chest. When I asked what it was, she answered with a story.

My mother told wonderful stories wonderfully, typically legends of Rome. Even now, when I think of Cæsar’s pursuit of Pompey, my mind’s eye sees a man chasing another across railroad tracks, to murder him in the field on the other side. Whether those tracks are my mother’s embellishment, my childhood imagination, or a queer synaptic rewiring four-and-a-half decades later,✝Railroad, Rubicon… they sound the same, don’t they? I can’t say. My favorite story was that of Lucius Cincinnatus, which led eventually to one of the more common nicknames she had for me.

This story was not about the Romans, but a girl in France whom Jesus’ mother visited. Like me, she suffered from asthma. No one believed the girl had seen Jesus’ mother until she dug out a spring which her visitor had pointed out, a spring which no one had seen before. The water from that spring healed people, and the bottle contained water from that spring.

Unfortunately for the French girl, the water didn’t cure her asthma.

Nor mine.

Arizona

After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, I traveled clear across the country to work on a Master’s Degree at the aforementioned Northern Arizona University. One reason was a truly curious conviction that you’d get a better education studying far from home than nearby.

A bigger reason was Arizona’s reputation as a haven for asthmatics: At Marymount my asthma had gotten so bad that I took an economics exam from a bed in the clinic, where they had confined me after a prolonged asthma had led to pneumonia. I had read that Teddy Roosevelt’s parents moved there to alleviate their son’s asthma.

Nor did it hurt that I was such an emotional wreck that I wanted to flee Virginia. So Arizona seemed great… and it did seem to alleviate my asthma! In the 21 months I lived there, only one attack occurred, on the second Christmas holiday, while in Virginia.✝Do not take my experience as medical advice. Some people have the reverse experience; that is, they have never had asthma, but develop it after moving to Arizona. I knew someone like that, a grown woman who nearly died from her first asthma attack in Flagstaff.

Atheism

Already in high school I had concluded that I could follow Christ just fine without putting up with jerks who didn’t seem to care what Jesus taught, let alone study it. My family had come to attend our Southern Baptist Church at best infrequently, and though I sometimes made the effort to attend on my own — even walking to church at times — that lapsed pretty quickly in college.

I didn’t return home that first Christmas. In fact, I didn’t return home at all until the following Christmas. I don’t recall all the reasons, but part of it was likely that I didn’t want to fly and the train was a three-day trip each way. Besides, a married couple of fellow Taiwanese graduate students I knew wanted someone to house-sit their apartment, so I did.

I didn’t think I’d mind being completely alone, and at first I didn’t, but there was a problem I hadn’t expected. I knew absolutely no one in the area,✛I have a real knack for failing to meet people, as well as for falling out with the few people I do meet. As far as I can recall, nearly all my graduate-student acquaintances had likewise left Flagstaff to be with their families. didn’t have a car, and was staying in an apartment complex that opened onto a highway that was unsafe to walk. I could see a mall, but reachign it required either walking the highway or crossing a wide field and then an interstate. I didn’t want to call a taxi because I had little in the way of money, and credit cards were still not commonly accepted for day-to-day purchases. So I was constrained to a very small, walkable area.

I tried to pass time programming my computer, but succeeded mostly at crashing it. I even crashed the hard drive once or twice — managing somehow, through some miracle, to recover it without reformatting.

Despite having access to cable, not much on TV interested me. Broadcast religion consisted largely of hucksters and scandals. Not that I considered myself much better; I was keenly aware of my own inadequacy. I’ve never been especially self-confidence in my competence, and I have a knack for proving myself right — or thinking I have. The tedium, the scandal, and the increasing frustration at crashing programs opened the door to an insidious darkness. One afternoon, feeling especially miserable in my inadequacies, I felt myself on a kind of precipice, on the brink of declaring, “There is no God.”

Something had to change.

The Song of Bernadette

The other diversion available to me was a video rental store in a very small shopping center that was only a hop, skip, and jump away. I remember renting only one film: by God’s grace, I not only noticed The Song of Bernadette — thinking at first it was some sappy film and wanting to sneer at it — I picked up the box and read the summary on the back. I quickly realized that this was about the girl my mother had told me about some fifteen years before, and decided to watch it.

What struck me as I watched it was how it fit in so well with the faith I had developed over the years. Occasionally bed-ridden as a child, I once took the opportunity to read the New Testament, and in recent years I had begun to disagree deeply with certain distinctive Protestant tenets — especially the Prosperity Gospel being broadcast on TBN. Few things crystallized that so clearly as the Woman’s words to the young, sickly girl: Another thing that stood out was how recent these events were. Growing up, I acquired the impression that miracles are a thing of the distant past.✞ This is not exactly fair; I remember hearing men at church talk about faith healers. To their credit, the men were skeptical, but one said he had known someone whom the doctors had declared uncurable until a faith healer laid hands on him and the cancer went away. But that’s the impression I’d somehow acquired, so it can’t have been completely off-base. Yet here was a sequence of miracles that are still going on, with a medical board on which any doctor can sit and participate, and which reviews all alleged healings with care.

While the film takes some liberties with Benadette’s life, it is more or less an accurate portrayal of the events, not only the opposition of secular French society, but also — this surprised me most of all — the Catholic clergy’s skepticism and caution.

I had been contemplating attending several churches grounded in “traditions” of scriptural interpretation, and while Catholicism was on that list, it was absolutely my last choice… until this film.

The thorn in the flesh

St. Paul writes of a thorn in his flesh that God declined to take from him, to prevent him from growing proud or thinking his salvation was his doing. I identified with that somewhat: I had struggled for some years with at least two compulsions. Complete helplessness in the face of these weaknesses was one of the things pushing me towards atheism: If God loved me, and I repented sincerely, why didn’t He relieve me of this burden?

He finally did. At my first confession before the Easter Vigil, I was able to tell Fr. Bain that the compulsions evaporated the moment I committed to trying the Catholic Church.

This isn’t to say that they were gone for ever, let alone that I am now perfect. I foolishly let them back into my life some months later, and on the stupidest of reasons, no less: “Gee, am I really free? Let’s find out.” While the struggle would take many more years, and in analogy to St. Paul I have reconciled myself to the fact that I can never “play with fire”, so to speak, it was never again as bad as when I considered declaring that there is no God. Eventually, by God’ve grace alone, in an episode reminiscent of the first sign above, they went away.

In retrospect I recognize it as an example of the fomes peccati, to use the Council of Trent’s words, the “tinder for sin” that God leaves in us, to allow us to struggle and participate in our salvation.

Later I would say that St. Bernadette declined to heal my physcial sickness, but she did heal my spiritual sickness. That remains for me the strongest sign along, and of, The Way.