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

Sunday, the 9th of January, 1994, was the first Sunday back at university after the Christmas holiday. I rose early, bundled up, then walked 20-30 minutes across snow-cleared sidewalks to 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 more 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?

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

Introit

Nativity is a strange-looking church made of pink rock quarried locally and built in the Gothic style, with 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.

Roughly halfway down the nave, I chose a pew, then knelt down to pray, at which point 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. I then said a prayer that has stuck with me every time I have since arrived at Mass early enough to pray, “Thank you, God, for having brought me here.”

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, and 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.

I was not especially convinced. I could see what they were saying, but it didn’t seem like an iron-clad logical proof to me.✢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 original when I first knelt down to pray. “What you feel is the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.”

I have not seriously doubted the Real Presence since then.

2. The Beggar

After becoming Catholic, I adopted the practice of attending 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 found myself one Wednesday morning with all of $1 in my pocket. Payday was not until Friday, and I had only enough food to make one peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich: two slices of bread, a bit of jam, and barely any peanut butter.

Just $1. This was before credit cards became widespread — at least, I didn’t think I’d be able to use mine at the Safeway.

After Mass, I walked out to a lovely spring morning. Crossing Cherry Street, I came to its intersection with Beaver, where I passed a middle-aged Navajo 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 in his pocket. They were not enough for even one to ride the bus.

I fingered the dollar in my pocket, looked at his coins, looked at his boy, said a silent prayer, then handed him the dollar. “God bless you,” he said, as I asked him to pray for me, then turned and headed home. I’d have a hungry couple of days.

I went home to work on homework and prepare lessons for the College Algebra class I’d be teaching. Round about midday, I packed my things and enjoyed that last peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich. I then headed out the door.

It was a windy day, not unusual for Flagstaff. 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.

A $1 bill blew down the sidewalk and came to rest on the side of my foot.

It rested there.

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

Just $1.

Later that day, I went to Safeway and bought 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 being told at one point to hold my face over a pot of boiling water and to breathe the steam in as deeply as I could. It didn’t help.

They called a family doctor — 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 — one physically, others 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 one 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, 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.

The water didn’t cure Bernadette’s asthma, nor did it cure mine.

It’s funny what you don’t know is there until boredom compels you to look. I spent a lot of time in bed that summer, and at one point I decided to explore the nightstand. I came across an English-language Bible and decided to read the New Testament. I’m not sure why I started there, but I must have been in bed quite a lot, as I actually finished the thing. Yes, that includes every word of St. Paul’s letters, which is not to say I understood them.✗I strongly suspect that most people wielding St. Paul as a weapon haven’t understood them, either. But Jesus’ sayings seemed plain enough, including the strange ones: I literally turned the other cheek to a bully who slapped me. Believe it or not, it worked: he stood there dumbfounded. After a few moments, he scoffed, then turned away.✚ I do not recommend this as a general rule, just as I would not recommend cutting off your hand or gouging out your eye when they cause you to sin, but hey, it worked at least once!

Arizona

After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, I traveled clear across the country to work on a Master’s Degree at 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: I had read that Teddy Roosevelt’s parents moved there to alleviate their son’s asthma. I had struggled often with asthma at Marymount, to the point of taking my economics exam from a bed in their clinic where they had confined me after I passed out in the shower with a pneumonia brought on from a prolonged asthma. So Arizona presented a very attractive destination.

Nor did it hurt that I was such an emotional wreck that I wanted to flee as far as possible from everyone I knew.

So Arizona seemed great… and as far as asthma was concerned, I did great. In the 21 months I lived there, my only asthma 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 the baggage of jerks who didn’t seem to care what Jesus taught, let alone study them. 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 alone — I let that lapse pretty quickly.

I was house-sitting that Christmas holiday, completely alone, the only relief coming from reading and rereading a Catholic friend’s occasional letters and my family’s occasional emails, or from finding various controversies online to get myself worked up over.✜ All the internet’s dangers were already available there in the mid-90s;it just wasn’t so widely diffused. I had little in the way of money, 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. 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 it required me either to walk the highway or to cross a wide field and then an interstate.

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. So what was the point? I felt as if I were on the brink of saying, “There is no God.” Something had to change.

The Song of Bernadette

The other diversion available to me was to cross a driveway from the apartment complex to a very small shopping center, to buy groceries and rent a videotape. By God’s grace, I not only noticed The Song of Bernadette — thinking at first it was some sappy film — 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. 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. It depicts accurately the opposition of secular French society, and — this surprised me most of all — the Catholic clergy’s skepticism and caution, starting with her own pastor.

I had been contemplating attending several churches grounded in “traditions” of scriptural interpretation, and Catholicism was the lowest on that list. This movie was one of the three circumstances that nudged me to Catholicism.

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. Until becoming Catholic, I had struggled with at least two compulsions. My reading of alcoholism and drug addiction makes them sound not dissimilar. Complete helplessness in the face of these weaknesses was one of the things pushing me towards atheism: If God loved me, why didn’t He take this compulsion from me?

At my first confession before the Easter Vigil, I was able to tell Fr. Bain that the compulsions disappeared after I stepped into Nativity Church.

This isn’t to say that they were gone for ever. I foolishly let them back into my life some months later, but even so, while I would have to struggle with them for some time yet, it was never as bad as before, and eventually — by God’ve grace alone — they were gone. In retrospect I recognize it as an example of the fomes peccati, to use the Council of Trent’t words, the “tinder for sin”, that God leaves in us, to allow us to struggle and participate in our salvation. As another analogy with alcoholism, I have come to recognize that this thorn will always remain, but with God’s help I can avoid it.

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