A Far Green Country Under a Swift Sunrise

As [my wife] and I struggled and talked and prayed all through that autumn of 1984, the tug-of-war inside of me was between "Am I mad?" and "Show me, dear Christ, Thy spouse so bright and clear."  Could I introduce this fissure into our very household?  How could I possibly head for a Table other than the one at which my dear lady made her communion from week to week, and at which I had brought up my children, and, indeed, at which I myself had worshipped for twenty-five years?

--Thomas Howard, Lead, Kindly Light (p. 64-65 )

So writes Thomas Howard, an Anglican convert to Catholicism, about his journey to Rome.  And I find myself echoing his thoughts, though certainly not his prose, as I weigh the same decision and mull the same looming consequences:  what will happen to my children if I pull up stakes and head for that strange and ancient country?  What about my wife?  

My dream was always to be a father and to live in a comfortable little house and close enough to a small Baptist or Reformed church that we could walk there on crisp, sunny Sunday mornings.  That's what I pictured, what I wanted.  And that's what I have:  a thriving church filled with kind, friendly and real people.  

My children are happy there.  My wife is happy there.  And I was happy there until a couple of years ago when I found myself suddenly face to face with the authentic Catholic Church. (I say "authentic" because as Archbishop Fulton Sheen once accurately wrote "There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.")

That certainly summed up my experience.  I had always pitied the Catholic Church and the poor Catholics with their mumbled Hail Mary's, their rote prayers, and dry, dead faith.   I knew from vast amounts of experience (which I gained by listening to various preachers talk about Catholics) that Catholic Churches were places of despair where the misinformed throng was taught to "earn their way to heaven", to "bow in worship to Mary" and to completely ignore the saving work of Jesus, replacing the "real" Christ with a sissy who was bossed around by his mother.  (I remember an ex-Catholic in one of the churches I attended explaining that the "Catholic Jesus" he'd been raised to believe in was a "namby-pamby Jesus."  And that he was glad to finally have found the "real Jesus" here.)

So, when I looked into the claims of the Catholic Church--mostly just to disprove them with my tremendous Biblical knowledge (of which I was humbly proud)--I began my search with no fear at all of being converted.  In fact, I began my study with no fear at all that it would even develop into something that could accurately be described as a "study".  I figured it would be an afternoon (maybe two) of reading and then I figured I'd step in with my great wisdom, derail the Catholic arguments easily and handily, and be back home in time for dinner.

But it didn't go that way.  Instead of finding the Catholic Church I'd always heard about, I found something all together different.  Something ancient and yet vibrant.  Something tied indelibly to history and yet current and, to use a sadly overused and twisted word, relevant.  To put it simply:  I found Christ.  And not the "namby-pamby" Christ that my ex-Catholic friend had warned me about.  I found a blood-and-bones Jesus who loved and suffered and died and rose.  In short, I found the same Jesus I'd always known about--and yet I found him in what seemed the most unlikely of all places.

Still, this didn't completely sway me.  I remember thinking that this was good news (I have a number of Catholic friends and it was a great surprise and comfort to discover that they may indeed be "saved" after all and that I needn't worry about them as much as I had been) but I still believed them to have a faith full of errors and misguided devotions.  

However, that initially startling discovery of Christ in the Catholic Church did lead me to dig a little deeper:  after all, there was no fear of my conversion to Catholicism, so I might as well try to understand their strange ways a little better.

And so I've done for the last 2 1/2 years or so.  I've read books by Protestant converts, countless conversion stories and basic introductions to the faith.  When those made more sense than I thought possible, I looked to Protestant sources to refute this belief system and get me back on track.  However, instead of finding reasoned arguments against Catholicism, what I found was sad, angry and vitriolic.  Even with my limited study, I was able to see that many of the arguments presented by "ex-Catholics who left the Church when they found Jesus" were simply not based in fact or in a firm understanding of their previous Catholic faith.  In some cases, I found what I can only believe were lies (supposed ex-Catholic priests with a poorer understanding of the Eucharistic mysteries than I myself had after reading just a few books or researching for more than 10 minutes on the internet).

Neither confirmed nor comforted by my Protestant compatriots, I went back to Catholic sources to see what they had to say about themselves.  I picked up the Catechism, dipped into the writings of various Saints and looked into the documents written by the early Church Fathers.  After that, it was time to tackle Conciliar documents and encyclicals.  All of these were rooted in Scripture and the writers, rather than having a disdain for the Word of God (as I'd been taught) actually held the Bible in high regard.

By the end of all this--or actually, part way through--I discovered that something had shifted in my thinking:  instead of reading to disprove their doctrines, I was reading to understand them better.  At some point in the journey, I'd come to the very remarkable (in my opinion) point that whenever a Catholic Doctrine or Teaching seemed bizarre and unnatural and pagan and unholy, it's very likely that I simply didn't understand it. (Afterall, when I read the love for Christ that is apparent in the writings of the Church's Saints and Doctors, who am I to so quickly and easily conclude (with my immeasurable storehouse of Biblical Knowledge) that I had succeeded where they had failed?  That Saint Thomas Aquinas, or Saint Augustine, or Saint Louis de Montfort failed to discern true Christianity whereas I, Daniel Hansen of Zeeland, Michigan, was able to grasp the fruit the giants couldn't reach?  To make that claim is a failure to think critically and honestly on my part.  Or at the very least, it gives evidence of a tremendous over-confidence in my own cognitive abilities.  For someone with my limited experience and knowledge to dispel out of hand, without more than a few moment's thought, the entire canon of St. Thomas is, to put it mildly, arrogance in the extreme).

At any rate, I found that I was no longer reading to refute, but reading for clarity, for understanding.  Before long, the strange phrases, "our Blessed Lord" the "precious body and blood" and many others felt comfortable and, more importantly, Right on my tongue.  The holy water, the icons, the statues, the rosaries, the beads, the Saints, the feasts, the liturgy, the confessional . . . all not only made sense to me but actually have become essential to the full expression of my faith.

I found myself not just looking at them with the eyes of wonder one might have at a museum filled with strange and unusual artifacts, but with real and sincere (and aching) longing.  The Catholic faith of the ages came to life before my eyes and lit a fire in my chest.  Yes, part of it's a yearning for the past--for the ancient cathedrals filled with stained-glass and symbolism and hymns that must be chewed before they can be absorbed--but that's not all.  It's also a longing for sublime and serious and weighty liturgy and for worship that is not based on a thumping beat but which is instead grounded in the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Christ "made present" in the Eucharist.  And yet, even that is not the sole reason for my longing for communion with Rome.  I feel, in a remarkable and undeniable way, that Christ is calling me.  To disobey for the sake of convenience is not an option.  I want to be obedient above all.  

And that brings me back to the quote we started with at the beginning of this ramble.  Thomas Howard was in this same place and was wondering the same things and dealing with many of the same issues.  His wife wasn't ready for the journey.  How would their relationship fare when the most important part of their lives--their faith--was something they didn't share?  And what about the children?  What would become of them? 

I find myself asking those same questions.  My wife and I have argued and discussed this long into the morning on many occasions.  My children are aware of the Struggle, the Quest (or, as it's more often called:  Dad's Catholic "Thing") and often ask, on any given Sunday, whether we're going to "Dad's" church or "Mom's"?  

I don't know, right now, what the outcome of all this will be.  And though I'm hesitant to even use this analogy because I've learned over the last couple years that I'm no "Father of Faith", neither did Abraham know the outcome of his journey up the mountain with Isaac.  He only knew God had called him to go and to be willing to give up all that made sense and abandon that to Him.  

That's what I will struggle to do in the next year as I plan to enter the Catholic Church next Easter.  And yet, like Abraham (who I'm convinced had more than just an inkling that God would "come through in the end") I'm convinced that He'll work things out to our benefit. 

Right now, the journey is dark and lonely--for all of us.  My children are floundering between faiths, my wife feels alone and I feel the weight of monumental decision-making and the fear of the Second-Guessers, the "What-if-Your-Wrongs" and my own worries that my journey is internally and personally driven.  And yet, I believe that, at the end of this, God will bring us back together--here on earth, mind you and not just in the world beyond--and I am confident that rather than being dark and dreary and frightening and empty, that place He will bring us to will instead be thriving and beautiful and unmistakably, undeniably Right--or, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it in The Lord of the Rings:  we'll see "the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and . . . rolled back, and [we'll behold] white shores and beyond . . . a far green country under a swift sunrise.”