Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

Dying to self

Speaking of Christian concepts that used to baffle me, the idea of "dying to self" was high on that list.

This concept was one of the first things I got from reading the New Testament and books by Christian authors, and, honestly, it sounded kind of depressing. There were surely some good things about me, and it seemed a shame to have to get rid of it all. I eventually understood that it is only by dying to self that we show Christ to others, which did make it sound more appealing. But even then I pictured that if all Christians were to completely die to themselves and be perfectly Christ-like, that we'd all basically be identical drones. I thought of all the different talents and personality types out there -- poets, artists, engineers, comedians, etc. -- and it seemed sad to whitewash all those unique characteristics.

I thought this instruction was so odd, in fact, that I would sometimes wonder what kind of weird religion this was that I was exploring here. "How could a good religion tell people that they're bad, that they need to die a death of sorts in order to grow closer to God?" I'd wonder. It was only because I had an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of this belief system being the box top to life that I was willing to move forward and set aside my concerns for the time being. It was probably one of my first leaps of faith.

Slowly, I began to understand that to die to self was to die to the willful, selfish, sinful parts of ourselves; to let go of our plans and what we want to do based on comfort and convenience. Even this, though, sounded dangerous. The skeptic in me had to wonder: if I attempt to empty myself of all these lifelong tendencies that are supposedly sinful, if I set aside my to-do lists and goals spreadsheets and make no plans for the future, what will be left? Isn't that a recipe for ruin?

I was surprised to find that it was not.

As I slowly began to empty myself of so many of the things that composed life as I knew it -- my plans, my goals, many of my habits, (what I thought were) ingrained personality traits -- I found that I was not left empty. Rather, there was immediately Something there to fill me up, Something whose presence increased as life as I knew it decreased. But there was something else there as well, something that had been lost that I'd never tried to find:

Me.

I've mentioned that in the past I sometimes thought of "finding myself," but I thought of it in terms of finding what I should do with my life, what I should accomplish. It never even occurred to me that there was some other, more pure version of myself than the one I already knew. Perhaps because I never used to believe in the soul, I always figured that the chemical reactions that fired in my brain at any given moment were "me," that there was no one set of chemical reactions that represented my true self more than any other. It's been with some amount of surprise, then, that I've begun to see that the process of dying to self is a process of stripping away layers of sin encrusted with selfishness, and that glowing underneath all those layers is the true, complete version of who I was designed to be -- the real me. That's probably another reason I feel younger these days: the closer I get to God, the closer I get to the original version of myself.

I now see "dying to self" not as something a person does because he thinks he's bad; it's something he does because he knows he's good, and wants to find the Source of all that is good. It's not a whitewashing of unique characteristics, but the shining of Light through them to make them more beautiful and true. Dying to self, I think, is a purging of all that is not love; it's a process of breaking down the walls that block out Love himself; it's a way -- the only way -- of truly finding ourselves.

The Adoration List update

On Friday I told you about the idea of keeping an "Adoration List." The idea first came to me in the beginning of March, so though it was frustrating to have to wait almost 30 days to see the fruits of the habit, it was a great relief to have a way to let go of the little daily worries that linger in the back of my mind. At least once a day I thought of how eager I was for the first Friday to roll around!

When Friday finally arrived, I was so eager to get down to the nearest Adoration chapel and go over this list. It had grown rather long, and I couldn't wait to see what I'd find through prayer: what would I find to be the big issues worth addressing? What would turn out to be things that seemed like a big deal at the time but are really not worth worrying about at all? There were so many scattered thoughts scribbled down on that paper, I was glad I wrote everything down since it would be impossible to remember it all.

As I prepared to get out of the house, things were already Not Going How I Wanted Them to Go™. I had let time slip by and it was getting late. I didn't finish some things I wanted to get done before I left. My mother had made a wonderful last-minute offer to babysit so that my husband could go with me, but the kids were uncharacteristically fussy about us leaving, and it required the skill of a snake charmer to extricate ourselves from the chaos without all three of them having simultaneous meltdowns. When we were finally in the car and on the road, I still felt tense and stressed, but took great comfort in knowing that I would finally be able to bring my long list of worries before the Lord. I will leave it up to your imagination as to how I reacted when I realized:

I forgot the list.

I. Forgot. The. *%@!&#. List. And there was no turning back -- it was already late, we were more than half way to the church, going back in the house would get the kids all wound up again, and I had no idea where I'd left it anyway. I was beside myself. I had been looking forward to this every single day for weeks, I really felt like it was an idea I'd been led to through prayer, and now it was all for naught because of an absent-minded mistake (it was with bitter irony that I recalled that one of the items on the list was "Am I too forgetful?").

To be honest, I'm not sure if I would have even gone to Adoration if my husband hadn't been with me. The self-pitying, control-freak, not-trusting-in-God side of my personality had been kicked into overdrive by this situation, and I was so frustrated about it all that I wanted to just forget the whole thing and go pout somewhere. At some point it did briefly occur to me that perhaps I should turn to God in calm trust that this was part of his plan and he'd lead me where I needed to go, but that thought was quickly drown out with more important concerns like, "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE A PRODUCTIVE ADORATION WITHOUT MY LIST?!" (That is what John Paul II emphasized in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, right? That Adoration of the Eucharist is supposed to be productive?)

Anyway, when we arrived at the church my heart softened a bit. Outside the chapel was a write-on/wipe-off board where people could list their prayer intentions, and just reading through all the things that other people were praying for helped put it all in perspective. I added my own note to the board and was about to head into the little chapel when something else caught my eye: the schedule of people who had signed up to sit with the Blessed Sacrament while it was exposed for Adoration.

I'd known about this, but until I saw that schedule I'd forgotten that the consecrated Host is never left alone; so in order to offer Adoration a church has to make sure that at least one person will be there at all times. I was amazed as I looked at the schedule for the 24 hours of Adoration: there were names next to the slots for the 1:00am - 2:00am hour, the 2:00am - 3:00am hour, the 3:00am - 4:00am hour, and so on. It was so touching to see all these people who were willing to get out of their beds in the middle of the night and go sit with the Lord. It reminded me of why I think of churches as places of hope.

When I walked into the silent chapel, I saw the man who was scheduled to sit with the Blessed Sacrament that hour sitting in the back row. I noticed that he wasn't reading or doing anything. He was just sitting quietly. I took a seat and immediately set about the task of trying to mentally review my forgotten list. But it wouldn't work. I just couldn't. It was like my mind was being blocked from doing any efficient, analytical thinking. I am the type of person who always has about a million different trains of thought running through my head, and for the first time in a long while, all my scattered thoughts were silenced. My mind was quiet. The only thing I felt like doing -- really, the only thing I could do -- was bask in feelings of overwhelming appreciation of God's presence.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was not meant to bring a list. I wouldn't have looked at it even if I'd had it.

For the longest time all I could do was offer prayers of thanksgiving and adoration. I didn't feel like I needed anything anymore. The only thing I needed at that moment was to give God as much love and gratitude as possible. (I've gone back and forth a few times about whether or not to mention this next part because it sounds kind of odd, but here it is anyway...) After a while I felt strongly drawn to pray for a specific person. Here's the crazy part: it's someone whom I never knew, who was not a believer, and who died in 2005. The only connection I had to her was that I read her blog a few times. But I spent the rest of my time at Adoration praying for her soul.

When I left the Adoration chapel, I felt lighter. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. My only concern was how I was going to do this more often. Later in the evening I was still marveling at how powerful the draw had been to spend most of my time in silent appreciation, to just be, and then I checked comments to my post about taking a list to Adoration. I was amazed as I read through others' experiences with this devotion.

Patty wrote:

It seems that whenever I go to adoration with something in mind to do (reading, journaling, decision-making, etc.) I end up just being quiet with Jesus, because that's what I really needed--some quiet and just to BE and not DO, because that's all Jesus wants is just plain old ME, and turns out what I needed most was Him.

I always leave peaceful. You're going to love Adoration, I'm sure of it.

Anne Marie wrote:

Adoration: My favorite devotion. Period. Like spending time with, well, GOD. I've been known to bail out of a particularly difficult day for a few hours to run up to the perpetual Adoration chapel an hour away from us just to get some perspective before returning to the fray...Perspective, yes, that's what's needed, perspective. Adoration is just the ticket.

Laura wrote:

Adoration is like a drug. Once you get a taste of it, you need to keep going back for more....I cannot even begin to expound on the graces that have come to our family because of our commitment to adoration. Give it a try and you will find yourself desiring it more and more!

Elizabeth wrote:

You might only have the opportunity to go monthly, but it will quickly become a much-anticipated ritual for you...I'm still not entirely sure what I should be doing in that first 40 minutes....but there is something undeniably moving about being in a still church with others in the presence of God...The best way I can describe it is that, short of attending daily Mass...it's the next best thing to keeping that Sunday feeling all week long. You are in the presence of a miracle.

Tausign wrote:

If you find yourself oozing out 'Praise and Adoration' do NOT stop, keep it up as that is the highest form [of prayer]...I'm sure you had a blessed time this evening. The Lord falls over those who spend time with Him.

Carol wrote:

I've only been to Adoration twice, but that was more than enough for me to get "hooked" on it!...I've noticed that while I take things along with me to do, in the end I tend to just fall silent and "be" there.

I can't remember where I read this recently but there was a little, old man who would spend hours and hours on end in Adoration. He was asked once what on earth he was doing in there for all that time and he replied to the effect of - "I look at Jesus and He looks at me and we are happy together."

Ashleyrae wrote:

Adoration will bring a certain kind of peace to you life...What I found out the first few times I went was that it's ok to just not do anything, to just be still. I think the Lord will guide you in your Adoration prayers. You may find yourself coming with a certain prayer in mind or with a book or journal and then God says, "I'd rather you do it my way." Funny how His way always gives you exactly what you need.

Those are just some of the comments where others shared their experiences with Adoration. What struck me all weekend as I watched these comments roll in is how precisely they pinpointed what had happened. It was uncanny to see how closely my experience of Adoration matched that of others. "Do these people have crystal balls or something?" I joked to my husband at one point.

So, back to the original subject, I don't really know what to make of the Adoration List. I still think it's a good idea and plan to keep that sheet of paper out in my kitchen. Maybe I'll try to take it with me again next month. All I know is that going to Adoration was like a spiritual cleansing, that even though I forgot my list and didn't think about solutions for any of my worries and the only active praying I did was for a deceased person whom I never met...I walked out of the chapel knowing that God had given me what I needed. I didn't (and still don't) know what the exact solutions are to any of my little problems...but I don't feel as much like I need to know. I'm starting to think that maybe all I need is more quiet time in front of the Lord.

Easter Vigil, one year later

How could a reasonable person living in the 21st century actually believe that at the Catholic Mass, bread and wine are truly (like, not symbolically) changed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ?

This was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when considering Catholicism (notice that "Christ's real presence in the Eucharist" was conspicuously absent from the "five Catholic teachings that just kinda made sense to me" list). When I first heard that the Church still believes that the Mass makes Christ's one sacrifice at Calvary present here and now, that the bread and wine is seriously turned into the flesh and blood of God himself, I prayerfully thought: "Are you kidding me?" I thought I must be missing something. I'd never heard a more bold, audacious claim made by a modern religion.

There was a part of me that kept hoping I'd find that it was all a misunderstanding, that Catholics were only required to believe that the consecration of the Eucharist was a really, really, really important symbolic event, that all that crazy talk about drinking blood and eating flesh was just some old fashioned superstition that us enlightened modern folks weren't required to believe. I was a lifelong atheist, after all. It was enough of a feat that I even came to believe in God in the first place. It was enough of a leap of faith for me to believe that some miracles might have happened a few times throughout history. But to ask a former militant atheist to believe that a miracle happens at every single Catholic Mass, that bread and wine are actually changed into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ despite the fact that they look exactly the same...it seemed too much to ask.

It is surprising, then, that as I sit down to write my reflections for this Easter Vigil, when I think about all that has happened in this first year since my husband and I entered the Catholic Church, as I marvel at how different this year has been than any before, I find that there is really only one thing to talk about: the Eucharist.

For my one-year anniversary post I could try to pen a great ode proclaiming my joy at having come to know God on a level I never imagined possible for someone like me; I could write about the challenges we've faced, and the oasis that our newfound faith provided for us when we felt cast out into the desert; I could have my husband do a guest post about the transformation he's seen in me (and in himself) in the past year; I could talk about how my role in Christ's sacrifice is finally real to me; I could say something about how my life is unrecognizable from what it was only a few years ago. But when I started to write on each of those topics, I realized that each one of them -- everything, really -- comes back to the Eucharist.

Though God certainly could work in my life if I didn't receive the Blessed Sacrament (as he did tremendously before I became Catholic), the way he's slowly but steadily infiltrated my body and soul since I began to receive him physically at Communion is something new -- I am united with him now in a way I was not before.

To be honest, I am surprised by this.

When I received my first Communion at Easter Vigil last year I had come to accept that the teaching on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is true. Or, perhaps more accurately, I was willing to accept on faith that it was not false. I was undoubtedly being led to the Catholic Church, and found its defense of this teaching to be solid and compelling, so I trusted that it was true in some mysterious way, even though I didn't really get it. That was the best I could do, and I never expected to understand it any more than that. Even as the months have rolled by, after receiving Communion week after week, I still don't know how it works. I don't even have a visceral reaction when I first see the consecrated host held above the altar, and don't think I ever felt the Holy Spirit hit me like a ton of bricks the moment the consecrated host was placed on my tongue. And yet, despite the lack of immediate emotions, despite the fact that I can't tell you exactly how it all works...I believe now with all my heart that it is true. I know that I eat the flesh and drink the blood of God at the Mass, and that it is the source of my strength.

I know it for the same reason a baby knows that its mother's milk is the source of its nourishment: the baby can't tell you how the milk is created by the release of prolactin and the cells in the alveoli. He can't tell you about the importance of immunoglobulin IgA and fat-to-water ratios. He couldn't even begin to understand how and why the milk nourishes him if you tried to explain it. He just knows how very much he needs it. He knows that the mysterious substance that his mother gives him is the source of his strength as much as he knows anything at all in his little life. And so it is with me and the Eucharist.

This belief in and love of the Eucharist is the most surprising thing that's ever happened to me. Never in my dreams would I have thought that I could believe such an incredible, outlandish claim. On some occasions I have even taken a step back to look at it all as objectively as possible, to set everything aside and honestly ask myself if this is all in my head, if perhaps I am eating bread and drinking wine at the Mass, but that its great symbolic value has led me to put myself in a different state of mind. And all I can come up with is this:

If this is a symbol, then I am insane.

It's not Tolkien, but that's about the best I can do. The way this Sacrament has slowly transformed my soul and given me a connection to God that I never knew before, the way I could easily move myself to tears at the thought of not being able to receive it, the strength I have drawn from having this direct communion with God...if these things are not real, then nothing is.

As I reflect back on this year and compare it to years past, the whole story of my life comes together in a very simple way: I realize now that my entire conversion process, really, my entire life, was one long search for the Eucharist.

Surrexit Dominus vere, alleluia!

Confession

As soon as I hit Publish I'm going to head out to confession.

In my long road from atheism to Christianity, one of my favorite memories is when I made my first confession, the Wednesday before Easter of last year. When I think back on it I first remember the ethereal chant music that wafted throughout our beautiful church, and the surprising sense of stillness and peace that pervaded the sanctuary, even though there were more than 500 other people there. I remember marveling at the diversity of the crowd: a man in an expensive business suit would be standing next to a young construction worker in muddy workboots, followed by a teenage girl and an elderly lady. We were all so different, yet all united by our beliefs, all there for the same purpose. I remember thinking about all the unpacked boxes that waited for me at home, and how thrilled I was about our much-needed new house. It felt like it was the first day of the rest of my life, and it was.

I don't have time to write much more today, but to celebrate the memory of this wonderful event in my life, here are some posts in which I've shared my experiences with this sacrament:

• A first confession, part I
• A first confession, part II
• Confessing my sins to a priest

Love and conversion

Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was frequently exposed to the expression "God is Love." I saw it on t-shirts, bumper stickers and the occasional Precious Moments figurine, and figured that I pretty much knew what it meant: it was a shorthand way of describing one of God's characteristics, i.e. "God (that Guy we believe in who's kind of like a dad, only nicer) is love (meaning he's really, really, really loving)." Right?

It is only recently that I realized that I had it wrong. One of the biggest lessons I learned in the conversion process, maybe the biggest lesson I learned in my life, was that the phrase "God is Love" is meant to be taken literally: God is love. God = Love. It's not just some characteristic, but his essence. To paraphrase the Cynical Christian's recent post on a similar subject, when we say "God is love," we're not describing what God is, we're describing what love is -- love is God.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how this understanding of God and love played such a key role in my conversion. It brings light to three issues in particular that would sometimes perplex me as I walked the long path from atheism to belief:


1. It explains the importance of humility.

When I first began to explore the possibility of God's existence, I approached the endeavor the way one might approach proving that something in the material world exists: I put God under the microscope, so to speak, waiting with arms folded across my chest until proof of his existence was presented to me. Occasionally I would read something about the importance of humility, which I took to mean that one should be open to new data. So I'd make a mental note to make sure that I wasn't closing my mind to any sort of proof God might offer me, and promptly return to sitting and waiting with my arms folded across my chest.

This approach made sense since I thought I was seeking an abstract theoretical concept called "God," and saw myself as involved in a process that should require nothing on my part other than observation of data. Yet I couldn't seem to escape this concept of humility -- and the more I read, the more I realized that all these great Christian thinkers were talking about something much more than just admitting that you don't have all the answers. They were talking about embracing radical, self-abandoning humility. I didn't get it. Did these people have hang-ups or something? Why were they so determined to believe that you had to be humble yourself before you could seek God?

Now that I realize that I was seeking not an impersonal theoretical concept but love, Love itself, it makes sense. I won't get in over my head by trying to fully explain the Christian virtue of humility and get into all the reasons it's important; suffice it to say that I came to see a close connection between love and humility. Even in human relationships, I realized, one does not find love by starting with an overly skeptical, "prove it!" sort of attitude. Love is not something that can be dissected under a microscope; to find it requires emotional involvement on the part of the seeker, a willingness to investigate with the heart in addition to the coldly rational part of the mind. It requires a questioning mind, and a humble heart.

Which brings me to the next thing I realized...


2. It explains why it took me so long to "feel" God's presence.

As anyone who's glanced through the archives to this blog knows, I never used to "feel" God's presence. I eventually came to believe in his existence on an intellectual level, but was disappointed that I didn't feel much on an emotional level. It always seemed like I was talking to myself in prayer, and I often felt a bit jealous that other people seemed to "know" God in a way that I did not.

Part of that might have been due to the normal spiritual dryness that most people experience at some point or another, and part is surely because I'm not a very "touchy feely" type of person. But there was another factor as well, possibly the biggest factor: I didn't understand that God is Love. Once I realized that you could replace the word "God" with the word "Love" in almost any instance, the problem behind a lot of my spiritual struggles became clear. For example:

"I'm seeking God" = "I'm seeking Love"

"I want to experience God" = "I want to experience Love"

"I want to know God" = "I want to know Love"

When I considered the statements on the left side of the equations, each sounded like a nebulous, intellectually difficult endeavor that would require lots of passive contemplation from an armchair; but when I considered the statements on the right side, each sounded like an exciting, intriguing endeavor that would require the active participation of my mind, heart and soul. I might not have felt like I knew much about experiencing God, but I did know a thing or two about experiencing love: I knew that you don't fall in love by reading about it in books. You don't increase the amount of love in your life by sitting back and waiting for others to make the first move.

It was when I stopped asking "How does one experience God?" and started asking "How does one experience Love?" that I began to really feel God working in my life.


3. It explains why I now believe in God with all my heart.

In his conversion story, former atheist John C. Wright likened coming to know God to falling in love. He writes: "It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast." I can't think of a better summary of what I've experienced.

Back when I wrote my original conversion story I talked a lot about how much more sense the world made to me after seeing it through the lens of Christian teaching. The profound changes I saw based on that understanding alone were enough to convince me that Christianity spoke the truth about God and the world. But in the year and a half since I typed that up, something else has happened as well: my life has been infiltrated by Love. A real, external, palpable force of love has entered my life, a distinct presence that wasn't there before. I don't mean that I just feel happy more often or that I try to be more loving towards others or that I think nice thoughts more than I used to (though all that is true), but that the very Source of those things is now involved, and it's not coming from within me.

I used to think I'd always have doubts about God's existence. I'd been too atheistic in my beliefs for too long, so it would be too much of a change to think in terms of the supernatural. What I didn't anticipate when I made that prediction, however, is that I would find Love. This Love that has ever so slowly become the center of my life is more powerful than anything I've ever known, and to doubt its existence would be to doubt reality.

I could have probably come to deep, unhesitating belief in God much sooner if I'd understood from the beginning that by seeking God, I was ultimately seeking Love.

Comments closed for Lent

And to dust you shall return

We had a great time on Fat Tuesday. To do some feasting before the start of our first Lent as Catholics, my husband and I went to the house of some good friends. When I first arrived I felt the wind pick up and looked to see some threatening clouds on the horizon, so I hurried to get inside before the rain started. We watched the Super Tuesday election results and talked some smack about politics with our friends as we enjoyed good food, good company and good wine in the warm glow of their home. In the midst of our merrymaking the window screens would occasionally rattle as the wind whipped around outside.

I woke up the next day, Ash Wednesday, feeling a whole lot less merry from having stayed up too late. As I got ready to go to my first ever Ash Wednesday prayer service, I heard the horrible news that tornadoes had ripped through five southern states the night before and that the death toll was at 44 and climbing. That same front that had done nothing more than blow leaves around our city had in other states leveled homes, killed entire families, and utterly devastated large regions of the country. As I drove to the church I thought of how surreal, how horribly impossible it all seemed.

When I got to the church I was initially distracted by making sure I didn't do anything stupid since I didn't know what to expect from this service. But I was quickly reminded of the tragedy that had played out on Tuesday night as the distribution of ashes began. We prayed, we listened to Scripture readings, and then we all got in line. And when it came my turn the deacon smeared ashes on my forehead in the shape of a cross, looked at me, and said:

"You are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Those words from Genesis 3:19 are probably the one thing on which all humans from every place and time can agree. The modern parlance might be, "You are chemical reactions, and one day those reactions will cease," or maybe "Your body is matter, made of atoms like all the other lifeless stuff in the universe, and one day it will return to being lifeless matter like everything else," but regardless of how it is phrased it is nevertheless something we all know to be true. It is probably simultaneously the most important, most agreed upon and most ignored fact of life.

The truth of this statement seemed all the more real this day. It occurred to me that as I sat in the pew with black ashes on my face, listening to beautiful yet somber sound of Attende Domine coming from the chant schola, watching men, women, and children walk through the line to receive ashes, that at this very moment thousands of people were walking through the ashes of what was once their homes. Probably some of the bodies in the funeral homes in Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and Alabama at that moment were yesterday people who were chatting about whether to give up chocolate or coffee for Lent. As the long line moved forward, I heard "You are dust, and to dust you shall return...You are dust, and to dust you shall return...You are dust, and to dust you shall return," over and over again. I thought of how casually I'd glanced at the darkening sky the night before, how I'd taken it for granted that my own death is far off as I heard the wind pick up outside.

You are dust.

I never intended to take Lent lightly, but I had fallen into the mode of thinking of it in abstract terms like "a time for spiritual growth" or "an opportunity to grow closer to God." But in the ashes ritual I was starkly reminded that that the storm clouds are on the horizon for us all; that to build your life around earthly comfort and pleasure is to build a house of cards.

And to dust you shall return.

The announcement of this most inconvenient, inevitable fact of life begs the question: what are we going to do with this information? And that, I now realize, is what Lent is all about.

Comments closed for Lent

How I became pro-life

I've been wanting to put this together ever since I read Abigail's touching post with the same title. I've been dabbling at this post for a few months, and finally feel ready to share it. I apologize that it is so long, I just couldn't figure out how to condense it without leaving out important details. I hope that you will find that it's worth your time to read the whole thing.


Who is human?

Back in college I remember reading about how in certain societies throughout history, I believe in this case it was the Greeks, it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire societies?

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing babies -- and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anything. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people's-life," he quipped. "Everyone is pro-their own-life."

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness of that notion as was my habit...yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense:

"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?...Eight weeks? No, they're not human then, those must be involuntary spasms..."

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human.

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.

The whole thing started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would advocate for.

In reading through the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, I read that Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women, opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought -- because it was plainly obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form -- but because dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's words in its amici brief:

D&X presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E's involving dismemberment, D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can injure the uterus and cervix.

There is also considerable evidence that D&X reduces the risk of retained fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a 'free floating' fetal head that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal injury.

I read the Court documents from Stenberg v. Carhart in a state of shock. A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden -- mommy's big boy!"), I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people -- not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices -- casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself pro-life.

I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some arbitrary point during gestation.

It wasn't until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group, took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on abortion.


The contraceptive mentality

Here are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed:

• When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
  
  
• In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
  
  
• On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me -- that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
  
  
• Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
  

Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.

I'd always thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it, the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a "contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy, expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.

I came to see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion had to be OK.

I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone...but the lie was just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity...terminating pregnancies just had to be OK, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal...and society had made it very clear that sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

So this idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins, opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.


The great temptation

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me, and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life -- "we can't afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a good life" -- left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme Court Justices in Stenberg v. Carhart, with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I bet that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them "fetuses."

From atheism to Christianity: a conversion story through books

Back in this post I was talking about how I strongly encourage Christians to ask the tough questions about their faith. To summarize what I said there, occasionally I meet Christians who seem hesitant to delve too deeply into their faith for fear of what they might find. It's a shame because, in the opinion of this former atheist, by asking challenging questions and seeking answers Christians have absolutely nothing to fear, and everything to gain.

"So where do I start?" is a frequent response I get to that statement. I've finally had a chance to put together a list of books that I found helpful when I was first asking the tough questions of Christianity. I think it would be a good jumping-off point for lifelong Christians (especially Catholics) who don't feel like they have a lot of knowledge of the how's and why's behind why we believe what we believe. This would also be a good list for people who are not Christian but are curious about the religion.

These are by no means the only sources of information I used -- the conversion process was a long road that involved lots of thinking and reading (and eventually praying) and gathering data from tons of different sources. These books alone were not enough to convince me to convert; all the information in the world would not have been enough had my heart not been open to it (as I talked about here). But they are, I believe, good places to start.

One of the reasons it's taken so long to put this together is because I don't want to present this as any sort of definitive list or hold myself out as an authority on the subject: I offer this as a humble account of my personal story, detailing some books that I found compelling in my search for truth about God, the world and the human experience.

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The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

My conversion to Christianity had a very clear beginning: the day I walked into a bookstore and saw this book. In my vague search for religion up to that point, I had been planning to explore Buddhism and other Eastern belief systems first (then Judaism, then Islam, then Baha'i, then that Wicca/"earth goddess" stuff that my friend from college was into...anything but Christianity!) It had never once occurred to me that there was even the most remote possibility that the Christian claims about Jesus could be true, so I was planning to skip over all that. But one day back in July of 2005 I walked into a bookstore, saw this book from way across the room, and knew I wanted to read it. I had no idea what it was, just that I was oddly drawn to it and had to go see it.

As it turns out, the book was exactly what I needed to read. Former atheist Lee Strobel lays out the data that convinced him that the Christian claims about Jesus' life, death and resurrection are true. It's not that the book was perfect, or even that I instantly believed after reading it (I didn't). But it did open my eyes to the fact that Christians had a much better defense for their beliefs than I'd expected. I wrote about it at the time here.


Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

I read Mere Christianity shortly after I finished The Case for Christ, and it added fuel to the growing fire of my interest in Christianity. It was the first book I read where a Christian looked at Christianity from a rational, questioning point of view. One of the reasons this book was probably so helpful to me is that Lewis was himself a former atheist, so he knew how to explain his faith in a way that made sense to nonbelievers.


By What Authority? by Mark Shea

At some point along the way I bought a Bible and started reading it, which left me with more questions than answers (as I talked about here). Around that time someone suggested I read By What Authority, saying that Shea (a convert to Catholicism) provided a good, readable explanation of the concept of Sacred Tradition. I would love to spice up the story with tales of how I wrestled with accepting the notion that God gives us doctrine through the Catholic Church...but, honestly, it was a slam-dunk. This was the missing piece of the puzzle. I had been leaning towards Catholicism for a lot of other reasons, but understanding the concept of Sacred Tradition was what finally made all of Christianity make sense to me.

I still had questions, though. What about the bad popes? What about the Crusades? And, most pressingly, what about those teachings that were just obviously antiquated and oppressive (e.g. their stance on contraception)? I figured that a lot of those crazy teachings must be optional, that perhaps they were categorized under "suggestions" rather than official teachings. I decided to keep reading to see what I'd find...


Catholicism for Dummies by John Trigilio and Kenneth Brighenti

I admit I was a bit embarrassed to buy a "Dummies" book on such a serious topic, but after multiple people recommended it I sucked it up and got Catholicism for Dummies, thinking that maybe I could slip on a fake Summa Theologica cover if I were to read it in public. :) Indeed it was very helpful -- not, of course, for gaining deep knowledge of any one area of Catholicism, but for answering some of my basic questions and pointing me in the right direction for further explanation. For the first time, I started to think that a lot of that Catholic stuff that I had written off as oppressive or old-fashioned might actually have a whole lot of wisdom to it.


The Catechism of the Catholic Church (version by Fr. John Hardon)

At this point I decided to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and get a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official exposition of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Though you can read the full text online for free on the Vatican's site here, I decided to get this version since a) I didn't want to read that much text online, and b) I heard that this arrangement by Fr. John Hardon was more readable. Reading it was amazing. It was so...not what I expected. Here's one excerpt (chosen quickly from the copy sitting here on my desk) that is the type of thing I found interesting:

[W]ith his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material", can have its origin only in God.

The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".

The more I read, the more I became enthralled. As I've said before, when I read the Catholic Church's official teachings on God and what they claim is God's one true church, I felt overwhelmed with the peace of certainty that I had found truth.


Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible As the First Christians Did by Mark Shea

Now I felt ready to deepen my knowledge of the Bible -- I'd previously read through most of the New Testament, but didn't know where to go from there. We didn't own a Bible in my house growing up, so I had almost zero familiarity with it. I'd flip through some of the Old Testament books and think, "What on earth is going on here?"

I read a few books on the topic of getting a basic understanding of the Bible, and this one was my favorite. Mark Shea walks the reader through an understanding of the Scripture as seen through the eyes of the Apostles themselves. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, was a lot more understandable once I understood that different books were intended to convey their truths in different "senses": literal, moral, allegorical or anagogical. This book really illuminated the Bible for me.


The Good News About Sex and Marriage by Christopher West

Back on the topic of Catholicism, the one thing I couldn't quite understand was the issue of contraception. I'd been living in this cycle of "Jen thinks she knows better than the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" --> research and reading --> "Jen does not know better than 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" for a few months, so I was at least open to hearing the Church's point of view on this one. And, on a gut level, something was starting to ring vaguely true about the notion that contraception might not be the best thing for individuals or society. But I still had a lot of serious reservations.

That's where Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body came in. Unfortunately, I was too sleep deprived at that time to get through the massive tome, amazing as it was. So that's where Christopher West came in: he's made his career making the wisdom of the Theology of the Body accessible to everyone. The Good News About Sex and Marriage explained a lot of the questions and concerns I had about Catholic teaching on the relations between the sexes. Reading this book helped my husband and me familiarize ourselves with the basics so that we could move on to other sources which explained them in more detail. To our shock, we found ourselves agreeing -- even though we had some serious issues going on at the time that would make following these teachings very difficult -- after finding what we had found in our research and conversations (and prayers), we knew that we would have been lying to say that we didn't think this was true.

When we actually started to apply these teachings to our lives, everything changed -- our relationship to each other, to God, to our vocations, to our children -- everything. We found ourselves standing in wonder at how our life had done a 180-degree spin and been turned on its head by what we once assumed to be oppressive rules, and it was then that something that we'd come to believe intellectually about Church teaching became something we knew in our hearts: this stuff doesn't come from people.


The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

I read The Everlasting Man shortly after I came to truly believe in God, and found myself wanting to shout, "Yes! Exactly!" all throughout this book. In this classic work, Chesterton makes the case that Christianity is something that rings true both to the mind and the heart. It takes what we know of the world through science and what we know of our souls through human experience and brings it all together. Though he doesn't use this exact analogy, I found that this book helped me articulate why I came to believe that Christianity is the box top to the puzzle of life.

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So there it is: a very abbreviated version my my conversion story as told through the books I read along the way. As I said above, none of these books will convert anyone since that is not something a books alone can do. I think they will, however, provide great starting points for believers who are eager to ask the tough questions of their faith, or for nonbelievers who are starting to think that there might be something more to this whole God thing than meets the eye.

The bottom line is this: if you are seeking God with humility and an open heart, you will find him. And asking tough questions will only speed up the process.


Feel free to use the comments to share your favorite books