Raised a Catholic: My Story of Conversion to Christ--Part 1

St. Greg's--my childhood church home, Williamsville, NY

I came to faith in Christ in my twenties.  Raised Catholic, I had a basic foundation in the following:

*I was taught that there is a God. 

*I was taught that I sinned against God.

*I was taught that I needed to repent of my sin (albeit via a priest) and make amends. 

*I was taught that I should respect/fear/obey God by keeping the sacraments and traditions of the Catholic Church and doing good works.

*I had a sense that there was a heaven and hell, rewards and punishments, that I could be in good favor with God or out of His favor.


*I knew some of the parables of Jesus, was exposed to none of the Old Testament, but oddly, yet despite this, my understanding of God was clearer in my mind than my understanding of Christ.

*My understanding of God and my relationship with Him was fuzzy, apart from confession which is inherently personal despite the corporate way the Catholic Church taught me to confess---in a line, waiting for my turn, like an appointment with the doctor.  I remember standing in such confessional lines trying to drum up sins to confess to the priest: nothing too personal or tender, my sins impressed me as ordinary, uninteresting.  Thankfully, I never had the traditional confessional booth experience of  Catholics--our congregation was rather contemporary, and confession consisted of meeting with the priest in a small room face-to-face.  However, the problem with this experience for me is similar to the obstacle I faced understanding Catholicism and connecting with God in general:  there was no relationship there to build upon.  Whether in a booth or room, the priest didn't know me, and I certainly didn't know him outside of mass.  It was just another awkward encounter with an unfamiliar authority, and I had many of these as a shy child.

God was a very big, holy, "out there" kind of God--and I had a sense that my unspectacular personal life and little girl feelings (beyond sin) were not something He was particularly interested in.  He was more interested in obedience, a "because I said so" kind of God, and I was to pull up my religious boot straps, clear my slate, and get on with being a good Catholic.  And yes, I thought of myself primarily as A Catholic.  The broader concept of being a Christian or even a Catholic Christian didn't resonate with me.

I also had a strong sense that the church was about formality and abiding by rules. Perhaps the clear coursework and steps of the faith in Catholicism---infant baptist, communion, confirmations--gave me a sense that church was something to DO rather than BE.  As a Catholic, I checked a lot of boxes, and as I got older, I viewed the boxes as a lot of mindless rule-following without purpose.

As an unmoored but intellectually honest teenager, I believed the story of Christ to be too much of exactly that---a story.  Who believes in someone rising from the dead?  What kind sadistic God would set up a system where only some people heard the story and only those who believed the story, hook line and sinker, would be rewarded with eternal life in Heaven?
In my understanding, God preferred emotionally simple people, people who believed in things that were not thought through carefully, people who preferred wishful thinking to real-world realities. 

Who doesn't want to believe in a fairy tale?  But it's a fairy tale all the same....  This was my overarching thought.

This, along with viewing the distant nature of my parents toward their faith, deterred me from a deeper desire to dig deeper with God.  Being Catholic, to me, was like being Jewish, something you were born into for the most part.  My thought was to give a passing respect to the tenants of the faith, keeping it at arms length, and living my life alongside, parallel to, but for the most part, not intersecting and certainly not being infused by my faith.

The idea that I needed to believe in Christ, in His resurrection and in His provision for us, that I had to mentally and spiritually condescend to this belief is something that came much later---and only after much "real-life" experience and intellectual wrestling.

To what extent this partial grasp of the gospel is my fault and to what extent it is a shortcoming of the approach of the Catholic Church, I don't feel adequate to comment upon.  I imagine there is fault to be born on both sides.  

He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.  -John 3:36