Via Mark Shea, here’s another man’s tale of coming home to Rome. There are some very interesting reflections here.

And I still do.

Dr. Suess’s delightful I Had Trouble In Getting To Solla Selew is the first book I can remember getting at a bookstore. I was very little (maybe four or five years old), and going to bookstores was not a common occurrence. We had lots of books around the house, mind you, but with three older siblings buying lots of new kid’s books was hardly a priority. So going to the bookstore with my mom (or maybe with both parents, I don’t recall) was a special occasion. What prompted it, I have no idea.

If you’re not familiar with the book, it involves a young fellow who gets thoroughly disgusted with the “troubles” lurking around his home, troubles that bite him or sting him or trip him and that won’t leave him alone. He hears of a wonderful land called Solla Selew, where they never have troubles (or at least very few), and he sets out to find it. And, of course, what he finds are more and more troubles, mostly more serious than the ones at home. And Solla Selew proves to be unattainable. Eventually he buys a big baseball bat and heads for home, resolved that his troubles will have trouble with him.

Some of you might be thinking that our journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism is a quest for the wonderful, magical Solla Selew, that, tired of the troubles currently plaguing the Anglican Communion (on which be God’s blessing) we’ve run away to a place where we think we’ll never have troubles, at least very few. On the contrary. Very much on the contrary.

The same forces that have taken over the leadership of the Episcopal Church and that are tearing the Anglican Communion in two are at work throughout our culture and are certainly present in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. As Christians of any stripe we can’t hide from them; we have to take our stand for what is right, where ever we find ourselves. I’m sure Jane and I will have ample opportunity to do that in our new home. On top of that there are not enough priests, there are the sex scandals, there are the massive settlements resulting from the sex scandals, there are the laity who aren’t used to the notion of active evangelism, there are all sorts of things to be concerned about.

But seriously, what would you expect from the Catholic Church? It’s full of Catholics! Which is to say, Christians, which is to say people, which is to say sinners. Of course there will be trouble.

Nevertheless, I think Rome is a much better place to stand. In the Episcopal Church, there’s nothing left but a faithful remnant. In the wider Anglican Communion, much of the body is perfectly sound–by weight of numbers, the majority of it. But, as the state of the Church of England and Rowan William’s failure of leadership has shown over the last few years, the Communion has a bad case of heart disease. It’s not clear that the patient can be saved.

Rome, by contrast, has a strong and healthy center in Pope Benedict and the Magisterium. The center can hold; and with Christ’s help it will, even if the extremities are a bit ragged.

One final reflection: for the first time in years I feel like I can invite people to come to church with me. Most of the folks I run into day-to-day, outside of my family, I run into at work. JPL is a big place, and people live all over Southern California, sometimes commuting quite preposterous distances every day. While I’d have gladly invited them to come to St. Luke’s, few live near enough to attend St. Luke’s regularly. And if not St. Luke’s, where could I suggest they go? I certainly didn’t want to direct them to the nearest Episcopal parish, not without knowing which one it was, and quite possibly not even then. Faithful Anglican parishes are scarce here in Southern California. And while it would undoubtedly be better for them to join a Lutheran or Presbyterian or Baptist or non-denominational congregation and come to know Christ than not, it just seemed wrong to say “Jesus loves you and wants you to be baptized and follow Him, but you don’t want to join my Church.”

Jane, I might add, had similar concerns for our children, when it came time for them to head off to college. Where, in general, could we recommend that our kids go to church?

Now, at least, that problem is dealt with. I can wholeheartedly say, “Jesus loves you. Come and be baptized, and follow him. There’s sure to be a Catholic church near you.”

At least, in principle I can say that–actually opening my mouth and saying it to a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood person face to face is harder.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.

So, a few weeks ago near the end of September, Jane and I decided that it was time to step out in faith. We would leave St. Luke’s, we would join the Roman Catholic Church, and we would trust that Christ would show us the community He wanted us to become part of.

Even casual readers will note that I’ve said quite a lot about my thoughts and reflections, and how I came to this point, but very little about Jane’s experiences. That’s in part because it’s her story, not mine, but it’s also because I’m not really sure. She went from being very unwilling and anxious to being ready to go, and I can’t explain it. I’m not sure she can explain it. I think it’s fair to say that she’s following me in this, but she’s following willingly, and even cheerfully. She has concerns, but they aren’t slowing her down.

So what were the next steps? We made another appointment with Fr. Ed, to talk about them. In the meantime, it seemed right to start attending mass regularly, somewhere. Now, I’d actually been attending mass about every other week, for over a year–not out of personal conviction, but out of love for my father. He’s no longer driving, and so my brother and I have been taking turns to drive him to church at St. James on Sundays. Jane had also taken him a few times, and was no more impressed with St. James now than she was twenty years ago, when we were engaged. Something about the place just put her off. And last Christmas we’d tried bringing the whole family to the Christmas morning mass with my dad, and that turned into something of a fiasco. The kids were cranky, and out of sorts, and the incense drove our oldest kid to distraction. None of them liked it. So what to do? I didn’t think it was really the fault of St. James, but dragging the family to a place they already didn’t like didn’t seem right either.

The first weekend in October I was away on a trip, returning home early Sunday afternoon. Having decided to become Catholic I was resolved both to take the Church’s requirements seriously, and to begin as I meant to go on, and so it was necessary to go to mass. I love that the Catholic Church takes the Sunday obligation seriously–by scheduling masses at a wide variety of times.

St. James would normally have been my first choice, since I was familiar with it. But the family had been to church at St. Luke’s that morning (we were planning on making the big jump as a family the following weekend), so I was on my own, and could go anywhere. It seemed reasonable to experiment. And St. James didn’t have a Sunday evening mass in any event. The logical place to try was Holy Redeemer, a church only a block or two farther away. In addition, Fr. Ed had just been named rector of both St. James and Holy Redeemer, so there would be at least one familiar face. So off I went. I was glad to go, but a little nervous.

The next bit is hard for me to write about. I’m an intellectual, logical sort of person, and my path to this point was an intellectual, logical sort of path. My experience at Holy Redeemer that evening hit me right in the heart, not in the head. I’ll try to describe it, but I doubt I can convey it all that well.

From the moment I walked in the door, everything was simply, gloriously, beautifully right. The late afternoon sunlight shone in through the stained glass windows. The sanctuary was filled with a beautiful, warm golden light. The church building was completely rebuilt a year or so ago (termites, I think) and I had not seen the new sanctuary before; it was nothing like what I remembered. It was simple and light and airy; it was warm and welcoming; and it was instantly familiar. It immediately reminded me of the sanctuary at St. Luke’s, but larger, more open, more expansive.

I’ve read that one of the purposes of the mass is to lift us up into heaven. I have rarely felt so lifted up as I did at mass that night. I was amazed, I was filled with awe, and with joy.

In truth, I felt like Jesus had wrapped the whole experience up as a surprise package for me, just waiting for the moment when I’d take that first step. I more or less floated all the way home.

The next week Jane and I took the whole crew to Holy Redeemer for the Sunday evening mass. I won’t give a blow-by-blow; but on the way back to the car all three of the older kids asked, “Can we go back there next week?” And Jane agreed with them. (Our three-year-old didn’t express any opinion, but she was remarkably cheerful all through the mass.)

And that was that. Jane and I met with Fr. Ed last Saturday morning, and I made my first confession in at least twenty years on Saturday afternoon. Jane will be joining the joint St. James/Holy Redeemer RCIA program; Fr. Ed offered to work with us privately over the next few months, but thought that RCIA would be an opportunity to meet people, and Jane agreed. The kids have started the religious education program, and David and James will be making their First Confession and Communion in the spring.

And the blessings have kept on coming. When the kids went to their first CCD class last Tuesday, they were all a little nervous–Sunday School on Tuesday? What was this? And James frankly didn’t want to go at all. And within moments of arriving, James and Anne were both greeted and welcomed by kids they knew and liked, and their reluctance was gone.

In short, the transition has so far been as easy and trouble-free as it could possibly be (for which I’d like to thank all those who have been praying for us–you know who you are). There will be many challenges ahead, as we study our new faith, as we try to get to know others in the parish, as we find out what Christ has in store for us.

* * * * *

Looking back over this series of posts, it seems to me that there’s a sense of inevitability about the whole thing that might be accurate in one sense but isn’t at all what I felt at the time. Indeed, I can still hardly believe it. There have been any number of moments over the last month or so when I’ve told myself, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” And then I’ve gone back over my reasons, one by one, and answered, “No, I don’t think so. It’s scary, but it makes sense.”

There’s so much more I could say, and so much I’ve left out, but I think this will do for now. It’s time to be getting on with things, looking forward rather than back. As Fr. Ron loves to say, “God is good!” But now, at any rate, long time readers of this blog will understand why I haven’t blogged very much this year.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.

I spent quite a long while in a state of serious conflict. I’d become nearly convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was what she said she was; and if those claims were true it was hard to see any alternative to joining the Church. At the same time I did not want to leave St. Luke’s; and Jane, though worried about the future viability of Anglicanism in the United States, didn’t want to either. We talked about it (we’d been talking about for quite some time), and we made the following decisions:

• We wouldn’t leave St. Luke’s unless we saw clearly where we were to go. Any move must be essentially positive, moving to something better, rather than negative.
• Whatever we did we would do united as a couple, and as a family. God called us to a life together, and He had blessed our time at St. Luke’s; we figured he’d want us stay united.

And so we prayed a lot, and I spent a lot of time studying up on the Roman Catholic Church and talking about it with Jane, and I talked it over with a number of friends. Eventually we had a long talk with Fr. Ed Dover, the priest at the local Catholic church (the church, in fact, where I was confirmed). Jane and I were interested in asking the question, more or less, “If we did decide to become Catholic, what would happen?” This was with special reference to community–what opportunities would be available for us to get to know people. At this point Fr. Ed made something perfectly clear: he wasn’t going to talk about “programs” with us. The Faith had to come before utilitarian issues. He was happy to “give us refuge” for as long as we needed it, and to discuss the Faith with us, but unless we came to believe that Catholicism was true the programs at St. James were irrelevant.

So we came away very thoughtful, without most of the answers we were looking for, but with some new questions and realizations. First, I wasn’t ready to make such a move, and Jane certainly wasn’t. Second, Fr. Ed had asked whether we’d discussed this with our pastor at St. Luke’s….which, well, we hadn’t. And in all fairness, I realized that I hadn’t given Anglicanism a chance. I’d spent the better part of a year looking into things Catholic, but I’d never at any time spent any effort on learning about the foundations of Anglicanism. When I first became an Episcopalian I’d been told that Anglican theology was compatible with the Roman theology I was familiar with, and until recently I’d never questioned that or felt the need to look further.

So I went and had a long talk with Fr. Ron Jackson, our pastor at St. Luke’s; and he pointed me at a number of books he thought would be helpful during my investigations about what Anglicanism is all about. The one to start with, he said, was Anglicanism, by Stephen Neill; it was a complete history of the Anglican Communion. And so I spent two months studying Anglicanism, reading that and other books. My goals in this search were as follows:

• To discover the essential core of Anglicanism, that which makes Anglicanism Anglican and gives it its identity within Christendom.
• Having found it, to decide whether it was enough, whether it was, for me, a viable alternative to the claims of Rome.

Now we get to the ticklish bit. The trend of this series of posts has no doubt been clear for a while, so I can hardly be expected to be praising Anglicanism to the skies; at the same time, I do not wish to appear to be bashing Anglicanism. Let me be very clear about this. I spent twenty years as an Anglican before heading back to Rome, half of the canonical period to be spent wandering–but if I was wandering, it wasn’t in a desert. Rather, during those twenty years the Lord led me through green pastures, and by running waters, and blessed me more than I can say. And the tool He used to do it was Anglicanism in general and St. Luke’s in particular. I love the people of St. Luke’s, and I have no quarrel with any of them.

Anyway, here’s what I found. I found a church that in every time period had a strong body of devoted Christians, but no fixed or systematic theology. In one era the most serious tended toward the more Protestant end of the spectrum; in another toward the more Catholic. What there was, was the Book of Common Prayer–by itself almost the entire basis for Anglican unity. Everyone agreed on the Book of Common Prayer…but they didn’t necessarily agree on what it meant. They prayed the same words, but they didn’t necessarily mean the same thing by them. (As an extreme case of these, one book I read, a survey of Anglican theology in the early 20th century, revealed half a dozen distinct meanings for the term “Real Presence”, shading from an almost-but-not-quite-Roman sense to a purely symbolic sense.)

I did not see any general building up of a body of knowledge like the one I found among the Romans. I saw plenty of evidence of Jesus working in the Anglican Church, as various bodies of Anglicans clung to him for dear life–as well they should!–but though I saw evidence of the Lord working through Anglicans, I didn’t see any evidence of Jesus working within Anglicanism as a whole in the sense that I saw Him working within and in preservation of Catholicism. There were great men of God among the Anglicans, and writings of great truth, but nothing that could be described as definitively normative for all Anglicans at all times. At last I was forced to conclude that that wholeness and unity I was looking for simply wasn’t there.

I am quite likely going to be thought unfair by my Anglican brethren, for which I beg forgiveness. They are quite likely right. I like to find evidence that bolsters my preconceptions as much as anyone, and my own desires were seriously in conflict during this period of time. I had found the Church of the See of Rome to be a lovely and glorious thing, and I wanted to be united with it; I’m afraid that deep down, though I didn’t want to leave St. Luke’s, I wanted to find reason to. If I had found reason to stay, I’m not sure what I would have done.

My constant prayer at this point was, “Lord Jesus, if you want us to leave St. Luke’s, to leave the Anglican Communion for Rome, please make it clear. Please make it clear that we should go, and please make it clear where I should take my family on Sundays.”

What I was hoping for was some overt sign…that, maybe, Jane and I would make a new friend, who would invite us to their parish. Really, what I wanted was an engraved invitation from God himself, telling me that the pleasure of our company was requested at such and such a locale. Didn’t happen. What I got was a series of sermons at St. Luke’s, going back, I eventually realized, for at least a year, in which the basic message was this: “You need to step out in faith when God calls. It may be a step out into the darkness. You might not see any floor there to walk on. But you need to step out. If you step out in faith, God will be faithful.” Mind you, Fr. Ron wasn’t intending to encourage us to step right out of the congregation.

Then Fr. Ron left St. Luke’s himself to take on a teaching position at a seminary in England…and the interim pastor hit the same point, only he went a little farther. He said (I paraphrase from memory, and it’s been some weeks) that we often look for signs before stepping out in faith, but that as mature Christians we should be past that. Once we’ve figured out what we need to do, we should just do it.

God had already given me my marching orders. Not through signs or wonders; he’d used the intellect he’d given me, the studying I had done, the conclusions I had come to. I knew the right answer. I loved it; I was afraid of it. My desire to stay at St. Luke’s began to look more like huddling in safety than holding fast to that which is good (though it was very good). God was asking me to step out in faith, trusting in His faithfulness.

Part 7 is here.

Jen at Et Tu has posted the story of how she came to join the Catholic church. Her story is very different than mine, but she runs into some of things I’ve been talking about.