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.

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

St. Paul tells us, “Test everything; hold fast to what is good.” Intellectually, and practically, Catholicism seemed to do this. As an example, consider virtue. Or, rather, a virtue. Bravery, say. What is it? According to the Catholic tradition, which goes back to antiquity (to Aristotle, as a matter of fact), a virtue is, simply enough, a good habit. If you have the virtue of bravery, that means that you are in the habit of standing firm in times of danger, even though you are afraid. If you have the virtue of honesty, that means that you are in the habit of telling the truth, even though it might benefit you to lie.

This is important. This description of virtue not only tells me what virtue is; it tells me how to get it. How can I become brave? By getting in the habit of behaving bravely. And how can I do that? By choosing to stand firm when the going gets tough. I can start with small things, indeed I’ll have to start with small things. Major battles don’t come every day. But if I can get in the habit of standing firm, then when the crisis comes and there is no time to think, I can trust that my established habits will take over and I will do the right thing. The same applies to honesty, chastity, or any other virtue.

Now, this is basic moral philosophy. But despite my having been a Christian my entire life, and having been actively involved in a church for all of my adult life, I’d never heard virtue described in that way–to the extent it was talked about at all.

But the Roman Catholic writers I was reading all seemed to take it as a matter of course. They referred to it, and they all seemed to be on the same page. And when I thought about it, so was C.S. Lewis. In his writings, though, he tends to avoid using the standard well-known terms so as to present the material freshly, as he does in The Abolition of Man where he spends an entire book writing about the Natural Law and never once uses the term. For this is basic moral philosophy, and it used to be that everyone knew it. And yet I hadn’t, despite having every opportunity. But the Catholic bloggers and writers did.

This is a humble example, but it illustrates my point. The Catholic tradition tests everything and holds on to what is good. I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that every Roman Catholic knows these things, or that the definition of virtue is preached in every parish. But this wealth of knowledge is readily available if you look for it, and it’s all of a piece. It hangs together.

It’s hard to find this kind of unity of thought in Protestantism. There’s unity on basic things, but there are so many different streams of theology in Protestantism that unity is not to be looked for; and then there’s the tendency of Protestants (myself not excluded) when presented with an issue to pick up the Bible, find something that applies, and wing it.

As I commented in the previous post, it was at about this time that I read Mark Shea’s By What Authority: An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition. Mark points out the verse from Matthew, “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” and observes that here Jesus is promising to look after his church…which should include preserving it from error.

Oh, dear. And that accumulated body of Catholic tradition made it appear that perhaps this was true. That perhaps the Roman Catholic Church really was the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and that Jesus had really taken special care of it over the last 2000 years.

This was a glorious and dreadful thought. Glorious, because of the vision of God’s power working through the sweep of history to preserve His church, His body, from error; dreadful, because, of course, I was Anglican rather than Roman Catholic.

And I mean really, truly dreadful. I discussed my thinking with a close friend of ours, who told me (more or less), “I hear what you’re saying, but don’t forget the importance of Christian community. You’ve got a great community there at St. Luke’s–can you find that in a Catholic parish?” I won’t try to tell Jane’s story here, as mine is complicated enough, but it suffices to say that she shared this concern–in spades. Anyway, I didn’t want to be Catholic. I love St. Luke’s; I love the people at St. Luke’s; I love the worship at St. Luke’s; and Jesus is clearly both sought and found at St. Luke’s. Jane had attended there from a child, we were married there, our four children were baptized there, we’d taken our stand for orthodoxy there when we’d voted to leave the Episcopal Church and take refuge in the Anglican Church of Uganda.

But of course, Anglicanism is a branch of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. So I’d always been taught; couldn’t I claim the same tradition while remaining at St. Luke’s?

Part 6 is here.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.

I first met Chesterton when I was in college, via the Father Brown stories. One of the advisors to our IVCF group suggested the The Man Who Was Thursday, which I read and mostly failed to appreciate; and I recall picking up The Everlasting Man and finding it not at all like Mere Christianity as I had been led to believe. In fact, I found it impenetrable…which given my gross lack of familiarity with the intellectual currents in which Chesterton swam is unsurprising. Despite that unpromising beginning, I found myself picking up the occasional book now and then, as I ran across them–Four Faultless Felons, Orthodoxy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Heretics, and so on–and eventually I put my hand on Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, a figure I knew virtually nothing about. I bought the book mostly because it was by Chesterton, and I was in a book-buying mood.

And I was enchanted. I’m afraid most of the actual facts swept past, borne rushing away on Chesterton’s glorious stream of verbiage, but the fundamental sanity of St. Thomas shone clearly through.

Some background is needed. The “Philosophy 101” class I’d took as an undergrad spent a fair amount of time on Plato, then slid right over Aristotle and Aquinas to Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Kant, and Marx. Hume was the sticking point for me. He insisted that all knowledge comes from sense-experience, and then, as I recall, concluded that alas! we really can’t trust our sense experience either. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying.) In the end, he concluded that, consequently, we can’t really know much of anything for sure. He called this a conclusion; I called it an absurdity.
I was, in fact, completely disgusted. I left college with not much use for philosophy and a definite sense that any system of thought that regarded objective reality as something that needed to be proven wasn’t worth spending my time on. And all of the modern philosophers we studied, from Descartes on, seemed to start with the assumption that such proof was necessary (”cogito ergo sum”). And later philosophers, I found out, mostly started with the assumption that such proof was impossible.

Aquinas, though, and Aristotle before him, they took objective reality as a given! The world doesn’t need to be proven; it amply demonstrates itself. This was a shock and a delight. At last, here were philosophers that it might be worth my time to listen to. Not just then, of course, because I was ”so” frightfully busy, but I resolved, someday, to spend some time with Aquinas and see what he had to say. Not immediately; it sounded like rather a major project. But someday.

Then I noticed that several of the bloggers I was reading, notably Mark Shea and Tom of Disputations, quoted Aquinas (and Chesterton!) from time to time, and not just as an interesting nugget but in the heat of argument. (It was also at about this time that I read Mark’s By What Authority and Peter Kreeft’s Back to Virtue.) It also began to seem to me that they had deeper wells of argument to draw from than many of the other bloggers I was reading, that they were standing on deeper and firmer intellectual foundations. What were those foundations? Where did they come from? And for the first time I really came face-to-face with the intellectual tradition of Roman Catholicism.

Let me digress for a moment. People often want religion to be simple, but as Lewis noted that’s the point: nothing real is simple. Physics isn’t simple; chemistry isn’t simple; things that are real are complicated. If Christianity is true, we ought to expect it to be complicated, with lots of intricate little details and occasional results of elegance, beauty and deceptive simplicity. Now, our knowledge of Physics and Chemistry accumulates. No one expects a budding physicist to work it all out from scratch; instead, there are these neat things called “textbooks” that contain the basics of the field and then build on them. If Christianity is real, we should expect to be able to do the same thing, and with more reason. If God is all-good and unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then a truth once learned can and should be held onto. We might, over time, find that “it’s more complicated than that”, we might need to develop our knowledge further, as Einstein revised Newton (though even Newton gets the job done for many practical purposes).

And in the books and web pages I was reading, I thought, I was beginning to see the outlines of such an accumulated body of knowledge.

Part 5 is here.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.

In 1997 everything changed. Our first son was born that year, and though we continued faithfully attending St. Luke’s every Sunday our lives were (and are) consumed with parenthood. Coincidentally, it was also at about this time (December of 1996, actually) that I began posting book reviews on line–but I digress. And so we were more or less distracted until 2003, when Gene Robinson was elected and consecrated the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, an event that polarized–and well-nigh created–the Anglican Blogosphere. I don’t see any value in rehashing all of the details here; if you’ve not been following along, I’ll simply note that the events of 2003 revealed that the division in the Anglican Communion on matters of sexuality, biblical interpretation, and Christian orthodoxy was far deeper and wider than most of us had realized up until that time. Kendall Harmon, who blogs at Titus OneNine, dubbed the two camps the “reappraisers” (those who wish to interpret scripture in accord with modern needs) and the “reasserters” (those who wish to interpret scripture as the Church has always interpreted scripture).

Jane and I, along with most of the people at St. Luke’s, were and are firmly in the “reasserters” camp. The phrase our pastor used was “biblical orthodoxy”–at St. Luke’s, as at a handful of other parishes in our diocese, we would strive to be “biblically orthodox”. And that was well and good. “Biblically orthodox” described in a nutshell what we wanted to be, and what the reappraisers did not seem to care about.

Only, what did it mean? What did being “biblically orthodox” entail? Being true to the scriptures, obviously; but what were the specifics? The Nicene Creed was involved, and I knew something about that and what it meant and where it came from; but the “reappraisers” also recited the Nicene Creed. In the end, I decided that Kendall Harmon had it right: to be a “reasserter” was to interpret scripture as the Church has always interpreted scripture. So…how had the Church always interpreted scripture?

I’m a bit of a history buff, and I’d read quite a bit about the Roman world during the time the Christian faith was born, but I’d never boned up on the Early Church in the years following the Acts of the Apostles. I resolved to remedy that. One of the books I read was Rod Bennett’s Four Witnesses, a book about four of the earliest of the Church Fathers: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Bennett’s book includes a biographical sketch of each along with excerpts from their writings. Not coincidentally, he shows how their writings span the first two hundred years of the Church’s history, and how each was in a position to receive the gospel either from the apostles (Clement came to Rome during Peter’s lifetime) or from those who had known them. Bennett, in fact, details the workings of the Apostolic Succession during those early days.

At the end of the volume, Bennett tells some of his story. He came to the Fathers from a Baptist background, looking for answers to some questions he had…and once they’d been answered to his satisfaction he was a Roman Catholic. (As Lewis noted, a young man can’t be too careful about the books he reads.)

Hmmm. I was not entirely surprised; here were bishops, deacons, and priests as an essential part of the Church, and here was Justin Martyr’s description of the mass, which might as well have been a description of the mass I attended right up until I got married. But Anglicanism also has bishops, deacons, and priests and claims the Apostolic Succession. So that was OK.

In addition to reading about the Early Church, I was also reading widely in the Anglican Blogosphere, just to keep up with the news. In addition to Titus OneNine, Chris Johnson’s Midwest Conservative Journal, and Captain Yips, all blogs I still look at daily, there was one by an anonymous Episcopal Priest who called himself the “Pontificator”. He was involved in a detailed investigation of Anglicanism and whether it could truly be considered a branch of the Catholic (i.e., “Universal”) Church, along side the Roman Catholic church and the various Orthodox churches. In time he concluded that it could not, and swam across the Tiber. This was somewhat distressing, as my original entry into the Episcopal Church had been based on the (not particularly well-researched) assumption that it could.

There were two other threads that worked their way into my thinking at this time. In addition to reading Anglican blogs I’d done a fair amount of surfing around and reading other Christian bloggers, and much to my surprise the ones I found myself going back to time and again, outside of those listed above, were the Catholic blogs, especially those of Mark Shea and Amy Welborn. Mark was genuinely funny, and was also, like the Anglican blogs I was reading, fighting the good fight for Orthodoxy. There was a difference, though: Mark generally entered the fray cheerfully and with gusto, rather than without the anger and frustration I was used to hearing from the Anglican bloggers, nor was he distracted by every little shift in the wind among the major Anglican players. It was refreshing. And Amy somehow managed to maintain a thoroughly irenic tone, even while dealing with contentious issues.

The other thread began with G.K. Chesterton.

Part 4 is here.

Part 1 is here.

So I swam the Thames and settled down to being married.

Much happened over the next ten years. Jane and I involved ourselves with the daily life at St. Luke’s: we both served on Sundays as chalice bearers, we attended (and, upon occasion led) weekly bible studies, we went on retreats, we made our Cursillos and were subsequently active in the Cursillo community in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Looking back, there were two trends of note during this time. First, the teaching at St. Luke’s moved from the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum towards the Evangelical Protestant end of the spectrum under the influence of such men of God as Frank Lyons, then our associate pastor and now Anglican Bishop of Bolivia, Praveen Bunyan, later rector for a time of St. James Church in Newport Beach, and Ron Jackson, our rector for many years, who has recently been called to a teaching position at Trinity Seminary in England. I learned a great deal from all of them, and owe them all a great debt of gratitude for their teaching, friendship, and wise counsel over the years.

As the teaching became more Evangelical so bit by bit did my own personal understanding of Christianity move away from the Catholicism of my youth, until finally I ran into Calvinism and rebounded. (I’m tempted to say “recoiled”, but I have too many friends and acquaintances who profess some form of Calvinism to put it quite that strongly, and in any event I’ve promised to keep to a positive note in this series of essays.) I say “rebounded” because when I first came seriously to with the tenets of Calvinism I discovered that I simply could not accept them. Accordingly to Calvin and his followers, each human being is either saved or damned from all eternity. The Damned can do nothing to achieve salvation, and the Elect can do nothing to lose their salvation. I found that I simply could not believe this. It’s clear to me that I cannot save myself, that salvation is the gift of Jesus through his death and resurrection…but it’s equally clear to me that I can refuse to receive that gift. A man stranded on a rooftop during a flood might be unable to swim to safety, and yet still (through fear, or underestimating the danger) refuse to be rescued. If he stays on that rooftop, he will surely die…and he can choose to do so. At the same time, it was clear that Calvinism was an intellectually clear and internally consistent statement of Christian faith, a faith that had sustained many Christian communities over the years. From an intellectual point of view, it was a great pity that I couldn’t accept it; but I couldn’t. In the end, the effect of this discovery was that I began reflecting on the intellectual basis for my faith and reconsidering my easy slide away from Anglo-Catholicism.

The second trend was the discovery, through my participation in the larger community and attendance at two or three diocesan conventions, of troubling currents in the teaching of the Episcopal Church in general and the Diocese of Los Angeles in particular. The presenting issue was homosexuality, but it became clear over time that there was more going on: John Shelby Spong, the Bishop of Newark, had, in addition to being a staunch supporter of the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church, had also written books in which he had explicitly denied the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, indeed, all the major points of the Nicene Creed. And yet he was still a bishop, and (so far as I could tell) honored by his colleagues in the House of Bishops. And from what I could tell at diocesan convention, there were many in our diocese that felt the same way.

I spent considerable time wrestling with the issue of homosexuality, but none wrestling with Spong’s open rejection of the Creed. I think now, as I thought then, that if he could not in good conscience uphold the beliefs he had vowed to uphold at his ordination and consecration, then in good conscience he should resign his position and leave the church. And I simply could not understand how such open and explicit apostasy could be so easily tolerated. But I took refuge in the thought that the Dioceses of Los Angeles and Newark were aberrations, and that the true faith, so clearly taught at St. Luke’s, was also taught in the wider Episcopal Church.

Part 3 is here.