Becoming God's

Hail, Holy Queen

2005-10-26T16:26:00.000-04:00

You have GOT to read this book if you haven't... I already knew I was a Scott Hahn fan before reading this book (afterall, see below about how his conversion story was the first thing that really drew me to Catholicism) but WOW...

Will try to post more specifics later (I've on my third week of being sick with a sinus infection, finished off two different rounds of antibiotics, and still feeling bad enough today to miss class tonight - so if you're reading this and would like to pray for me I'd appreciate it!) So while I'd like to keep my blog a little more regularly updated, it may not happen. (then again, it may happen because I'm stuck in bed bored to death - after all thats when I started it, LOL)

Hmmm....

2005-10-26T12:45:00.000-04:00

Yesterday all of a sudden I had this feeling that I just HAD to tell my parents about my converting to Catholicism - or at least that I was reading about Catholicism and was considering it.

Then it didn't seem like the right time last night by the time I got home from class, and I'm quite hoarse from being sick at the moment which means I really shouldn't be having any long conversations period...

then starting last night I just started getting all these doubts of "what in the world am I thinking" and I don't know - just "feeling" that the Church was not where I should be - I add that because it wasn't doubt about the teachings of the Church (Well not about most of them... i still have a few emotional issues left with the Pope and Mary but they're not really intellectual issues) Still feel a tad bit that way this morning (only its not morning - but when you're sick and end up sleeping 12 hours til 11:15 am, then it still feels like it is!)

Anyway - bought Scott Hahn's Hail Holy Queen yesterday even though I've been avoiding buying Catholic books and have instead been just reading them from the library so my parents wouldn't see them. This was at the time when I felt like I HAD to tell them right away. Still think it might be a good thing - yes its as Catholic as you can get, but it also means (to my parents) thatI am still investigating the Church instead of being ready to jump in (although I probably would if I had already moved out and was in my new town already)

I want a rosary...

2005-10-23T23:12:00.000-04:00

but I am worried about trying to actually get any Catholic objects before I move out of the house. I am pretty sure that I am imagining my parent's reaction being much worse than it will actually be, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea to wait the few months just to avoid such confrontation while I am still living under their roof.

It looks like I may have an opportunity to go to a shrine soon after moving, and I am thinking that I will wait and see if they have any nice rosaries in their shop - theres lots of ones online, but I think it would make it more memorable to get it some place like that.

Until then I am praying it with a cd I made using EWTN mp3 files, and/or using the virtual rosary software at home...

Currently Reading and Patron Saints

2005-10-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

An Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales (available online at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/desales/devout_life.pdf )

I'm really enjoying this - it is well written and reads quite easily. I can't apply all of his ideas until I actually join the Catholic Church, but it is good reading, and I plan to implement them in the future.

I think St. Francis de Sales is going to be one of my honorary patron saints - I'm not going to officially take a male saint - but he seems like a good one for converts from Protestantism, and I like the book.

If you haven't figured out from my screenname, I'm trying to find out more information about St. Angela Merici and St. Catherine of Alexandria as two options for my patron saint. St. Hildegard of Bingen is also there on the list to consider - she was always an interesting character to me in Music History class - and her feast day happens to be the day I really decided I was going to become Catholic, oddly enough - but I haven't found out enough about her either to decide on that (and I didn't add her into my screenname because I hate to admit it, but Hildegard was just too weird a name for me =)

Books Books and More Books

2005-10-23T12:52:00.000-04:00

So then of course, I realized that I was going to have to read some books on Catholicism too. I couldn't buy them all (both for money and for the fact I didn't want to explain them to my parents - I'm living at home during graduate school), so I used interlibrary loan to get most of them. I did buy Catholicism for Dummies though since I hoped it would give me a good enough overview and that it would be the best buy since it was an overview instead of just one topic.

Of the books I interlibrary loaned (most of them on evangelicals converting to Catholicism) I found Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David Currie to be the best. I would never have considered myself a fundamentalist, and the church I grew up in was certainly not when compared to the extreme end of it, but the book really spoke to me. Especially his section about why is sola scriptura not supported by any Bible verses. He never recieved an answer from his former church on the issue, and likewise, I asked the question of my own sunday school teacher who similarly did not have a really good answer for me, he only said that well Catholics should prove their view, that we don't need to prove sola scriptura by way of Bible verses, and promised to find me some information that he had on the topic. I have yet to hear anything more about it from him.

The site that really changed it all....

2005-10-23T12:18:00.000-04:00

So I was reading all these websites and was finding that the Catholic Church seemed like it was a possibility, but I was still not so sure about some of the theological issues. Then I came across the Coming Home Network's webpage. They had a bunch of conversion stories on their website so I decided to look at a few. I first read Marcus Grodi's conversion story and was facinated by the fact that he went and heard this otherminister who had converted, Scott Hahn. So I looked back at the page and found that they had Scott Hahn's story as well.

This is the second time that I just FELT something amazing as I read (the first being when I read Girl Meets God several months before). Scott had actually come to the Catholic Church FOR theological reasons? He didn't decide to convert and then have to work out the theological issues, rather he converted because of them. And when it got down to it, it MADE SENSE. He spoke of transubstantiation, which I thought was going to be my biggest theological issue, and you know what, it really does make more sense Biblically! This didn't of course convince me of everything - in this small version of his conversion story he does not go into all the distinctively Catholic theological principles, but it was enough to make me sit back and go "woah! I think I'm becoming a Catholic!"

http://www.chnetwork.org/scotthconv.htm

So I began to search the internet...

2005-10-23T12:03:00.000-04:00

So I decided to do a little looking around the internet for information on Catholicism. I was shocked to find out that many of the things that my father had been taught as a child about the Catholic Church (his family was Catholic - but not very active in the Church) were completely not what the Church actually teaches. I was also shocked to find that the Catholic Church, despite there being a lot of liberal Catholics was actually as a whole standing up for moral issues, and that there was a large number of very devout, very orthodox Catholics online.

The first thought of Catholicism

2005-10-23T11:56:00.000-04:00

So at this point, I was really just feeling that I was going to have to determine what denomination was really going to be a good "fit," but feeling that this might be harder than one would expect.

About this time I got into a discussion with a Catholic friend at school. I was commenting on the fact that one day I would like to go to a Mass in Polish just for the fact of getting to hear the language, and sort of getting a better idea of the church of my ancestors. She said that she really thought if I had never been to a Catholic mass that I ought to go. I then happened to ask whether Catholics believed in free will or predestination. The fact that Catholics were pretty much on the free will side made me stop and think. At the time I didn't really think there was much chance I would actually decide to become Catholic, but - I thought - maybe its as good a choice as any to investigate.

Prayer from St. Thomas Aquinas

2005-10-23T01:07:00.000-04:00

And because I found this other prayer that is appropriate for graduate students at approximately this point chronologically in my journey I wanted to share it with you all here:

Ineffable Creator,
Who, from the treasures of your wisdom,
has established three hierarchies of angels,
has arrayed them in marvelous order
above the fiery heavens,
and has marshaled the regions
of the universe with such artful skill,

You are proclaimed
the true font of light and wisdom
and the primal origin
raised high beyond all things.

Pour forth a ray of your brightness
into the darkened places of my mind,
disperse from my soul
the twofold darkness into which I was born:
sin and ignorance.

You make eloquent the tongues of infants
Refine my speech
and pour forth upon my lips
the goodness of Your blessing.

Grant to me
keenness of mind,
capacity to remember,
skill in learning,
subtlety to interpret,
and eloquence in speech.

May you
guide the beginning of my work,
direct its progress,
and bring it to completion.

You who are true God and true Man,
Who live and reign, world without end.

Amen.

I investigate the Episcopal church

2005-10-23T00:39:00.000-04:00

So, of course, since Lauren Winner is an Episcopal, I decide, well maybe I should do a little research on the Episcopal church. Well of course, in the process I run into their "issues" at the moment on certain moral issues, and the fact that at least in America, most Episcopal churches are becoming more and more liberal. Now while I may not be as conservative as my parents or the church I grew up in... that was still just too much for me. And it seemed pretty apparent that most of the "high church" protestant denominations were that way (and/or they believed in predestination - which I can't agree with).

So then I'm stuck. I really don't feel that I fit in with the church I grew up in, nor the one I am currently attending. Yet I don't know where I will fit. Luckily I will be graduating and moving soon which would make actually trying different churches much more doable, so I kind of set my mind on trying them all out at that point, and maybe do a little research on them in the mean time. But I'm still stuck as to finding a liturgical church that doesn't have so many moral issues up for debate at the moment.

Venerable Bede

2005-10-23T00:33:00.000-04:00

as a somewhat aside in the midst of my attempt to catch the blog up on my journey, I just wanted to go ahead and post this prayer written by the Venerable Bede:

"I pray You, nobel Jesu, that as You have graciously granted me joyfully to imbibe the words of Your Knowledge, so You will also in Your bounty grant me to come at length to Yourself, the fount of all wisdom, and to dwell in Your presence forever."

I found this thanks to Lauren Winner who quoted it in her book, and I fell in love for the same reasons she mentions in her statement about it: "That prayer is why I love Bede. Because he knew that knowledge and books were just a nice way to fill the time until he came to dwell with Jesus. It is a good prayer for a graduate student."

(PS Lauren, if you ever come by my site (since I plan to be able to post comments to your blog now that I'm a blogger member) I apologize for posting these two quotes (this one and the one in my first post about your book) and hope you won't make me take them down - I promise no more quotes!)

The book that started it all...

2005-10-23T00:25:00.000-04:00

I date the beginning of this portion of my journey to my reading Lauren Winner's memoir Girl Meets God. I had not had such a spirtual experience in quite a long time. It actually scared me a good deal because I was worried that there was a lot of spiritual warfare going on. Actually I don't think there was as much as I thought - though I'm sure there was some - it was more the "old me" fighting with the "new me." I found my self strangely drawn to her descriptions of liturgy. I found myself with pretty much no prayer life at all, and she seemed to find liturgy good in that sense. She states that "I find liturgy...as bland as macaroni and cheese, but I would have no prayer life without it."

There was a lot of other things in her memoir that spoke to me, but the fact that her descriptions of liturgy actually made sense was the biggest thing. For you see I had grown up - while never being told or taught that liturgy was bad - feeling that liturgy just was wrong. To me, having grown up in a very non-liturgical church, "reading" a prayer was an insult in my mind. Afterall, you wouldn't read a conversation to your best friend would you? And since prayer was supposed to be like talking to God in that same sense, then liturgy made no sense to me. But - when it came down to it - talking to God like he's sitting there in the room with you - it really didn't help me pray any - it obviously wasn't working for me, and when I read Lauren's book, I thought "well maybe that would help."

Explanation of this Blog (well sort of...)

2005-10-23T00:14:00.000-04:00

I want to use this blog to record my spiritual journey. Well some of it has already happened so I'm going to have to try to back up and play catch up. For a real basic introduction, I grew up in an evangelical denomination, "saved" at age 4, attended a private Christian high school and college. I'm not going to try and journal that part of my journey. I'm going to start this with where I think it started back in March, even though I had no clue it was going to take the turn it has, its still pretty clear to me that thats where it started...

Re: Blog Title

2005-10-22T17:01:00.000-04:00

I took my blog's title from the following quote from Rich Mullins' sister Debbie: "A lot of people ask if he was becoming Catholic. I tell them he wasn't becoming anything but God's." (p.55 of Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven by James Bryan Smith).

I thought this was a great quote. You will quickly find that I have created this blog to follow my strange journey towards Catholicism I seem to be on. And yet the thing is I don't think the above quote should be offensive to Catholics. We may disagree with Rich's decision not to join the Catholic Church, but ultimately, what we do want to be is God's child.