Am I Protestant or Catholic? I’ve been received into the Catholic church, but as far as identity goes, this isn’t an easy question to answer. Over the past few weeks I’ve had exhausting dreams in which I’ve been attending Mass, and then rushing off to go to one or other of the Protestant churches I attended as a child.

When I decided to become Catholic, my husband, who was raised Catholic, warned me that I would always remain Protestant. At the time, I dismissed his comment, because I had been through huge changes in my thinking and beliefs. I felt that I was already more Catholic than Protestant.

Now that all the excitement and euphoria and challenge and worry of converting has died down, I realise that he made a very astute comment. I was brought up steeped in the Highland Protestant tradition. From my mannerisms and background, people assume that I am Protestant, and in a way they are right. I can’t change the fact that my Protestant background is woven into me, a fundamental part of my identity.

I have chosen to become Catholic, or perhaps it is better to say that I was invited to become Catholic; the idea certainly didn’t originate with me. After making a long hard journey into the church, it is painful to realise that Catholics will always spot me as someone who wasn’t brought up in their tradition. Sometimes I feel as if I am going around with a label pinned to my back which reads ‘Brought up Protestant’. Not only that, people in the know can often work out, after a short conversation, exactly which flavour of Scottish Protestant.

Where am I in all this, caught between two traditions and not really belonging in either? Before I was received into the church, a priest told me that I would always have my Protestant identity. He said that becoming Catholic was like adding another layer of clothing on top of the Protestant layer on which was already there. He told me that I didn’t need to lose my Protestant identity, or try to distance myself from it. His words gave me comfort at a time when I was worried that I was betraying the people who had loved me and brought me up and taught me to worship God in a particular kind of way.

I understand better now that I can’t and shouldn’t try to remove that Protestant layer, even though it can at times feel so deep and strong that I wonder if I really am in any way Catholic. In Mass recently, I had an image of the Protestant part of me as being like a thick, deep layer of soil. Into that grows a Catholic root, long and strong enough to go right through the soil, down to the core of my being, the quiet place where God speaks and identity no longer matters.

I need the soil to nourish the plant, as well as the plant to bring life to the soil.

So, am I Protestant, or am I Catholic? The best answer I can give is that I am both, but that I am a practising Catholic. That is confusing and difficult for me, and perhaps also for other people, but I hope that God works in the pain and the discomfort of being neither completely one thing or the other.