Catholic

Don’t try to change your religion …

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My husband once went to listen to a talk by a Buddhist monk who was speaking at an inter-religious event. The monk told a hall full of people that they shouldn’t try to change their religion. Instead he recommended people to work within the religion in which they were brought up in order to find God.

I can see where he was coming from, because I know first hand how difficult it is to make a radical change in your religious views. I refuse to say that I changed my religion, because I was brought up in a Christian church and I have recently been received into a different Christian church.
All the same, I’ve had to make some drastic changes in my religious outlook. When I was a child, Catholics were talked about in the same way as the poor pagans in Africa. By the time I was a teenager, a few more thoughtful people in our church were beginning to say that there might be a few true believers within the Catholic church. When I announced that I wanted to marry a Catholic, I was warned about marrying into a different religion. In practice, however, my family were incredibly generous and accepting of my husband and his family.
All the same, it’s one thing to marry a Catholic and quite another to decide to become Catholic yourself. Most people won’t do what I did, because it’s too darn difficult. On the positive side, I had years of being married into a Catholic family who turned out to be, well, normal. They didn’t seem to worship images or even to worship Mary. Among my in-laws were several nuns and a priest, who visited us regularly in the early years of our marriage. On the other side of the balance, I still had my anti-Catholic attitudes. Every week I longed to go to Mass, but when I tried to actually go, it was incredibly difficult. I felt as if I was wading through a thick sludge of anti-Catholic prejudice.

I don’t know if God expects most of us to change religions. I prefer to think that, like the father in the parable of the lost son, he comes out to the fields to meet us where we are rather, than expecting us to come into his house before he’ll even talk to us. After all, his house might seem strange and foreign and frightening to people who’re not used to it.
However, I do think that we are all asked to stick our heads over the barriers which divide us. We are asked to talk to our neighbours without attaching conditions or demanding that they cross over into our territory before we begin a conversation. In short, we’re asked to love.

One of my closest friends changed religions when she was young. She is now eighty years old and her freedom to get about and do things has shrunk in many ways. However, she often tells me how grateful she is to God for giving her this period of her life. She is thankful each day for little things. No longer under pressure to achieve, she is content to just be and accept her life as it is.
This lady was brought up with a very harsh version of Catholicism and decided as a teenager to leave the church. She found it impossible to live without some sort of spirituality, and when she discovered Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, she realised that she had found her spiritual path. I was nervous about telling her that I had decided to become Catholic, because I didn’t know if old hurts would make her bitter. However, she wrote the following in her letter:
I hope that you find in this church everything which you have already sought. Religions for me are just different ways to HIM, who has no name, no form and no colour. In the deepest centre, in the mystical heart of every religion, we find the same thing. That is the wonder of mysticism. It should not lead to religious wars and conversions. In this place we are all brothers and sisters, and we sing and dance to praise HIM in our different ways and yet together.

More thoughts about Ash Wednesday

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I was quite a way through the day before I found out that Catholics are supposed to fast on Ash Wednesday. It was a bit too late by then, but how was I supposed to know when no-one had told me? I guess that Catholic converts are supposed to just pick up these things as they go along. I’d probably have run a mile if I’d been handed a manual of rules when I decided to become Catholic, so it’s just as well that I wasn’t.
I guess that the rules only make sense if they help you get to the spirit of what’s behind them. Many years ago, when I married, people wondered if I was going to become Catholic like my husband. My reaction was, “No chance. Why would I exchange one traditional church and its heavy burden of rules with another?”
Now I’ve come full circle. I didn’t keep rules (apart from traffic ones) for many years. I no longer feel I have to keep religious rules to please other people, or because I’m scared of the consequences of breaking them. I could just ignore this new set of rules, but if I did, maybe I would miss out on an important lesson which the rule is trying to teach me. Somewhere in the middle, between keeping rules for the wrong reason and ignoring them altogether, is a very narrow path where keeping the rule leads to a deeper understanding of some aspect of faith.
Why do religion at all? Is it for the show of the thing, or for the spirit? God is bigger than all of our religions, but without the discipline of some kind of religious practice can we really know God? I’m sure that we can have some knowledge of God without religion, but will we be challenged to go further? I don’t know the answers. I’m just throwing up questions here.
How long are you supposed to keep the ashes on your forehead? There’s another question I don’t know the answer to. I didn’t want to wipe them off right after leaving church, and so I walked home through our mainly Protestant town, with a hat that didn’t quite pull down all the way to my eyebrows. I’ve made some mental notes to prepare for Ash Wednesday next year:
1 Grow a long fringe and/or
2 Bring a low brimmed hat to church

Queuing up for ashes

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Today I queued up to receive ashes on my forehead. I’ve stood in line for cinema tickets, at supermarket tills, at airport check-in desks and, only recently, to receive the Eucharist. This is the first time I’ve joined people quietly waiting their turn to receive a sign of penance and be reminded of their mortality.
I haven’t been too sure about Ash Wednesday. It seemed like another strange thing which Catholics do and Protestants don’t. Becoming a Catholic is like entering a foreign country where people have different customs which I’m struggling to follow. It’s a very humbling to be probably at least half-way through my life and realise that I have so much to learn.
I wondered if I would go to the church today. I was curious, but a little bit scared, because it wasn’t a regular Saturday evening or Sunday morning Mass. I asked myself, as I often do, what’s the point of going to church not just on Ash Wednesday, but on any day at all.
Last year, I went to Mass on Easter Sunday for the first time in my life. The church was packed and there was an incredible feeling of joy and celebration. It wasn’t quite my first Easter Sunday service ever, but I hadn’t attended many because Easter wasn’t celebrated in the church I grew up in.
I decided today that I can’t expect to understand the full meaning of the Easter celebrations if I don’t also take part in Ash Wednesday and Lent. After I got over hoping no-one noticed that I didn’t know what to do, I was glad that I went. The church was solemn and quiet and I felt that we are all in this together, struggling, failing, and yet still turning towards God. I had read that last year’s Easter palms were burnt to make the ashes we received, and I thought about how sorrow and joy are often closely interlinked.
I was glad that I made the effort to go out today, because it was a chance to set aside other things for a short while and be silent. Sometimes my mind wanders and nothing seems to happen when I go to Mass, but how do I know what God is doing in the times I am quiet and empty? I can’t pretend to understand what it’s all about, but in accepting the ashes I acknowledged that my own efforts aren’t enough. I didn’t create myself and ultimately, as a friend of mine once said to me, we’re not the ones in charge. The smudge of ashes on my forehead was a reminder that I need to make space for God.

Jumping up or reaching down?

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I went to school at a time when it was fashionable not to teach grammar. The theory was that as long as we could speak, read and write English, we would get through life. I arrived in secondary school knowing what a verb and a noun was, but that was about it. The poor lady who had the job of trying to teach us French was shocked that we didn’t know the difference between an advert and a preposition. She finally accepted that she would have to give us some English grammar lessons before she had a hope of trying to get us to understand French grammar.

In the same way, I only started learning Protestant theology when I began investigating Catholicism, in order to try to understand the similarities and the differences. As a child and young adult in the Protestant church, I had a good knowledge of what we believed, but I didn’t understand why we believed what we did. Theology is a bit like grammar. It takes what we do unconsciously and analyses it to understand the structure and the reasons behind it.

One of the big Protestant-Catholic differences which was flagged up in the books I read was the Protestant belief that we are saved by grace alone versus the Catholic belief that salvation is an ongoing process. Have I got that right? I’m not sure, and I get into such knots thinking about this that I am wondering whether the two positions are always so far apart when it comes to practical experience. I’m not going to discuss grace versus works from a theoretical viewpoint. However, I’d like to just say a few words from a personal point of view.

If someone had told me that we are saved by grace alone, when I was still in the Protestant church, I would probably have been quite surprised, and perhaps even annoyed, because it felt as if salvation was hard work. It seemed as if I was standing on tiptoes, with my hands in the air, and jumping up and trying to touch the sky. I knew that I would never manage to please God, but I had to try, because not making any effort would make Him even angrier …

This feeling of always trying and hopelessly failing was probably the main reason I left the church in which I was brought up.
I felt great relief, when I began learning about the Catholic Sacraments. I no longer had to try to do the impossible and stretch up and touch the sky, because God, through Christ, was willing to reach down and bridge the gap. All I had to do was open my arms and be ready to receive. Long before I became Catholic, I felt as if I could bring my struggles and the things which were bothering me to Mass. In abandoning myself to God, I could let go of my worries and failures and trust that God would do the rest. That’s what grace means to me.

I found this quote by one of the Greek fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, which describes how God reaches down to us:

So let us stretch ourselves in prayers upward to the more lofty elevation of the kindly Rays of God. Imagine a great shining chain hanging downward from the heights of heaven to the world below. We grab hold of it with one hand and then another, and we seem to be pulling it down towards us. Actually it is already there on the heights and down below and instead of pulling it to us we are being lifted upwards to that brilliance above, to the dazzling light of those beams.

Can I do Catholic-lite?

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When I looked into becoming a Catholic, I thought that I could do Catholic-lite. I wanted to take the parts which were most similar to the Protestant tradition, such as the Gospel teachings, and leave out the uncomfortable extras such as saints and devotion to Mary. It was a bit like choosing a diet version of a cheese spread which claims to have half the fat, and expecting it to have all the taste and goodness of the full fat version.
In the last few months, it’s become increasingly clear that Catholic-lite isn’t an option, as I’ve been gently nudged towards the things I find most challenging.
A few months ago, I was browsing a Catholic blog on the internet and was astounded to find out that the Rosary contains a series of meditations on the Gospel. That might seem obvious to people brought up Catholic, but I didn’t really know anything about the Rosary apart from a vague idea that it had something to do with ‘praying to Mary’.
The same still voice which had planted the desire to become Catholic now made the suggestion that I should learn to pray the Rosary. By this time, I knew better than to argue with this voice, even though this idea was very challenging for someone brought up in a very reformed tradition. I tried to compromise. Acquiring Rosary beads was just a step to far, they were just too Catholic a symbol, but I would learn to pray the Rosary.
I began meditating on one mystery a day, praying while I was walking the dog, or at night when I couldn’t sleep. I used my fingers to count off the prayers. I was surprised, and even slightly embarrassed, to realise that I found this method of prayer comforting, and not in the least repetitive or boring. As a Protestant, I hadn’t given much thought to Mary’s role in the Gospel story. Because I was saying the Hail Mary, it seemed natural to imagine some of the Gospel scenes from her point of view, and I gained new insights. I also realised that I have sometimes viewed Christ as a vague divine figure who floated around first century Palestine with his feet hardly touching the ground. Praying the Rosary has helped me to consider Christ’s humanity as well as his divinity.
Although I began to see all these benefits, I still resisted getting the Rosary beads. However, they came to me without me even trying. My husband was away on a work trip and the night before he came back, I woke up in the night with a very strong image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. It was so vivid that when I got up in the morning, I looked up the passage in John 10 about Jesus as the Good Shepherd. That evening, as my husband unpacked his bags, he tossed me a plastic case with a brightly coloured picture of Pope Francis on the top. Inside were Rosary beads and on the crucifix was a tiny image of Christ carrying a lamb with a flock of sheep behind him.
I laughed, with joy because I realised that I was finally ready for these beads, with humour because my husband had probably deliberately given me the most Catholic-looking symbol he could find, and with thankfulness for the image of the good shepherd which seemed to be God’s way of saying that it was okay for me to pray the Rosary, even if I had been brought up Protestant.

Why on earth do I want to start a blog?

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When I first became aware of blogs about ten years ago, I wondered why on earth people would waste their time writing open letters about their lives on the internet. Blogging held no appeal for me even though I have always liked to write. I was busy trying to figure out what to do with small children and didn’t have time to even read blogs never mind write one. During my children’s pre-school years, I went from being able to write computer code and design web pages, to becoming someone who struggles to send a text message. My phone is ten years old and I am afraid to update it in case I can’t figure out how to actually use it. Okay, I know. All I have to do is hand the new phone over to the kids and they will have it sorted within minutes. However, they may also download games, redesign the background and set the ring tone to rude noises.

My attitude to blogs has changed. Over the last year or so, I have found myself surfing the web and reading about other people’s experiences on blogs and other sites. I was faced with a difficult decision and by searching the internet, I was hoping to make a connection with others who might have been in the same position.

I had heard a still, small voice suggesting that I should become Catholic. This was not easy to deal with as I had been brought up in Scotland in a very reformed Protestant tradition. For a while, I did nothing and told nobody. After six months, the thought still hadn’t gone away, and so I told my husband, a cradle Catholic. After that I told the parish priest. Apart from a handful of close friends, I told no-one else until I had made a definite decision to be received into the church.

There were no RCIA classes running in my parish, and so I had no opportunity to meet other prospective converts although the local priest was very good about making time to answer my questions. Unable to talk to anyone in the same position or who had recently gone through the same thing, I searched on the internet, looking up the blogs of recent or prospective converts, or reading the many sites which gave conversion stories. Whilst these stories were often helpful, the problem I came up against was that most of these people were living in the United States and came from quite a different culture and outlook even if they had also started in the Protestant tradition. It was very difficult to find stories about people who had come to Catholicism from a Scottish Protestant background.

That little thought about becoming Catholic wouldn’t go away, and I was received into the church very recently. Since then, I have felt joy about this great gift, confusion about what to do with it and loneliness. It’s a difficult thing to talk about. Perhaps these things are easier to share in a reflective way in writing. I’m starting this blog because I want to communicate what happened and what is happening in my life as a new Catholic. Maybe there are a few other people out there who will see some connections with their own experience.