A Saint or a Hippopotamus?

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I didn’t give saints much thought until a week before I was received into the church when Father K, our parish priest, asked me if I had an attachment to any particular saint. He might as well have asked me if I had considered keeping a hippopotamus in a tank at the bottom of the garden and if so, what did I intend to call it. I admitted that I was completely ignorant about saints and he suggested St. Bridget, who, I guess, is the fallback saint for clueless Celtic Protestants like me. St Bridget sounded nice, but I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t bother to find out anything about her.
I had a last minute panic on the morning I was supposed to be received into the church. Was I going to be called Bridget during the ceremony? What if I felt afterwards as if some stranger called Bridget had been received into the church instead of me? Seasoned Catholics will probably see this worry as being as naïve as Paddington Bear’s misapprehensions about the human world. In defence, I’ll only say that the first confirmation I attended was my own.
I told Fr. K that I would be much more comfortable if he used my middle name as I was sure that there must be a saint associated with that, although I had no idea who. He said that that would be fine.

After my confirmation, I did actually bother to do some research on google and found out that my middle name (Christine) is associated with a medieval saint who did things, such as deliberately putting herself in danger, which seem totally incomprehensible to me although they probably made sense to people at the time. I felt no connection at all with this lady, but it probably served me right for not making any effort to choose someone.
I thought that was the end of the business. It wasn’t very satisfactory, but I had ticked the required box. However, it wasn’t the end of the story. Very recently I visited a church in which there is a shrine to St. John Ogilvie. He is the only Scottish Catholic martyr from the post-Reformation period. I was brought up in a family who had great respect for the Protestant martyrs, and as I walked past St. John Ogilvie’s statue, I thought about the many Scottish Protestants who lost their lives at the start of the Reformation.

It was safe to say that I had mixed feelings about St John Ogilvie, not least because life-size statues in churches take a bit of getting used to if you are brought up in the reformed tradition. As I sat in the church, I hoped that St John Ogilvie and the Protestant martyrs were shaking hands in heaven in a spirit of reconciliation.
When I got home, I looked up St. John Ogilvie on the internet and read that he, like me, was a convert from Calvinism. This completely changed the way I thought about him. Here was a saint who was relevant, and who could understand where I had come from and what I was going through as a recent Catholic convert. I also read that he concealed his Rosary beads during his trial and torture and that, at the last possible moment, he flung them into the crowd gathered to watch his execution.

Later that day I received an unexpected gift in the post. I had entered a competition in a Catholic magazine and won a book on praying the Rosary. I felt as if I, another Protestant convert almost 400 years later, had put out my hand and caught St. John Ogilvie’s Rosary beads.

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.

Let’s get started

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I have never blogged before. I’m starting this because I’ve had a lot going on in my life recently and want to share my thoughts. I am a new Catholic, so new that if I was a baby I would still have red skin and a squished nose. These blogs will just be me trying to come to terms with how I got to this point and what it means for me now. I have no big plans. I can’t promise I’ll still be blogging in six months or a year, but it seems to be what I need to do right now. Here goes. Let’s get started ….