I have a weird genetic quirk. My left eye is dominant, but I write and do most things better with my right hand — except, weirdly, dribble a basketball. I’m slightly ambidextrous. My brother is right-eye dominant but easily switches hits in baseball. My son and daughter are left-eye dominant but do everything right-handed. My other son is lefty all the way. My dad is left-eye dominant but writes left and competes in all sports righty. His brother is opposite. This variant causes all of us to have, as a neuroscientist explained, “internal frustration.” That is, because we’re opposite-eye dominant, and, even rarer, ambidextrous, it takes an extra step for our brains to complete a task. The message has to jump to one side of the brain and then back to finish the command.
This quirk explains so much of the trajectory of my life. Whereas some people seem to see the path and follow it immediately, because it’s so obvious and so easy, I take a more hop-scotch route, one often filled with “internal frustration.”
So it has been on my spiritual walk. Mine is a story of finding Jesus early and then finding him again and finally, finding the fullness of God at home in the Catholic Church.
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You, dear reader, may wonder why I share my story with you. It is not because I particularly want to. This part of my life has been blessedly private and profoundly transformational. It’s been my treasured secret, my light under the bushel basket. Yet here I am on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and the joy of this event because of our family’s spiritual awakening is too great and wondrous to stay silent. Plus, as Southerners say, I felt the Lord’s hand on me and won’t have peace until I get these words out.
I have always believed in God. As a child, I felt his presence and safety while living in a very unsafe home. Abuse and simmering malice defined my childhood environment, and yet I did not blame God or discredit him for the deeds of those around me. I did get the sense that He was there but awfully busy and maybe not always available to save me from the routine horrors I faced. A couple pivotal times God made His presence well-known, and those times fortified me in the milieu of evil I could not escape.
When, finally, young adulthood came, I was exhausted physically and dissociative emotionally and trying to be perfect for God. I was baptized at 19 and felt peace that took away the edge of despair that followed me like Pigpen’s blanket. My future husband came into my life, and after our marriage I promptly reproduced, along with four children, a lite form of the unresolved trauma of my tormented childhood.
We were young and stupid. Those things often go together, and so they did with us. But we weren’t so dumb that we didn’t realize that the God represented by the church we both attended in our youth wasn’t an accurate portrayal. After years in exile at home (I was angry at God for my son’s death and didn’t want to hear Christian platitudes about it, so I avoided all churches for five years until my kids started asking probing questions), we visited churches.
We found a church home and met and worshipped with the most wonderful people. Yet something was still missing. We thought it was service, and so we joined a local mega church doing lots of community service. We sent our kids to the Presbyterian Early Learning Program, Montessori and Methodist preschool, Lutheran summer camp, Episcopal Boy Scout events, and Baptist vacation Bible school. Hey, it’s the Bible Belt, and none of this was weird.
Then came the cataclysm. The marital charade could not continue. The corrosiveness of betrayal could no longer be ignored. The structural weaknesses of my marriage became clear for even me to see. It only took me 25 years to truly see it. The peripheral damage was swift and total and continued as my children finished growing.
Layered upon this calamity (for every divorce is an abomination) were my son’s repeated bouts with life-threatening severe aplastic anemia, something I’ve written about before. Facing my son’s mortality, after having lost a child, was too much, and I was utterly laid low. In this shattered state, God gave me a dream, the only one I’ve had of soaring, where I, along with those who loved me, flew above the sky, and into the stars, and we landed safely to be joined by all those who were praying for me and my family. (READ THE PIECE: A Miracle)
God never left my side, ever.
Now, I must go back in time because there has been a through line that needs to be shared.
Most of my middle childhood years were spent in a Catholic neighborhood. The Catholic ne’er-do-wells got booted from Catholic school and ended up in public school with us regular kids. Then, as a new chiropractic intern working in a free clinic, my first patient was a young Catholic priest. He was kind and patient. The poor man! I misplaced the electric stimulation pads on his painful low back and gave him a nickel-sized burn. and yet he did not complain. Then, when my twin sons fought for their lives in the neonatal intensive care unit after being born at 24 weeks, and my son Andrew died, another young Catholic priest came to my surviving son’s bed.
“Do you mind if I pray for your son?”
Me, hostile: “No, but I will never become Catholic, so don’t talk to me about it.”
And so this priest, whose name I did not learn, came to pray over Harrison daily for the rest of the time in the NICU, which was about three more months. He never said another word.
This graceful act stuck with me. That didn’t abate my Catholic hostility, though. I found the hierarchy distasteful and the scandals with the pedophile priests and the ensuing coverups to be disgraceful and repugnant. I wrote with glee about the corruption of the Catholic Church. Those lopsided missives can be found at previous writing habitats, much to my embarrassment. So great was my contempt for the Catholic Church that I lost a writing gig at a place you all would know because fellow writers thought I was an anti-Catholic bigot. They weren’t wrong.
Throughout my years blogging, the writer Elizabeth Scalia and I became friends. She suggested that I read G.K. Chesterton’s works, and so I did. I thought Chesterton to be a most insightful apologist. J.R.R. Tolkien, a Catholic writer, inspired me. Wow, those Catholics sure are intellectual powerhouses, I thought to myself. And there it lay.
When I came to The American Spectator, a place where the founder and editor were Catholic, I was the lone Protestant. It amused me. The way they thought and the writers I read caused me to pause. Had I been too harsh to judge? In what other field would I be satisfied taking the word of others to cast judgment on a whole group of people without examining it myself?
And so I studied. A year into this study, my daughter met a young Catholic man. She studied. She converted. And I thought this: I guess God just wanted me to get comfortable with Catholicism so that I didn’t freak out when she met him. I put the books on a shelf and let the issue rest.
The turning point was an Easter Vigil service. It was in Polish. I read along in English and was so profoundly moved that there weren’t words to describe my awe. The symbolism! The words! The forms! Every element of the service was imbued with meaning. Maybe this was for me.
I told a friend, and that friend introduced me to Catholic scholars. We had hours-long, vehement debates on various points of doctrine. The arguments lasted for months. I read book after book. And slowly, but surely, I became convicted piece by piece, bit by bit, truth by truth.
This was an intellectual exercise, and, during this time, I didn’t go to Mass. I was afraid.
One warm autumn Sunday evening, I asked my son if he’d like to go to Mass with me. He said sure. And so we did. One visit, and he was home. I was stunned.
Within two weeks, we talked to the director of outreach, and we were on our way. We attended Mass every week thereafter, and the pain of not taking Communion grew. We became anxious to be whole.
My resistance to taking the final step and coming into the Church wasn’t intellectual or spiritual but social. The friends who I loved and loved me and who had supported me through various trials were at the humble Bible-based Baptist church I had attended. How would I tell them? Would they take this as a betrayal? Would they feel abandoned or disrespected? Would they abandon me?
I told no one of my spiritual journey. It felt sacred and holy, yes, but I was also being a coward. In my joy, I didn’t want to be questioned, and I didn’t want to lose my other life.
Just after Easter, I came into the Church with my daughter as my sponsor. Two weeks later, my son joined us.
Holiness descended on our house. There’s no other way to describe it. Having been a lifelong Christian, baptized, with the Holy Spirit, yes, experiencing the Mass and full communion was revolutionary. Our inner lives were radically altered, and it manifested in an outer grace that has yet to abate nearly two years later. What does it mean to be full of grace and transformed? It means what Paul said to the Romans in 12:2: “[B]e transformed by the renewing of your mind…”
How does this grace manifest? The sacraments of Confirmation, the Eucharist, and Penance give a structure for living a holy life — something that I didn’t know I was missing. The majesty of God’s grace and Christ’s sacrifice are reinforced every week. There’s a cohesive way to deal with sin and grace. It’s healing. Liberating.
How could I be a Christian my whole life and not be truly free? Yet that was my state.
When people try to understand this journey, I describe it as knowing love before you have children. It’s not that one doesn’t understand love before, but it’s a whole new layer of understanding once children come along. Once one becomes a parent, he is transformed, a new person. That’s what this is like.
Mass must be experienced to be understood. Then, once experienced, what came before feels like the difference between a cheeseburger and fine filet mignon — nourishing, yes, but not as satisfying.
It’s one thing to feel the inward-man change. It’s another thing to see my children go from anxious care to peace. They exude a calm assurance and grace that only comes from the Holy Spirit and living in the sacraments.
Through continued trials — my son’s second bout with severe aplastic anemia and another bone marrow transplant came after our conversion — grace has abounded. The Rosary sustained us through chemo and radiation treatments. Communion gave us peace. Catholic nurses cared for him. The first place we went after leaving the hospital was the Houston cathedral to go to Confession and to praise God for his healing protection.
Our family is full of joy. Today, my daughter enters the blessed sacrament of marriage. She enters this union strong, for one is strong when they forgive and are forgiven, and they are wholly at peace with God through Jesus Christ.
When I look at the circuitous path I took to come to the Church, it’s clear God was there with me. At key points in my life, a Catholic priest or friend was there as a witness. They never pushed. They evangelized by example, and the example pricked my conscience. For those of you who did this for me, thank you.
Over the COVID years, statues of Mary would be desecrated and humble servants were arrested and thrown in jail for professing their love of the unborn. It became clear that Jesus was with them because Satan was attacking. Satan doesn’t attack his own.
The risk in sharing my walk is that my poor example will reflect negatively on God and the Church. You should know that I am the least of the Catholics, ignorant and new and learning. I too easily sin; too readily resort to the flesh. The only balm I’ve found for the darkness of my soul is Jesus, Himself, crowding me out with the Eucharist. He is my only hope. He is the only Way. The only Light.
As John says in John 8:36, “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” It’s good to be free. I’m still astonished that freedom came, finally, in communion with the Catholic Church, but that’s the truth of it. After a journey filled with internal frustration, I’ve come home.
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