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Grace2U
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| Joined: | Thu Jul 26th, 2007 |
| Location: | Oslo, Norway |
| Posts: | 26 |
| First Name: | Inga | | Gender: | Female | | Faith History: | Calvinist, briefly ICOC (the Boston movement), Pentecostal, Catholic |
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Posted: Tue Aug 19th, 2008 01:29 pm |
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I shared briefly that both me and my husband are conveting soon in the thread called The Catholic Church Ministers to the Whole Human Being. I am so grateful for all the kind words  A few days after I posted that comment, I found out more about my husband's conversion.
I had to think about the whole thing for a couple of days, because it seemed a reminder to not limit God and at the same time a challenge to place all our experiences of God outside the Church into proper context...
In October last year, we had a meeting with a priest due to the fact that my husband had been married previously and needed a Declaration of Nullity for me to become Catholic. Surprisingly, he seemed quite impressed by the approach of the Church and the fact that someone actually took the Word of Our Lord seriously. He attended some of the Sunday masses and prayer groups with me previously, but a couple of days after that meeting he said he was going to a weekday mass. He told me the same say it turned out to be a funeral mass he attended, a little baby had died, and that it was a very touching and powerful experience, not so much grievous as special in some deep spiritual way. It was singing and music that touched him, but also some powerful sense of God's presence.
The next morning I heard something I had never expected to hear so soon, even though I asked Mary for her intercession a couple of days earlier, because I so wanted him to share of the treasure I have been given to discover. He told me he could not sleep the whole night and felt it was not possible for him to remain a Protestant any more, he would have liked to learn more about the Catholic faith, was there any way he could do that? (now that felt like a bomb exploding!!! - of course I smiled and replied in a casual way that a new RCIA class was just about to start in our church )
Now nearly a year has passed and a couple of days ago, I was telling the whole story to a Lutheran friend of mine, who asked me how did my husband come to join me on the way. She told me that our mutual freind, an Evangelical/Charismatic lady, was the one singing at this funeral. From her - the singer - I found out that the Catholic couple who lost the child and who were here friends had not been particularly devout. They had wanted children for many years, tried and prayed, but nothing worked until that one time. They had a baby - imagine their joy! - but the baby got seriously ill and died only a couple of months later, despite many prayers. My friend, Katja, sang the very song she sang at the funeral at the moment when the baby died - she was praying with the parents and was moved to sing... She witnessed God's hand in everything that happenned, not the least in the funeral itself, an experience she describes as being led by Him very powerfully to do things she would not have imagined doing herself. People came up to her, many weeks after the funeral, and told her that they felt God's presence very strongly in those moments, and especially when she sang.
Obviously, I had no idea of all of this, but when it all happenned I had to share with the priest that my husband had made a decision to learn more about the Catholic faith, and I also mentioned his experience at the funeral mass. The priest, oddly enough - it is very big parish - it was his funeral mass, said he had never experienced anything of the kind in all his years of being a priest, and he felt the faith of the parents had been expressed in everything that went on (remember the comment on them not being very devout?)...
There is a mysterious element to this that is beyond words... At the same time, it makes me sad remebering how often I myself thought that we, Evangelical Christians, were superiour to Catholics with their dead tradition, and that it was actually 'our' Holy Spirit that made them experience the Lord. It was of course far from my friend's mind to sing at the funeral in order to 'convert' Catholics, but some of the reasoning (oh, so we made them experience the Holy Spirit) was certainly a part of her response. The strangest thing of it all, my husband happened to be present at that mass, and made a decision that if he can experience God in this way there is certainly something about this church he needs to know more about... (do you see the strange circular pattern in this event? )
I am not quite sure there is a way to comment more on this story
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David W. Emery
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| Joined: | Fri Sep 29th, 2006 |
| Location: | Brownsville, Texas USA |
| Posts: | 2522 |
| First Name: | David | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Catholic |
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Posted: Tue Aug 19th, 2008 02:00 pm |
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It is all about faith and its expression, isn’t it, Inga. Even the people who do not express their faith outwardly really have it. It dwells in their hearts, it breathes life into their souls. And one way or another, it is “contagious,” allowing people like your husband to want some of “what they have.”
David
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Grace2U
Member
| Joined: | Thu Jul 26th, 2007 |
| Location: | Oslo, Norway |
| Posts: | 26 |
| First Name: | Inga | | Gender: | Female | | Faith History: | Calvinist, briefly ICOC (the Boston movement), Pentecostal, Catholic |
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Posted: Tue Aug 19th, 2008 09:42 pm |
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| I have learned something about faith in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition - that it has to be lived to be understood, and that a life of faith says more than a verbal expression of faith. I think it is this life of faith that is contagious, even if people cannot understand it or express it properly...
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David W. Emery
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| Joined: | Fri Sep 29th, 2006 |
| Location: | Brownsville, Texas USA |
| Posts: | 2522 |
| First Name: | David | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Catholic |
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Posted: Tue Aug 19th, 2008 10:30 pm |
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Yes, Inga, I agree. Faith has to be lived to have any truth value. I have seen people who do not do that, and they are like the people in the gospel story about the sower who sowed the seed of the Word, and some of it “fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold” (Mark 4:4–8). It takes that “good soil” to make the Word of the Lord germinate and produce fruit.
In effect, the “living out” of faith is its expression. Wearing our faith on our sleeve, parading it in front of others as a trophy, often indicates that the heart is empty and barren, like the house (person) that the unclean spirit, after being expelled for a while, found “empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first” (Matthew 12:44–45).
David
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Grace2U
Member
| Joined: | Thu Jul 26th, 2007 |
| Location: | Oslo, Norway |
| Posts: | 26 |
| First Name: | Inga | | Gender: | Female | | Faith History: | Calvinist, briefly ICOC (the Boston movement), Pentecostal, Catholic |
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Posted: Thu Aug 21st, 2008 09:05 am |
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I have been trying to learn to express my faith in the evangelical manner of preaching and sharing my faith with everyone I knew for years I was awful at that , even though towards the end of my time as a Protestant I have discovered the grace and love of Jesus and wanted to share it wholeheartedly. In my case, I realised almost immediately that grace and love can only be experienced to be received (there is no point of 'understanding love'), which again put an end to my preaching attempts. Praying for people proved to be more effective in my case, though, and having embarked on the road of discovering what prayer actually is, I inevitably ended up in Catholic circles. I think almost any Protestant who has been called to prayer has ended up with only Catholic sourses on the subject. Not all have converted, of course...
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David W. Emery
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| Joined: | Fri Sep 29th, 2006 |
| Location: | Brownsville, Texas USA |
| Posts: | 2522 |
| First Name: | David | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Catholic |
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Posted: Fri Aug 22nd, 2008 02:27 am |
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Grace2U wrote:I think almost any Protestant who has been called to prayer has ended up with only Catholic sources on the subject.
Quite true. There is really very little Protestant literature on purely spiritual topics such as prayer, virtues and the effects of divine grace. Many Protestants insist that “works do not save” and refuse to look in that direction. This is one of the reasons I was drawn to the Catholic Church.
David
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Steven Barrett
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| Joined: | Tue Nov 14th, 2006 |
| Location: | Hadley, Absurdistan, AKA , Massachusetts USA |
| Posts: | 1566 |
| First Name: | Steven | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Catholic, Episcopal communicant, Baptist, Catholic |
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Posted: Mon Aug 25th, 2008 05:17 am |
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Inga, Welcome to the Forum (somewhat belatedly from me) but the thread you and David have going has been enormously helpful for me. Not that my faith or Catholicity was in any way in doubts with myself, but I've been trying to share it with somebody very dear and ... well, you'll be pleased to know you have company on this side of the Atlantic, and a bit closer than Brownsville, TX. (David, however, is THE man with more answers and he expresses them far better than I ever could.)
I'm also impressed with your husband's respectful understanding of our rules concerning nullification and how impressed he was with the Church's long expressed desires to keep the Sacrament sacrosanct: Period.
We willingly gave up the English speaking world at the very same time we knew full well England would be sailing out and establishing colonies in the New World which Columbus found not long before Henry VIII started his own rebellion.
I used to be a State Probation/Parole Officer in Orlando, FL and one of the saddest days on my job occured when I had to spend a few hours trying to dig up various marital records. FLorida had instituted "no fault" divorce and just from looking around at so many young and frightened moms with infants and toddlers, and their live-in boyfriends who just wanted to make sure their gals' marriages were indeed finished so they could become the next "Mr. Right" put the fear of God in me like nothing else could regarding the necessity of taking marriage in the serious vein Our Lord expects from us. While I don't want to wax generalities here, I'm almost dead sure many of those rebound "marriages" didn't work; largely because marriage by that time in the mid-late Seventies had been watered down to a form of state sanctioned fornication for steady relationships.
In God's and His Church's eyes, there are no such fictions such as "no fault divorces." You are indeed blessed to have a husband who cares enough for your marriage that he'd sit up and take positive notice of our rules concerning nullification, etc. On my side of the ocean, we're so caught up with our individualistic notions of freedom from pain that we also forget we can never be free from our responsibilities to one another, especially when it comes to love. We confuse affection with real love, and I was very guilty of making that mistake many years ago!
I'm praying for you and your husband and confident that the Lord will guide you along your Journey Home. And you're both very brave taking this journey in a LARGELY Lutheran country.
God's Blessings and love for you both.
Steven
____________________
James Michael Curley to a young Thomas “Tip” O’Neill -- “Son, it’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
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Grace2U
Member
| Joined: | Thu Jul 26th, 2007 |
| Location: | Oslo, Norway |
| Posts: | 26 |
| First Name: | Inga | | Gender: | Female | | Faith History: | Calvinist, briefly ICOC (the Boston movement), Pentecostal, Catholic |
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Posted: Mon Aug 25th, 2008 09:12 pm |
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Steven Barrett wrote: marriage by that time in the mid-late Seventies had been watered down to a form of state sanctioned fornication for steady relationships.
Well that's how I viewed marriage for most of my life, Steven
I'm praying for you and your husband and confident that the Lord will guide you along your Journey Home. And you're both very brave taking this journey in a LARGELY Lutheran country.
I remember reading Chesterton's short essay on why he became a Catholic, where he said something about Puritans becoming pagans. I often think that Lutheran Norway has reached that stage, it is definitely past Puritanism However, I have spent 15 years of my life in various evangelical communities (except 1 year in the Churches of Christ, which I am not sure can be classified as evangelical), and I think a move from evangelical/dispensationalist community into the Church is more scandalous here (and probably elsewhere) that it would ever be for any Lutheran I actually thought no evangelical ever converted to Catholicism when I began thinking about joining the Church (yes, this is pride).
It is therefore particularly interesting that on Wednesday we will be entering the full communion of the Church together with a girl who has been an active member of a very 'fired up' Pentecostal community. It is even more interesting that six years ago the pastor of this community (whom I met accidentally) confronted me lovingly but sternly about my relationship with my now husband, with whom I was then living outside of marriage and whom I knew to be separated but not divorced. I am not quite sure how this ever worked out, it would not have, had it not been for God's grace...
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Steven Barrett
Member
| Joined: | Tue Nov 14th, 2006 |
| Location: | Hadley, Absurdistan, AKA , Massachusetts USA |
| Posts: | 1566 |
| First Name: | Steven | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Catholic, Episcopal communicant, Baptist, Catholic |
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Posted: Mon Aug 25th, 2008 10:57 pm |
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Inga, I loved that quote from Chesterton about Puritanism becoming pagans. and how it relates to Norway today adding "it is definitely past Puritanism "
To a Catholic Irishman living in the former theocracy called the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I couldn't help feeling some alarm for you and your homeland. This sounds like Norway's being taken over by New England Yankees! 
After they gave up on God thanks to the decline of old-line Yankee Puritan Congretationalism, a lot of those New England merchants turned to their new Baal ($$$$$) wrung from the sweat off many Irish, Italian and Franco American immigrant laborer working in their pre-modern version of our sweatshops.
And when faced with a "conflict of interest" troubling their tender consciences just before our Civil War, what did these good neo-pagans do with their slaves (which they weren't supposed to have in the first place in some states in the north?) Being good neo-pagan Yankees and never at a loss for finding ways to make a dollar, ethically, ("if necessary"), they simply SOLD them to awaiting Southerners.
I'll be offering up a prayer of Congratulations for you and your husband for this Wednesday.
Welcome home, sister, both of you, and your friend, too! 
____________________
James Michael Curley to a young Thomas “Tip” O’Neill -- “Son, it’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
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setapart
Member
| Joined: | Sat Jan 13th, 2007 |
| Location: | Austin, Texas USA |
| Posts: | 269 |
| First Name: | Bill | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Born Catholic, Non-Denominational Charismatic, Catholic |
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Posted: Mon Aug 25th, 2008 11:42 pm |
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I join David and Steven in their welcome to you. This is another Texan though I am a few hundred miles north of where David is from, so I will welcome you long distance also. I did grow up in NYC, so I have some Yankee in me to go along with Steven.
I am sure this is a very exciting and challenging time for you and your husband and I am glad that you found this forum.
May you continue to share Christ with others by example, prayer, and word.
God Bless,
Bill
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But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings. And you will go free, leaping with joy like calves let out to pasture. Mal 4:2
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Grace2U
Member
| Joined: | Thu Jul 26th, 2007 |
| Location: | Oslo, Norway |
| Posts: | 26 |
| First Name: | Inga | | Gender: | Female | | Faith History: | Calvinist, briefly ICOC (the Boston movement), Pentecostal, Catholic |
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Posted: Tue Aug 26th, 2008 09:49 pm |
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I have a somewhat fragmented knowledge of the US. My best friend lives in NYC and my cousin ran away back home from Nashville a couple of months ago. Said she couldn't stand it She is pregnant and married and 37 y.o. which makes matters slightly worse, though. 
Oh by the way, Norway is NOT my home country in a sense I that I was not born here. There is a lot of moving around in Europe these days, people come and go as they please, me including, but I have been living here for the past 8 years and it's definitely my home in the broader sense. I am half Russian, but I've never had that much to do with the land of my ancestors
Thank you guys for you kind words.This is my last night as a non-Catholic... The past year has been the most beautiful and rich year of my life, the beginning of an incredible journey. The Lord gave me the grace to discover Jesus in His fullness, as I never thought was possible. I have seen God's hand in so much that has been going on. I understand this is just the beginning of the journey that will last my whole lifetime and beyound and I am simply grateful that the Lord has finally broken my defences and allowed me to learn the richness of the Christian faith...
Last edited on Tue Aug 26th, 2008 09:50 pm by Grace2U
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