It’s been thirty years since I stood at the “holy fire” of the Easter Vigil outside Holy Family Catholic Parish in South Pasadena. I can still feel the brush of satin as I settled my red sash over my white lace dress and lit a vigil candle from my sponsor’s taper. I remember thinking it was all a little surreal, as I climbed the steps outside the church, ready to process up the center aisle with the others.
Inside the dimly lit nave, I waved at two coworkers who had shown up to support me — even up to the last moment, my parents had been praying I’d change my mind, as were most of my friends from Bible school (those I had told about my journey). Sliding into my seat, I slowly drew in my breath and whispered the most appropriate song I could think of at that moment, “I have decided to follow Jesus… though none go with me, still I will follow, no turning back.”
Thirty years. Half my life, for I was thirty years old when God finally got through to me, and made me understand that the Catholic Church was not a cult from which poor souls needed rescuing, but an everlasting home for all those who wanted to know Jesus and the Church he established, full of goodness, beauty, and truth… and a family of saints who were praying for me in my darkest moments.
An Impossible Choice
Growing up, I had been a part of lots of different faith communities. I had started playing organ at the age of five (before I could reach the pedals), and by twelve was good enough to start playing in church. My first organist job was in a Lutheran church, where I discovered the beauty of liturgy — having been raised in a Presbyterian/Methodist hybrid, I had fairly memorized the hymnbook but had never experienced the rich cadence of chanted prayer. In my junior year, I became friends with the pastor’s daughter of a local Pentecostal church, and during my college years I worshipped with Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Episcopalians, and several different non-denominational groups, both charismatic and mainline.
There was only one kind of church that remained a mystery to me. My first year of college, when I started dating a Catholic guy, my mother took me aside and warned me that God would not like it if I married a Catholic. “You can go to heaven, or you can marry a Catholic — but not both. The Bible tells us not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” I was still a teenager, and my mother was a voice of theological authority in my life. I had known Catholics at school and in the neighborhood, but had never really managed to breach the invisible wall between my world and theirs.
So when my mother told me I had to make a choice.… I chose heaven. And yet, her comment had planted a seed to a question that remained tucked away, dormant, for years: “What’s so bad about being Catholic?” It would take me almost a decade to find the answer to that question.
A Deal with God
In his classic The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis observes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” There are times when his mercy is best seen not from the delights of answered prayers, but from the desolation of a hospital bed.
Early January 1983, I was driving home from work during a snowstorm in northern New Jersey when my car slipped on black ice and skidded into oncoming traffic. I don’t remember the accident or the days that followed apart from a single image of my old Sunday school teacher (who was then a missionary teacher for a blind school in South Korea) standing at the foot of my bed and telling me that I needed to get right with God. I remember telling her that if I got out of the hospital, I would become a missionary to pay God back for saving my life.
Now, of course God doesn’t need us to “pay him back” for his mercies towards us — which is a good thing, since we could never begin to pay such a debt! Yet, like any good father he knows what motivates us and uses those things to help us discover what he wants most for us. And when our beliefs or prejudices create barriers to the path he has in mind, he must sometimes take us on an adventure — like the Israelites who, because of their sin, wandered for forty years in the desert to arrive at the Promised Land.
I was still on crutches when I applied to and was accepted at Bethany College of Missions in Bloomington, Minnesota. Four years later, I began my career in publishing, working for two years at Bethany House Publishers, first as an assistant publicist and later as a copyeditor. Recognizing my aptitude, the editorial director encouraged me to go back to school, and told me of a special program in California that would enable me to complete my bachelor’s degree in two years.
Just before leaving for California, I took a trip to Mexico to visit missionary friends, who took me to Real de Catorce, an old silver mining town near San Luis Portosi, and was struck by the simple devotion of the locals who climbed the front steps of the church on their knees, then kissed the feet of a statue of St. Francis standing in a small shrine near the back. My friends saw it as an example of the hopeless condition of a people who needed to know Jesus — the reason for their work. I looked and saw a people whose faith held them up through even the darkest times. They knew Jesus. They also knew his friends and trusted those saints to remember them as well.
Returning to the U.S., I started school at Azusa Pacific University, working three different part-time jobs to be able to afford classes. One of those jobs was playing piano and directing the choir of a small Baptist church in Orange, California. It was a wonderful, close-knit church with a pastor who had been serving there for seventeen years. It was my favorite “gig” of the week… until just before I left on a summer outreach program to Poland, when the pastor announced from the pulpit that he was resigning his position in order to become Catholic.
No one saw it coming, least of all me! Later that week, I called and invited Pastor John to lunch, and he told me his story. Placing a stack of books and tape series on the table, Pastor John said to me, “I don’t know if this is something you will want to explore for yourself, Heidi. But I’ve been studying this for a couple of years now, and I believe it’s God’s plan for me.” I looked at the stack: Rome, Sweet Home by Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating, lots of other books by ancient writers. “The Patristics,” he said. “Cardinal Newman (another convert) was right: ‘To read deeply of Church history is to cease to be Protestant.’”
I wrote down a few titles to look up later. Then, a few days later, I got on the plane with a dozen classmates and flew to Budapest. We were going to meet up with our Polish teammates — Pentecostal Christians and musicians who would accompany us on our summer outreach across Poland. As the oldest student with significant travel experience, I was appointed the team leader — at the time that meant making sure we arrived at our concerts on time. But then we lost our chaplain (who was the only one who could communicate with the Hungarian bus driver) and translator (whose wife was six months pregnant and had to go back early). That left me with $200 “emergency funds” in my pocket to spend two weeks on a bus with 27 young adults, until we could meet up with the other teams in Frankfurt, Germany.
If it was a test, I felt like an abject failure. I was also very angry that God had put me in such a predicament. When I finally returned home, I remember being unable to pray — it felt like my prayers were bouncing off the ceiling, that God wasn’t listening. I had rented a room down the street from a large Non-denominational church until I could find a full-time job. But I only attended services at Lake Avenue for a few weeks — I felt like a hypocrite worshipping alongside so many happy Christians.
Looking for More
One night I found myself perched on a seat at a local bar, contemplating my life over a cranberry vodka with lime. I didn’t want to go back to my tiny room or deal with the incessant yammering of my many housemates. Even though I had recently found a full-time job as an executive assistant at a large firm in downtown Los Angeles, it felt like my life was in a holding pattern… but what was I waiting for?
I purposely kept my eyes down, not wanting conversation — but I didn’t need to worry. The place was nearly empty except for the bartender. It was an odd place to have a conversation with the Almighty, but I wasn’t having a lot of luck at the traditional places.
“You know, God, I don’t understand what’s going on in my life right now…”
Silence.
“You seem really far away, and now that I’m done with school, I’m not sure where to go from here.”
More silence.
The bartender started wiping down the other end of the bar area, working his way toward me. I had just a few ice cubes in the bottom of my glass. I tossed them down and chewed the ice. Then, a thought came to me as loud as a shout.
But there’s more.
More what? More school? More vodka? God forbid, another mission trip? Shaking my head, I paid my tab and left. Whatever it was, it would have to wait.
That Sunday, instead of going to Lake Avenue, I crossed the street and entered the little mission-style Catholic parish I had passed every week, Holy Family. I’m still not sure what made me do it. Maybe something Pastor John had said before my trip had softened my heart. Maybe traveling across Poland in a bus full of Quakers and Charismatics had affected my point of view. It was the last place on earth I expected to find Jesus, yet there I was. I still had no idea what the “more” was, but I was pretty sure I wanted to try to find out.
Praying Catholic Style
It was an entirely different experience for me, walking up that aisle and sinking down on the kneeler near that little red lamp at the front of the church. It was so quiet, so peaceful. Nobody approached me or asked me what I was doing there. And yet, I had the strong sense that Someone was listening. So, I started talking.
I talked about my Poland disaster.
I told him about how angry I was, how frustrated, how lost.
I told him how lonely I had been, how much I needed to belong somewhere.
I asked him what he wanted from me, where he wanted me. I had given him my life when I was a young girl. If he still wanted me, he had to give me a sign.
At that moment, the organ started warming up and people started filing in. So I got up and went to the back of the church, and slid into the last pew. I had never been to Mass, but decided I had come this far, there was no going back.
Next to me, a kindly older lady pulled out a booklet from the Bible rack and showed me where to find the prayers and readings. During the Our Father, she held out her hand; I grabbed it and didn’t let go until the end. When everyone started going forward, I stayed in my seat that first week, but after a few weeks, I started going forward, too. At first I started crossing my arms like I’d seen the little kids do. But after a while, not knowing it was inappropriate, I joined the other adults:
“The Body of Christ.”
“Amen.”
Slowly, I started to get my life in order, and kept going each week to Mass — though I was careful not to mention it to anyone, since I couldn’t really explain what was drawing me there. But after a few months, I decided I should make it official and made an appointment with the Director of Religious Education, Dawn Ponnet. Kindly but pointedly, she told me I should stop receiving the Eucharist until I had made my first confession. She then invited me to attend weekly classes with others who were exploring the Catholic Faith.
At the first session Dawn introduced me to my first sponsor, who quit after about three weeks because I asked too many hard questions. Then I became Dawn and Frank’s special problem. And they welcomed me with open arms — as did Monsignor Connelly, who invited me for Chinese and listened patiently as I spewed out all the reasons I didn’t belong there. Kindly, he patted my hand and with his Irish brogue intoned,
“Ah, Heidi… you are a gift to us.”
Months later, at my first confession, I got into an argument with a Filipino priest who insisted that I was a good person — I knew for certain that I was not. This was a pattern that would be repeated every month until I was ready to accept the fact that God might have a different way of looking at me than I’d been accustomed to looking at myself. It entailed a true “renewing of the mind” I’d so often read about in Scripture. The fact was, there was a lot of Scripture it felt like I was seeing for the very first time. And most of it had to do with the Eucharist.
Seeing the Gospel of John
As a Bible school student, I had read the Bible cover to cover and memorized key chapters of the text so that I could teach and witness to the truth of the Gospel to those who had never heard it—in my mind, that included Catholics. And yet for some reason I had never noticed what Jesus taught about the Eucharist towards the end of chapter six in John’s Gospel:
I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.… unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you (John 6:51–53).
I had spent my life interpreting Scripture as literally as possible, and yet for some inexplicable reason, I had never noticed that Jesus was speaking of what I had always presumed was a symbol, a memorial, a sign—not the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise that, “behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
In this, and in so many other things, it was as if I had to become like a child again (Matthew 18:2–4). Instead of leading worship, I was learning new prayers and hymns. Instead of confidently quoting Bible verses and leading Bible studies and Sunday school classes, I had to be carefully taught from the historic tradition of the faith. Instead of leading, I had to learn to obey.
Of course, in this and in many other things, the Lord did have a plan to use me — in the words of Oswald Chambers, “If you are going to be used by God, he will take you through a myriad of experiences that are not meant for you at all. They are meant to make you useful in his hands.”
He took my love for books and my skill as an editor and brought me to a charismatic Catholic publishing house that had imprints for both Protestants and Catholics. Then he sent me back to school, so I could receive training in Catholic theology.
He took my love for children, and brought a couple of little kids from Catholic Social Services into my home, so I could raise them to know and love God, too — and to believe in their guardian angel, who watches over them and brings their praises and prayers to God each Sunday at Mass.
He gave me a wonderful husband who welcomed my mother, with whom I’d been estranged for many years, into our home when she was too sick for my father to take care of her. And while she was with us, she went to church with us each week until she, too, decided to become Catholic.
Thirty years have passed since that first moment I processed up the center aisle at Holy Family Catholic Parish. I am so grateful to God that he found a way to bring me truly home, and into the fullness of the Catholic Faith.
That’s not to say there haven’t been challenges. I’ve seen so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ struggle to keep the faith amidst the scandals and controversies within the Church, for as an institution she is both human and divine, a hospital for sinners as well as a school for saints.
But what I am most thankful for—what I have found to be true over and over again—is that in this Body of Christ, the Church, there is always “something more.” More to learn. More to give. More to receive. And more to grow.
As a Protestant I believed I had to have all the answers.
As a Catholic I believe God is infinitely greater than my understanding.
As a Protestant I believed it was my job to convert hearts toward God.
As a Catholic I believe it is my job to be faithful to the truth God has revealed to me. I have a responsibility to help my husband and children get to heaven through my prayers, but it is ultimately the Holy Spirit’s job to change hearts.
As a Protestant I believed Jesus lives in my heart, and that I will go to heaven, because of a prayer I prayed when I was twelve.
As a Catholic I understand that Jesus offers me his divine life through the sacraments, that I must “run with endurance the race set before us,” and that “the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Revelation 2:26).
Bringing My Family Home
In the first draft of my book, Stories of the Eucharist, I shared a story of how I taught my children to participate actively in Mass, so that they have a beautiful offering for their angel to take to God in heaven when they join the other angels. This understanding of the unseen world and its mysteries—the angels and saints, the heavenly battles and blessings, and the veil between heaven and earth that becomes whisper-thin when we worship—is a beautiful part of the Catholic Faith.
This “sacramental worldview” is at the heart of Catholic spirituality—that God reaches out to us through the physical world, because he made us as body-soul creatures. So he speaks to us, touches us, through our senses: the wafting of the incense, the taste of the wine, the calming repetition of the Rosary beads, the clamoring of the bells. As we fulfill our calling to be our children’s first teachers, we reinforce in our own hearts the great mysteries of our faith.
Our call to “become like children” and ask God to help us to look beyond physical realities to see with what St. Catherine of Siena called “the eyes of faith” was one of the greatest challenges for me—as it is for many Protestant “seekers.” When we begin to recognize that the theological opinions and ideas to which we have been clinging so stubbornly and confidently might actually be encumbrances to spiritual renewal or the conversion of our hearts, we are forced to admit that the god that sits on the throne of our hearts bears a striking resemblance to ourselves.
God forbid we stay that way! Our God is infinitely greater, infinitely wiser, infinitely more merciful than we are. In the Eucharist, he keeps his promise ever to remain with us “to the end of the age.” He feeds us his own divine life so that we, too, might follow him faithfully all our lives and ultimately, live with him forever in heaven. His plans for us are infinitely greater than the dreams we create for ourselves.
In becoming like little children, we make ourselves little in order to fit through the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13–14) so we can embark upon that journey toward “something more” that God has in store for us. Refusing to settle for a faith that fits in our own limited minds, we emerge like children, full of wonder and ready to receive Jesus “with the palate of holy desire. The corporal palate tastes only the savor of the bread; but the palate of the soul, which is holy desire, tastes God and Man.” (St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue).
It has been thirty years since I lit that vigil candle and walked through those open wooden doors of the church to begin my new life as a Catholic Christian. Thirty years of discovery. Thirty years of peace. Thirty years of learning from my older brothers and sisters in faith, whose wisdom transcends my own. Thirty years of Jesus meeting with me, week after week, to pour his divine life into me, restoring my mind, healing my soul. And — miracle of miracles — healing family relationships as well.
Just before the pandemic, when my mother became too ill for my father to care for her and she came to live with us, she began attending Mass with us each week. After about a year, she decided she wanted to receive Jesus in the Eucharist as well. Our pastor told me to take her home and teach her what she needed to know. Each night she would say, “Okay, Heidi… let’s read.” And I began to share with her some of the beautiful books I’d worked on over the years. A few months later, in her hospital room, our pastor came and gave her the sacraments for the first time. As I watched her eyes light up as he held up the consecrated host, I silently thanked God for bringing us on this journey into the family of faith.
