Testimony: Deep Awakening

By Karl Erickson

In fact, it was on a fishing trip with my grandfather one sunny afternoon as a young child that I committed my life to Christ and experienced what Catholics call “the second conversion.” It was an important step that sparked my desire to serve God and go where he directed me. It was my grandfather who first impressed upon me the need to listen to God’s voice and study the Word. To my grandfather, God was always near and welcoming. The fishing might not have been that terrific, but I knew that God had caught me, and that was good enough.

We weren’t quite ready to admit that this was where we belonged, however, so after attending an early Mass, we took the kids in tow and visited a Free Methodist service across town. With the beautiful Mass still fresh in my memory, the anti-Catholic sermon during the Methodist service made me all but storm out of the church. My wife recalls sitting on our back porch later that day and being so miserable that the thought of starting her own church passed through her mind. She was stunned when she realized how destructive this line of thinking could have been. Soon, we both seriously began to consider converting to the Catholic Church.

The first part of our spiritual journey was all about being led to the Catholic Church. The next part of our spiritual awakening concerned deep study of Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the writings of the Church Fathers. My father-in-law, John Collier, was a major help to us at this point. John Collier is the fine artist and sculptor who created the Catholic Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City. John was able to answer many of our questions and concerns regarding the Catholic Church. When a question stumped him, he would put us into contact with priests or others who could answer our many concerns. After a time, we were surprised to realize that all of our stumbling blocks had been removed and that many issues that we thought were insurmountable turned out to be simple differences in vocabulary or new perspectives. Whether through John or our RCIA program, God surrounded us with knowledgeable people to answer those troubling questions.

Six areas were pivotal in my acceptance of the Catholic Church as the one and true Church established by Jesus Christ and entrusted to the first pope, Saint Peter. Some were more of a hurdle than others, but they all held important meaning along our journey.

1. Sola Scriptura

Sola Scriptura, or the idea that Christian authority is vested in Scripture alone, was pretty easily sent on its way. Do we accept that each person must interpret every Scripture passage on his own? This seemed to be sending our Episcopalian friends toward moral entropy. How can the Holy Spirit be guiding different churches in opposite interpretative directions regarding identical Scripture passages? We felt there must be an authority somewhere to assist church members in understanding the Bible, because the moral anchors were certainly breaking loose within many Protestant denominations.

2, Birth Control

With the Anglican acceptance of birth control at the Lambeth Conference in 1930, and the brief Protestant love affair with eugenics, we are left with Protestant denominations that recognize abortion as a grave sin, but they don’t see the moral similarity between birth control and abortion. Every other denomination is blown by the winds of social and cultural change. Granted, some great Evangelical thinkers such as Amy Laura Hall are starting to ask the tough questions, but where is the consistency of reason and truth most readily found in regards to the Culture of Death, which is tearing our world apart—spiritually, morally, and demographically?

3, The Papacy

Non-Catholics frequently misunderstand and miscon­strue the value and purpose of our pope. As we learned, Catholics don’t believe that everything the pope utters is infallible. We are not bound, for example, to follow his personal preferences. Only when the pope speaks ex cathedra does the Catholic Church take his statements as infallible, and this has happened only two or three times in the life of the Church. Furthermore, this does not represent trust in the pope so much as it represents trust that God won’t permit his Church to fall into error. More and more Protestant churches appear to be heading straight for moral relativism, as gravely warned against by the great Anglican writer, C. S. Lewis.

4, Christian Unity

The Bible repeatedly calls us to unity. Did we have sufficient reason to stay apart from the Catholic Church? How should we prefer that the mystical Body of Christ be divided so many thousands of times in the different denominations of the day? The Protestant churches seem like injured cells endlessly dividing and replicating themselves. This division is precisely what Saint Paul was warning Christians to avoid, so that we might reflect Christian unity to the world. We should all consider ourselves members of a broken family, and it’s time we came back together.

5. The Real Presence

Before joining the Catholic Church, Kimberly and I always insisted upon a literal interpretation of Scripture, but we balked at applying a literal interpretation to John 6, which describes the Eucharist as the actual Body and Blood of Christ. It seems that the disciples were deeply troubled by our Lord’s words. If it was a symbol alone, it would not have been a challenging teaching at all, and Jesus would have clarified his meaning to the disciples. In fact, if his followers had so badly misunderstood, it would have been unlike Jesus to refrain from a deeper explanation of something so critical and central to our Christian walk. Nowhere in Scripture is the Eucharistic mystery characterized as a symbol, and the early Church did not treat it as symbolic in nature. The early Church Fathers also recognized the Real Presence as central in their understanding of the Eucharist. We were convinced.

6. Mary

Who is Mary? When my wife and I were studying in preparation to join the Catholic Church, the concept of Mary was one of the hardest ideas to get our minds around. Coming from the Evangelical tradition, we found that most of the new concepts we learned were simply a result of a more logical and consistent interpretation of Scripture. Although the verses are clearly there, understanding Mary required something beyond Biblical interpretation, and it was not easy. Slowly it began to make sense, and I recognized that praying to Mary was not the same as worshiping Mary. Instead, it was more along the lines of talking to a close and respected friend.

In conversations with skeptical Protestants, I often explain the Catholic perspective this way. Their tradition is like an artist’s canvas, which contains all the necessary artistic elements in the foreground. The background, however, lies bare of color or shape, simply white canvas awaiting the painter’s brush. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is a canvas of rich and vibrant colors, which seem to leap from the painting. Other Christians could be so enriched if they caught sight of the second painting and drank in its rich meaning, a perfect dovetailing of faith and reason. May God open all our friends’ eyes to this great beauty. As John Collier recently described this fullness of faith, “It was as if I had been worshiping in the basement all my life and got to move into the sanctuary.”

I remember my first Confession and a mysteriously fragrant breeze. Later, I learned that scents and gardens traditionally are associated with some of the most powerful conversion stories—e.g., Saint Augustine recalled being drawn to God again in the quiet solitude of his garden. Upon exiting the confessional, an inexplicable cool breeze of a pine forest brushed by my face, and I knew that this was God’s wonderful way of welcoming me to his Church, which teaches reverence and honor for God at every turn. It’s good finally to be home.