Come and see the works of God, tremendous his deeds among men. He turned the sea into dry land, they passed through the river dry-shod… For you, O God, have tested us, you have tried us as silver is tried: you led us, God, into the snare; you laid a heavy burden on our backs….we went through fire and through water but then you brought us relief.
—Psalm 65
Tried and Found Wanting
Quietly, matter-of-factly, we started worshipping at Mass. As we assembled with worshipping believers every Sunday at the Cathedral of St. Joseph, the answers to our most urgent questions began flooding into our hearts and minds. Our nowhere was progressively turning into “now- here.” The Good Shepherd was leading, and we were on a path that would take us home to the ancient Church. The peace of mind that poured over us was so refreshing and life-restoring. There were men and a woman of God who were the vessels of grace placed in Salvation History for many reasons that will never be fully comprehended in this life. Still, we are sure that we are among the recipients of God’s divine favor and mercy flowing from their lives. The Spirit drew us deeper into consideration of the Catholic Church as we learned from our priests and observed the intellectual and theological integrity with which they served God. Worship embodied the integrity and authenticity that we hungered for–every word, action, and moment of the Mass bore the full solemnity of the Christian faith, which profoundly impacted us.
As strange as it may sound, desperation is a good thing in the spiritual life. Desperation causes us to be open to radical solutions and willing to take all manner of risks to find what we are looking for. Desperate ones seek with an all-consuming intensity, for they know their life depends on it. Like the cancer patient who travels to a foreign country in the quest for cures that can’t be found in familiar territory, spiritual seekers embark on a quest for that which cannot be found within the borders of life as we know it. We search for healing not found in all the other cures we have tried. We have run all the way to the edges of our own answers; we have exhausted the possibilities and are now finally ready to admit our powerlessness in the face of the tremendous unfixableness of life.
—Ruth Haley Barton
Tired and Hungry
As the months passed and our perspective clarified as we worshipped at Mass, the season of waiting gave way to understanding. We hadn’t fully comprehended how distorted our vision had become during our service to Protestant ministry. We knew there had to be more depth to the Christian faith than our Protestant denomination’s churchiness. When we were still searching for a Protestant church to worship after we departed from that denomination, one thing became crystal clear: our denomination was not unique in its floundering. And we knew we were tired of all the man-centered maneuvering all done in “the name of God!”
Mary’s magnificent response to God’s grace and mercy on humanity, as recorded in Luke 1, prophetically describes the fallout of rebellion: “He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts…” As pride has taken root, entangling every facet of life, humanity has scattered and diffused into all manner of imaginations. We had witnessed how tiring the Protestant movement had become with its preoccupation with what people wanted. We found it increasingly tiring to be associated with all the innovations in the Protestant movement that had scattered over different “imaginations” about what it means to worship the Triune God and live as His Church in the world. We were tired of all the imaginative splitting of hairs. We were tired of motivations centered around attracting people through the consumerism familiar to the current generation rather than the true worship of God. We were tired of topic-driven preaching, performer-driven music, soapbox-driven teaching, and entertainment-driven programming. We tired of all the church splits, division, and multiplication, not to mention all the “affiliations” or movements replacing denominations–new wine in old wineskins!
Our spirits wearied from the futility attachments to the benefits of serving God. We had looked through the neatly packaged boxes God had been put into by customized movements and found them wanting. We had read the formulas and noted the steps laid out by well-meaning evangelical leaders, broadcasters, and writers who relegated faith to methodology and found so many of them self-serving. We had dedicated our time and effort to doing and believing all the right things according to our denomination’s perspective; we still had doubts about its continuity with the historic Church.
We were tired, and we were hungry. Our hunger manifested in what St. Anselm wrote thousands of years ago, “Faith seeks understanding.” Our questions about God and faith had made us uneasy, leading to new questions we could never have anticipated. Our questions were changing, and we found the answers we had previously accepted did not satisfy our desire for security, rest, and peace. We fed our spirits by reading from the Church’s early Church Fathers and Saints. We found satisfaction in their devotion to Christ and their desire to understand what they believed. We were more comfortable with the transcendent Mystery (“to shut the mouth”) of the Triune God than with the domesticated certainties that had fossilized so much of the Protestant movement. We fed our spirits by seeking more understanding and discovered the Mystery of Faith that transcends humanity’s diminutive attempts at definitions of The Faith. The gravitas that accompanied these realizations had led us in the “long obedience in the same direction” toward the threshold of the Catholic Church. The hungering darkness of our past gave way to light!
The Maiden Warrior 