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My Conversion Story

Where does the adult Catholic convert first turn to face the light?  For me it started as a child.  I was fortunate to have two important anchors to hold me steadfast until I could make my own way to the Mother Church:  family love and great Protestant guidance.  Given the latter, I will always characterize our Protestant brethren as true brothers and sisters in the faith.  However, in this blog I will also carefully discuss the unnecessary aspects of Protestant sects which limit the Christian experience and our relationship with Christ. For me, I was converted from Protestantism, so this is “what I know.”  If I could reduce my conversion reasoning to one notion, it would be this:  Only in the Church do we find the full sacraments of the Eucharist, reconciliation, anointing of the sick; only here do we find the guidance of the Magisterium to direct our living questions of faith with a hand that was touched into being by Christ himself; and only here do we join with the heart of the Blessed Mother in communion with the Saints to glorify our Lord.  How could I say no to these gifts?

As a child I knew deep love and true affection from my Grandparents and experienced a love of life through my parents.  My Grandfather in particular showed me much attention.  He died when I was 10, and had never talked about Jesus to me, but he showed Jesus to me through his eyes and attention.  I was given his wallet and found in it a silk rendering of the “Infant Child of Prague.”  My Grandfather’s family was from Slovakia, a beautiful and ancient Catholic people.  For the first time ever, I began to wonder about the faith I found hidden inside my Grandfather’s wallet.  As a child, I also watched the television ministry of Rex Humbard, a wonderful man and preacher of the Gospel.  I attended a Presbyterian Sunday School and recall hearing about the amazing story of Jesus’ birth in a manger.  By the time I was a young adult, I was already in love with Jesus.

In college, my faith became unfocused and I explored every other form of humanistic philosophy and even other religions for meaning.  Existentialism, Taoism, even Marxism.  In the end, through each of these I was left with the same dead end….truly a lifeless and hopeless end.  I knew then that the answer to my longing would not be found in books of circular logic or utopian wonderlands.  I knew that I had to dig deeper into the faith of my childhood, and in so doing, look for inconsistencies and leaps of faith that were too far to take.  If I came to that point, I would at least know where I stood.  Instead, I found in the Church a profound world of meaning, rationality, and a consistent narrative that stood above man’s own ability to have created it alone.  I also saw for the first time my own limits, but in a way that opened me up to a life unbounded by time, the past, my weaknesses, and my mind’s finiteness.   

My conversion took two huge steps.  First, I picked up the book “Life of Christ” by Bishop Fulton Sheen.  I had once bought into the stale arguments that the Church is anti-women, power hungry, and anti-intellectual --- and this one book changed that for me.   The Blessed Mother was shown to me for the first time as the “exemplar” --- the best example of the human race.  Yes, a woman is the Church’s vision of the best a human can be, because of her openness to the will of the Father and devotion and love of her Son.   I saw how Christ’s first miracle at the Wedding of Cana was not just a random trick, but was instead the first revelation of how He would stay with us and in us.  The water, transformed to wine, showed me that the wine can through Him become his precious blood.  It also showed me that Jesus is here for us to “save joy” --- not to judge, and not only to save us from our worst sins.  For the first time, I started to see what Christ was here to reveal, for the first time I saw that this loving God had given us everything at once, for all time.  I also knew that if the Eucharist was the real flesh of Christ, I would have no other choice, and no greater need in life, than to join in the unity of His Church to share in this Sacrament.

Secondly, I met the woman who would be my wife.  I felt the warmth of this faith when I attended Mass with her, and knew that if we were to become one, I wanted to give myself totally to the faith that formed her.

When I converted, I received First Communion from an Air Force Chaplain in Korea.  He was Polish, and had once celebrated Mass before John Paul the Great.  At our wedding, Jenny and I were Eucharistic ministers.  My good friend and Protestant minister blessed us and gave the Homily.  I felt as if Jesus had blessed me in a special way:  He had given me this direct connection to a Saint of our times, and he placed in my path a wonderful Protestant to “hand me off” to my final faith journey.   When the Catholic Priest who married us, “Father Ed,” sternly suggested that we be our own wedding’s Eucharistic ministers, I could not help but sense the presence of Christ saying:  “YES!  YES JEFF! Hooray!”   

Upon hearing of my conversion, a good friend and cradle-Catholic said to me:  “Aren’t you swimming upstream?  Everyone I know is going the other way.”  This notion has been a consistent theme along the way, whenever I discuss my conversion with anyone, especially someone is a “fall away” or cradle Catholic. 

It is my hope that “fall away” Catholics, Protestants, Atheists, and even those who attend Mass but don’t have the “fire” inside them, will follow this Blog as I discuss the many facets of my own conversion.  I also hope that other converts will tell their own story, and that together, we will start to turn the tide.   As a Catholic, I believe that we are converted not once, but every day.  Every day is a new opportunity to grow, to love more, to push open a new door to see what is revealed in the “Kingdom Come.”  At Mass, Heaven and Earth touch, Easter is again here for us and victory is in our very midst.  It is my hope that this blog will bring more of us together there, and we will all one day stand in permanent presence with the source of all love and truth, Jesus Christ.  Amen.