Valid Marriages and Sacraments: Honest Deeds, Honest Words, and True Things

Armed with this knowledge and vast stores of memorized verses from years of Christian schooling and Sunday school, I decided to convert. Now, the rest of that specific story is for another time; for now, I’d like to specifically explore the formation I received in preparing for the Sacraments.

However, let me preface this with the following statement: at fourteen, I was not technically an adult who could enter RCIA, due to needing teachers with Safe Environment Training. But there isn’t a teen equivalent to RCIA. Moreover, I changed parishes during this process. Finally, I knew a lot about Scripture, and so it was assumed I was more knowledgeable about the Sacraments than I actually was. This should not be held against any of my priests (who are excellent men) or teachers (who had 200+ students and did an excellent job with the resources they had). I was a strange case: converting independent of a whole family conversion, needing all my Sacraments but being too young according to diocesan norms to be confirmed, etc. What follows is not said to in anyway denigrate the efforts and labor of those who taught me.

Anyhow, in preparing for Baptism, the priest who baptized me was excellent, but in terms of the children’s classes I went to, I remember being with children much younger than me, and we did coloring book worksheets on the Sacraments. Consequently, I was less than excellently informed regarding specific dogmas and doctrines. I learned there were Sacraments, but it wasn’t until confirmation class that I received much information about them, and it wasn’t until college when I really began to have a solid understanding of what the Sacraments did. When I confessed believing in “the Holy Catholic Church,” I knew I meant the Church with a pope. But I had no idea when I was Baptized that we would say Christ has two natures. I had no idea it meant that we venerated relics. It took me years to understand what the big deal was with Mary or how to have a relationship with her.

After Baptism, I enrolled in CCD at my home parish. I loved the priests there, and many gaps in my knowledge about the Faith filled in, but there were a few challenges. I never received First Communion, and it was decided that since I needed to take classes to receive it, I would receive First Communion two years later as a junior in high school when I received Confirmation, so I would have two years of CCD. But, no one seemed to realize I had never received the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and as I still wasn’t super sure what it was except that it was connected to First Communion, I figured I would be told when and where to show up when I needed to do so. And you know what happens when you assume…you don’t get all your Sacraments in a sequential order.

I eventually received Eucharist and Confirmation as a junior in high school. And then I went to the Thomas Aquinas College Summer Program, where Reconciliation was offered multiple times a day, and I asked a girl in my dorm, “Hey, when does that happen anyway?” One of the priests offered me an impromptu afternoon catechetical overview, and I finally received Reconciliation. To this day, I am so unsure of the “Oh God I am heartily sorry” prayer that I normally make something up about never ever sinning and you have to give me the grace because you’re God and all and hope the priest cuts me off eventually and blesses me.  Grace, of the capital letter formal sense, in many ways encapsulates my whole story. I was not unlike James and John, asking to sit at the hand of Christ and drink from the cup that he drank, and yet how truly could Jesus have also said to me “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?”