To Susan

Dear Susan:

I saw your comment (#242) on Called to Communion.  It is today, as I write this, exactly one month after you entered full communion with the Catholic Church.  Congratulations to you.  I was received into full communion on April 23, 2011, so I still have a lot of the freshness of the memory with me, and I guarantee you you will carry that joy around with you the rest of your days.

Unfortunately, that joy does sometimes come at a price.  Some people will look at you with the blank stare of befuddled incredulity.  I’ve received that stare.  Some will call you an apostate.  I’ve been called that, and worse.  Some, like the polemical rogue John Bugay on his blog will give you empty platitudes about the ruination of Rome and try to confuse you with pointless quibble over whether you should cross yourself right to left or left to right.  (Honestly, as if people enter the confessional and say, “Bless me Father for I crossed myself the wrong way”!)  This you will have to face, maybe for the rest of your life.

But take joy anyway.  You are right that constantly switching back and forth between a myriad of Protestant menus will only, in the end, lead to “your heart’s frustration.”  You have been given a gift, a gift that I sincerely wish every Christian had:  the honest, innocent, and fervent desire to seek the truth and follow it wherever it leads you, whatever it means.  That is so obvious from your beautiful comment.  And trust me, Susan:  A sincere and honest desire to seek and find the truth—not merely to prove yourself right, which some get caught up in—will never let you down.  Trust me:  I know.

Ultimately, Susan, you had more.  When Christ said to you, “Come, leave your nets, follow me,” you did something few have courage to do.  You left your nets.  You followed the Lord.  There is no greater joy.  A great convert, formerly a Pentecostal minister, recalled the moments when people would ask him why he became Catholic, and his answer always was:  “I had to.  How do you tell God no?  How do you look in the face of a loving Savior, who loved me so much He died that I might be with him—how do you look at Him and say no?”

You said yes.  That joy will be with you forever, regardless of what people say to you.  When I took my first Eucharist, I was so overwhelmed with the moment that all I could do when I returned to my pew was say “thank you” over and over.  Every time I would receive, for a couple months going forward, I would always hear the same verse:  “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”  That is now true for you as well.  The tingle fades, and often only comes at unpredictable moments.  But what joy when it does!

Susan, I do not know if you will ever read this. But I post it in the chance that you will, and receive the knowledge that you are never alone in His Church.  You are now one, just as Christ prayed for his disciples.  He prayed “that they may all be one.”  He did not ask that they may all be 33,000.  Christ doesn’t want your heart’s frustration; he wants your heart’s joy.

Now it is no longer you who live, but Christ who lives in you.

Welcome home.

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