A Lifetime of Searching Until Her Climatic Leap of Faith

(originally posted in March, 2015 )

By Robert R. Schwarz

          Conversion is accomplished in daily life by gestures of reconciliation, 
          concern for the poor, the exercise and defense of justice and right, by 
          the admission of faults to one's brethren, fraternal correction, revision 
          of life, examination of conscience, spiritual direction, acceptance of
          suffering,  and endurance of persecution for the sake of righteousness. 
         (Catechism of the Catholic Church , second edition,   # 1435 )

          ' Somebody's knockin' at your door '   ( African-American spiritual harmony )

           

       

Julia , a "grains"research  scientist ,  in her lab

               It was, she would say later, "the crowning moment of my spiritual life ."  Nervously confident , Julia DesRochers  waited for one of  the four priests to lay   hands of blessing upon  her  head. She was standing on her church's altar with 12 other adults , and behind each of them stood their "sponsor" ,  the one who had eight months ago  enthusiastically encouraged Julia and the others to receive this soul-changing  sacrament.

  Today was the Easter Vigil , and the church was alive with music befitting the mounting  joy felt by Julia .

              Sitting in pews were smiling friends and family  . Smiles for Julia came from her aunt, a cousin,  and a close friend.  

            The priestly cadre of the St. James Catholic Church of Arlington Heights, Illinois  made their move. Frs. Zavaski  ( then pastor ) ,  Foley ( recently back from a long U.S. Army chaplaincy stint in Afghanistan  and soon to be pastor) , Gilbert ( recently   from Tanzania ) , and Joji ( originally  from India )  approached each of the "elect"  and , placing both hands on their heads, blessed the 13 . Then the priests dipped a finger into the Holy Oil , ( a mixture of oil of olives and balsam ) .

 Julia  felt Fr. Joji's fingers  make the sign of the cross on her forehead , thus "sealing" her with the chrism and  proclaiming her a true member of the Roman Catholic Church.       

            " I felt like I was really joining the body of Christ,"  Julia later told this reporter in a recent  Exodus Trekker interview.  For Julia, this  was the climax of a decades- long spiritual journey  that had challenged  her with many twists and turns .

A  Lukewarm Journey Begun at  Age 14

            Julia isn't sure when she first became aware of her spiritual dimension.  Growing up in nearby Palatine, she  to Sunday school  there and was,  she said, an "occasional church-goer"  with her mother at the United Church of Christ. When her mother remarried and she and daughter moved to New Jersey, Julia  joined a youth group at a Presbyterian church . The group had weekly prayer breakfasts . " That's probably when my spiritual awareness began to evolve, " she said.  "I was fourteen .   I was not really that into boys and was a pretty straight arrow sort of kid. "

            Then came a phase in the life of mother and daughter when both of them became "less  religious."  Some of this,  Julia claims, was influenced by  the divorce of their  pastor,   whom Julia described as a "neat, charismatic guy whom everybody liked  except for the several who wanted to give him the boot. It was pretty divisive.  "   Julia's  mother  referred to the pastor's critics as a "bunch of hypocrites who were suppose to be forgiving, not judgmental. "   The incident , Julia recalled,   "definitely changed the mood in  our house ." 

Dad and Daughter Test the Spiritual  Waters

   
Now 35  and out of graduate school and married , Julia admitted that she then "had a very hard heart about religion." One day while visiting her divorced father at his retirement cabin in Door County, Wisconsin,  she rose early before her husband  and joined  her father  for coffee on  the porch . "Dad and I had a real good relationship. " She began to tell  him about her joining a marathon running group and meeting two Catholics and a married couple , the husband being a Protestant minister.   "Sometimes," she related to her  father that morning, "we would talk about church , and  I remember thinking that these people weren't so weird or hypocritical. "  But she also told father that she believed "religion is just a crutch for people . "

In  Florida on vacation: in 2003 ( from right ): Julia,
her father, John, husband Glenn, and a family friend  

            The conversation turned to  a library book Julia had read recently that confronted the reader with his or her possible ignorance about the Bible. "I don't know what whispered to inspired me to read  this book, " Julia  commented to her father who, though he believed in God , was not a Christian.  This led to father and daughter talking  about "spiritual things."

            In our interview, Julia said she and her father that morning were "testing the spiritual waters " of the Christian faith . " I think God on that porch  was working on my heart, softening it, " she said. "He does this in such a subtle way. You have to sort of move close to Him inch by inch .  He knows it's got to be at the right time for you.  "

Tragedy Brought Her 'Finest Moment '

In May, 2003, Julia's father was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. " I remember praying like I hadn't prayed for years , " Julia said.  She   began to cry as she related one of those prayers:  God help me to be strong for him because he's going to need me a lot to get through this.  " And then I had this peace that I never had felt. It was so awesome. "

Her  father was moved to his daughter's home for hospice care , where he died  a week later. "It was such a  good death, "  Julia said.   Without   faith in God that was then "blossoming" in her , she said she never could have gone through her father's dying. "It was like God just held on to me, " she  said.  "It wasn't really me who had done this. It was all Him." 

" I loved my Dad, but before his passing I wasn't a much of a giving person.  " She admitted that if not for those  "searching" conversations with her  father on that cabin porch, she might have been tempted to just walk away from all of the ordeal.  "But not for a second did I have that temptation.   My husband —and he is not a religious person— later said to me: 'Julia,  that was your finest moment.'  "

Her Dad's Death the 'Tipping Point '

"In my spiritual walk,  my father's death was the tipping point, " Julia recalled.  "After that , I said to God: After you have done all this for me with my father, how can I turn my back on you now?"

          And she didn't.  After she and her husband moved back to Arlington Heights, Julia renewed her search for a church that was  "modern and progressive –and had likeable music. " Her spiritual outlook began to change after she read  " A Purpose Driven Life" by the noted evangelical Rick Warren . From his words  she learned  that "studying and praying is fine but  you really need to have people around you. "

For "nostalgic reasons" and to renew her faith ,  Julia  returned to her former Protestant church in Palatine where her parents had been  married.  But she  soon left this church after the congregation and the pastor had a "falling out."  ( She would later hear a Catholic priest comment humorously, that when Catholics are dissatisfied with their pastor they find a new parish, but Protestants go off and form their own church.)

Julia  began more "hopping around " to different denominational churches . But all their theology, she said, sounded the same to her , and  she got  "really tired of the relativism" of their  sermons . "I asked myself, well, if that particular Bible  translation I just heard is good now,  what about 20 years from now? "

            Julia knew she needed  "something else ." But what ?  " Being a Catholic was furthest from my mind.  I was raised Protestant and had heard a lot  of miscommunication about the Catholic church . I had a friend who challenged me with two questions: 'How can you worship Mary and  believe that the Pope is infallible?' "  Julia's   reply  today would be  this  quote from Archbishop Fulton Sheen:

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate

the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they

                            wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be. 

            She continued to  go "in and out" of several churches, "trying to get  their version of the mass…but never to become Catholic,  for my family  might become upset. I fought that and fought it. "  But two years ago she said she " yearned for a deeper connection with  Christian faith traditions and those saint and holy souls who have gone before us. "

Now  Drawn to the Catholic Faith

            Then it happened:  " I felt  drawn to the Catholic faith tradition in a way I cannot describe.  I finally accepted that the 'whisper ' I kept sensing was the Holy Spirit guiding me to  consider Catholicism.  I wrestled with this for a while until I decided that I had to trust, obey, and say ' here I am Lord. '  And one day while praying, all of a sudden I had this epiphany: Well,  why don’t you actually consider becoming Catholic instead of all these other things that make you feel close to being a Catholic but don't ?"

In Her home at the table where her
epiphany occurred

            At our  interview in her home, we sat around the same small  room table where Julia's epiphany occurred. A candle was burning on it, illuminating a Bible open to  Psalm 23 and also  a small Byzantine icon of  Jesus the Good Shepherd. My host with the  brown hair and blue eyes wore black slacks and  white blouse,  and with a coy smile  and  lilting  voice she brought to mind  Audrey Hepburn.  One of the  family's two  dogs yipped now and then in a distant room.

             Julia continued :  " I knew that thought was not mine, but totally the Holy Spirit…I called  up Fr. Joji because I had seen his name on the St. James website. I met with him. He was reassuring  about my lingering doubts about going through RCIA and advised me: " That's exactly what you should do. There's no obligation. You're just coming to  find out more about the faith. "

            Yet Julia had "tons of doubts ". One thing she was sure of, though:  "I didn't want to be a cafeteria Catholic, picking and choosing what  I wanted to believe. If I were to chose becoming a Catholic,  I really wanted to understand the doctrines and dogmas of the church  and remain faithful to them ." Then, deciding  that this was her faith journey and not her family's, Julia last September  took her first step to conversion and began the RCIA process ; soon she  was enjoying the  "wonderful  fellowship and  generosity of spirit "of her classmates .   

       When  asked to  comment on his 13 years of directing RCIA and of seeing  Christians  of all ages brought into the  church,  Jim Hamman said : " I always feel like a proud parent , seeing them gradually lose their doubts  as the Holy Spirit grabs them. "  [ update note: Since then , Julia has joined the RCIA team, she says, "to help other people come into the church. " ]

'It's So Beautiful—Really !'

            Not all of Julia's doubts disappeared overnight.  She admitted to struggling with doctrines like such as   Mary being born without sin and the need to confess sins to a priest rather than just to herself. She asked Fr. Joji if she should turn back from her intentions.  He told her , she said, that there are a lot of things which Catholic seminarians struggle with;  but as long as she  remained  open to God revealing the truth to her about things  like Mary being born without sin, then all would be right with  her. Julia now tries to see her spiritual director monthly—"so it can become a habit"—at the Sisters of the Living Word convent.  "I have really now come to appreciate reconciliation ( confession ) ."

            Julia will stay "open to the truth, " she said "because people much smarter than me  have studied scripture much more than me. "

            Now married 25 years to Glenn, a chemical engineer,   and having "put down roots"  in a home for ten years—"longest we ever lived in any place"—Julia  sings in the 8:30 a.m.  choir,  has joined the church's mission group to Dominican Republic, and plans to sponsor one of next year's RCIA candidates.  She has a PhD in grain  science and works full-time for a Chicago company doing  research on bakery products.  "It certainly has been a path that I never could have  anticipated. But God is good and here I am.  As I've walked along this path for the last year, it keeps feeling more and more rich. It's so beautiful—really ! "

            Her message to fence-straddlers ?  " Sometimes you just have to step out in faith and trust that the step is going to be there. Like when you walk down the stairwell in the middle of the night, you can't see that certain step, but you trust that it's there."

Julia with her RCIA class of  "new" Catholics and  (in rear )  their sponsors. Julia is second from left in front row. Fr. Joji is
directly behind her. 

THE END

All comments are welcome.

rrschwarz7@wowway.com

© 2016 Robert R. Schwarz