Quick recap from My Conversion Story, Part 1 from last week: Last January I had a miscarriage and said a prayer for the first time in a long time. Then in February one of my husband’s vocal cords became paralyzed, I said more prayers, it sucked. In March, we went to church, my husband bought me coffee as a reward, I believed in God but not in Jesus as His Son. In May I had a brief crisis with Catholicism and felt sad that I might not go to our church anymore, but then it was okay, and I realized I really liked the Catholic Church, but I still did not want to become Catholic. Got it? Good. Moving on.

Shortly after I wrote my first post about why I like the Catholic Church, another blogger wrote her own post ridiculing me for it. This shocked and upset me and led me to think and think and think about my reasons for liking the Church (And to write another post about it). And then I got all fired up, because I realized that the other blogger seemed to be using my post and dissing on me as a way to indirectly criticize Catholicism. Which made me mad because that is my church! And then I liked Catholicism even more.

Around this time, I began to experience a need to read everything I could about Christianity and Catholicism. I read lots of stuff, so I won’t list it all here, but there were two books that truly challenged me and changed me.

The first was The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. A true story about a family that ran an anti-Nazi operation out of their home and store and hid Jewish people during WWII. I was truly amazed by the faith of the people in this story. I can’t really describe what this book was like for me. Reading it felt like someone had lifted a veil from my face or something. Seriously deep thoughts resulted from reading this.

The second book was Rome Sweet Home by Scott and Kimberly Hahn. Scott and Kimberly were evangelical Protestants (I think Presbyterian?). He was even a pastor. This book is the memoir of their conversions to Catholicism. It describes the process by which the Hahns learned about and overcame their previously held mistaken beliefs about the Church. You know the types of beliefs I mean, like how people think Catholics worship Mary, or how Catholicism is all about what the Pope says and not about what the Bible says. The book was also full of the emotion (good and bad) that comes with finding a home in the Church. Even when you never, ever, ever thought that’s where you would end up.

Some time during the early summer, I began to experience Mass differently. I had begun to truly believe and I found that going to Mass left me with a feeling of peace and tranquility unlike anything I had ever really experienced before. I also began to struggle with not being able to receive communion. I felt something like an ache and a longing when everyone else went up to the front of church to do so, and I had to stay behind. I found this to be odd, and I spent quite a bit of time thinking about it to figure out what it was about.

I was shocked to find that, in my heart, I wanted to become Catholic. I wanted to be able to receive the Eucharist. I didn’t really understand the Catholic belief of transfiguration (that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ through the priest’s consecration of them), but I knew that I wanted that bread and wine. Very much.

I scoffed at this desire for a while, feeling that I was being silly. But it didn’t go away. I really wanted to become Catholic. But I didn’t want to tell anyone.

See, I grew up during the years of the televangelism scandals. I remember seeing and hearing about very theatrical displays of “finding religion” and thinking that these were weird and in some cases kind of fake. Even back when I still believed in God (I mean before I didn’t believe and then believed again), I found the dramatic displays of evangelical conversion and other experiences to be unsettling. I felt uncomfortable with these, and it seemed like people felt they had to put on a show to prove that they were “true Christians.”

Then after I became an atheist, I just found it all to be silly. I thought I had it all figured out and that those who believed in God were just naive and pollyannaish. I thought that I was being all “scientific” in my rejection of religion. I thought there was no “evidence” to support the existence of God. I thought I was so smart.

This is hard to write, because it makes me seem like a total jerk. And I was a jerk about this particular issue in many ways. I had spent so many years making light of others’ experiences of “finding religion” (seems I always used the air quotes in my mind) based in part on some bad TV from the 80s and in part on my own hoity-toity beliefs that I knew “the truth,” that I was hesitant to really embrace my own experience. I sure didn’t want to share it with anyone else, because I was afraid I would be ridiculed or that people would find my conversion to be insincere.

I had to take some time to think about it to make sure it was the right decision for me.

At the time I first realized I wanted to become Catholic, I was slowly working through reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis with a friend. When I first started reading the book, I was so annoyed with some of Lewis’s assertions about why we must accept that there is a God. In many instances I thought, “Okay that’s nice, but that’s not evidence. You can’t expect me to believe this if you can’t back it up better than that.”

Having a background in scientific research, I am naturally skeptical and have a tendency to look for alternate explanations for everything. When I started researching Christianity, I think I was looking for some hard data. I wanted evidence for the existence of God and for the assertion that Jesus was His Son.

But then as I read more of Mere Christianity and many other books and blogs and continued on with my own experiences of prayer and going to church, I began to have my own very real encounter with God. I couldn’t quantify it. I couldn’t measure it or prove it to anyone else. I was the experimenter and the test subject. I was an N of one – a case study. I was using my own anecdotal evidence. It would be terrible research design, but it turned out to be perfectly sufficient for my own personal experiment.

I actually did end up reading plenty of information about the existence of God. About Jesus and the Bible and the origins of the Church. I found that there actually is a lot of evidence out there to support Christian beliefs. But for me, the proof that I needed came from my own experience. I knew that God was real because I felt Him. I knew that Jesus was His Son because every Sunday I sat in the Church He built and felt Him too.

And finally, I knew that I wanted to become Catholic, without a doubt. Everything I learned about it felt right for me. I wanted to join the Catholic Church, because it was home.

I finally told my husband I wanted to convert. I wondered if he would think it was weird that I wanted to join the Church, but of course he didn’t. Neither did Super Friend. Neither did my Mom, or anyone else I told. I realized that most people don’t have the same thoughts about religious conversion that I used to have. And for those that do, I decided I didn’t much care what they thought about my conversion. It was something I just felt I had to do. So I contacted the director of the RCIA program at our church and got signed up.

Eight months later, my conversion isn’t quite complete of course. A lot has happened and I’ve learned a ton since July, when I decided to become Catholic. I won’t officially join the papists until the Easter Vigil Mass on April 19th. On that day I will become a bona fide convert. But since last summer, I have been a convert in my heart.

This whole conversion process has humbled me in countless ways. It’s led me to take a hard look at myself in many areas. I haven’t always felt this way, but I now know that it doesn’t really matter why or how someone comes to a place of finding God. It will be different for everyone. For me the experience has been very painful. And also very beautiful. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

A little over a year ago, I wrote my first post dealing with religion and faith. At that time, and maybe a few times since then, I made a vague reference to some things that happened in my life that led me to begin to pray and search for something more than atheism had to offer. I wasn’t really sure if I would ever share what happened as the impetus to my conversion. It might seem odd, considering all that I write about here, but I’m pretty private about certain things.

But I’ve started to think that maybe I’d like to write about my conversion story. The whole thing. So naturally, in doing so I’d need to begin at the beginning. The beginning of this story starts with a positive pregnancy test.

With each pregnancy, I have told almost no one about it besides my husband and my doctor until we get through the first trimester. Lots of people do this, I know. It allows one to avoid having to go back and tell a bunch of people about a loss if one occurs. I was fortunate, of course, in my pregnancies with my girls. I got pregnant easily and had no serious problems or complications during my pregnancies or deliveries. I am truly so blessed.

But last year, January 19th to be precise, I prayed desperately for the first time in about a decade, because I was pregnant for the fourth time, and I suspected I was starting to have a miscarriage. It was very early in my pregnancy. I think technically it would be called a chemical pregnancy, as I was only 5-6 weeks along. But I had had a whole week since learning of the pregnancy and had felt the thrill of the positive test, the anticipation of another wonderful nine months, and the excitement and joy of thinking about bringing another baby into our home. I’d had a week of dreaming of our much desired Baby #4.

And then it was gone. A couple of blood tests confirmed that I had in fact lost that little baby. I was devastated.

In RCIA, when asked what brought me to the class, I’ve alluded to this “event” that sparked my conversion obliquely (as I had here until now). One woman asked me if, when I first prayed again after so many years, I had an amazing spiritual experience. I answered her truthfully and said, “No. It was awful.”

And it was. After years of not praying and not believing, in that desperate moment of simply praying “Please. Please. Please.” over and over, I didn’t have any sort of mystical experience. I didn’t notice any experience of God, because my prayer was almost a reflexive response in that moment, and I was certainly not looking for Him right then.

It wasn’t until a while later that I was able to look past my sadness about our loss and actually reflect on the surprising fact that I had prayed. It wasn’t an elaborate or even intentional prayer. But I had to acknowledge that when the going got really tough, when things were at their worst, I prayed. Though I supposedly didn’t believe in God, I prayed. Though I didn’t pray again and certainly didn’t start truly believing right away, I. had. prayed.

I don’t think I really thought too much more about it until over a month after the fact. Then my world was shaken up again.

My husband lost his voice and was having some difficulty breathing. This happened in late February. At first it just seemed like regular old laryngitis, at least to me, because the girls and I had colds. So I figured he did too. But it didn’t go away. He could barely speak, and I got scared. I can look back now and say that God was probably intervening in my family to wake us up and bring us near to Him. But at the time, it pretty much just sucked.

This is when I started to pray again. Not frequently, but a few times. My husband scheduled some appointments to find out what was happening. I was afraid that he had some sort of cancer, and I prayed as hard as I knew how to. We got good news and bad news from the results of his various tests and scans. Good news: he did not have any evidence of cancer. Bad news: his right vocal cord was paralyzed. And we didn’t really know why, or when or even if it would recover.

He couldn’t yell or speak loudly. He could barely speak at all and not without discomfort. He had a hard time exercising because he got out of breath easily. It was very difficult for him to read books to the girls and he definitely could not make many of the funny voices he and the girls enjoyed when playing. He couldn’t sing.

He said he wanted to start going to church. He was not pushing me to go, and would have gone by himself if I had not wanted to. But I said okay. I felt very unsure about it. I wrote this post. I remember saying to my husband that I figured there probably was a God, but that I thought the Jesus-as-the-Son-of-God story was totally unbelievable. I started thinking about where we would go. I was not really interested in going to a Catholic church, but my husband was raised Catholic, so that seemed to make the most sense. Knowing that Super Friend is also Catholic, I asked her where her family goes and why. We decided to go to the same place. On St. Patrick’s Day last year, we went to church for the first time.

On the way home, my husband went through the drive-through of Starbucks and ordered me a coffee. We kept going to church each week and he kept getting me coffee, even though it was very difficult for him to project his voice well enough to be understood over the drive-through speaker. I think it was his way of setting up a positive contingency for me. Like a reward system for going to church! I would have gone either way of course, but it makes me chuckle in retrospect, that he was trying to do something to maintain my motivation.

Turned out I liked going to church, though I still wasn’t sure that I really believed in much of the teachings of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. But I was reading and learning as much as I could on the subject. I was researching the Catholic Church’s position on various issues one night when I read something that made me feel sick to my stomach. I’ll skip the details here, but it caused me to think that I was absolutely not going to go to the Catholic church anymore. Period.

And here’s where things got really interesting (for me anyway). I was really upset to think that I would have to find another church. Though I really hadn’t wanted to go to a Catholic church, I had come to like ours, and to enjoy the Catholic service. I was truly surprised to find that I actually liked the Catholic Church.

At that time I didn’t agree with many of the teachings of the Church, and I still didn’t hold many specific Christian beliefs, but I didn’t want to stop going to the Catholic services, and that was something. I spoke to my husband about my concerns, and my problem with the Church was resolved, for a while. So we did continue to go to Mass.

Around that time I began praying more regularly, mostly for my husband’s voice to come back. I felt kind of weird doing it, but I did it anyway. I still didn’t have any desire to become Catholic myself. But that’s the next part of the story. To be continued…

Find part two HERE.

Last year when Ash Wednesday occurred, I had still not been to church in many years. I had not yet written this post. I had had my one, first experience of praying, but hadn’t allowed myself to think much more about it. I still wasn’t a believer, and wouldn’t have even known it was Ash Wednesday except that I went out to dinner with Super Friend. This is something she and I do regularly. We always go to the same restaurant, sit at the same table, and usually order the same things.

Last year on Ash Wednesday, she shook up our routine. We used to always order an appetizer called “sizzling sisig.” It’s basically little bits of pork, fried with onions, and brought out sizzling in drippings on a little cast iron thing like lots of places use to serve fajitas. It’s delicious, but on Ash Wednesday she couldn’t eat it, and I wasn’t going to order it just for myself. So we didn’t have it.

^^ That’s not Super Friend, in case you were wondering

Also, we usually both order a decaf coffee and chocolate volcano cake with ice cream on the side for dessert. It’s a little luxury, and we both get kind of giddy when we get it. But on Ash Wednesday last year Super Friend couldn’t have this treat, because she gave up chocolate for Lent. This didn’t affect me at all since, of course, we don’t share dessert. I still ordered my little plate of gooey decadence while she ordered something else that didn’t look nearly as yummy. We had a great time, as always.

But I remember thinking, “She is giving up chocolate? She must be crazy. Why would anyone ever do that? Especially when pregnant?” I thought the same thing when I was taking ice cream to her in the hospital after her sweet little Super Baby was born during Lent. I was going to surprise her with the ice cream, and normally it would have been easy for me to pick out a flavor for her and know that she would love it. But I couldn’t surprise her, because I had no idea what flavor to get for her that didn’t have chocolate in it!

So. Last year, the whole concept of Ash Wednesday and Lent completely escaped me. Although we did venture into church for the first time during Lent, and we went to services on Easter Sunday, I really didn’t get any of it. I was still like a deer in the headlights, and very little of what was said and done penetrated my lingering atheist-turned-sort-of-agnostic mindset.

I didn’t understand, nor did I really care if I’m honest, why people gave up things for Lent. I didn’t get the fasting. I didn’t get the “no meat on Fridays” rule. I didn’t know what the ashes were for on Ash Wednesday. Okay, I still don’t really know that, but I will be looking it up promptly because now, I want to know.

I’ve done a lot of reading and asking questions this year to prepare for Lent because I want to understand what it all means. I don’t want to just go to mass next Wednesday and get ashes on my forehead and not know why. I don’t want to arbitrarily give up something for Lent without understanding the reason for it.

There are still lots of things I need to learn, but as I’ve been thinking and reading and praying about Lent, I have learned that, as I understand it, there are two parts to the process of giving something up or taking something on for this special time: sacrifice and drawing closer to Christ. It seems that the first helps you do the second.

So now I understand why a pregnant woman would give up chocolate for 40 days. I understand fasting. I understand that the specific thing I choose to do for Lent is less important than what I do with the experience of sacrificing something. If I don’t use that experience to help me grow closer to Jesus, I will have missed the point, I think.

So, what does that mean for me? This year my husband and I have agreed that we will be giving up ice cream as a family for Lent. I’m planning to have a special ice cream treat on Fat Tuesday with the girls and explain to them briefly that we won’t be having ice cream again until Easter and why.

This won’t be a huge actual sacrifice for them because they don’t eat ice cream a ton anyway (not nearly as much as I do), but we will have a few opportunities to highlight this with them because of a few birthdays and probably a family date night or two during the period of Lent (occasions when we might normally have ice cream). I’m also going to use the Prayer, Fasting, Alms-giving basket mentioned in this post to help the girls (and myself) focus more each day on Lent.

Are you wondering what am I giving up or taking on for myself this year? Me too. I haven’t actually figured that out yet. I am considering several possibilities. I’ll let you know when I decide.

I have mentioned before that I spent many years not praying. I didn’t believe in God, so I didn’t believe in prayer, so I didn’t pray. It’s only been a little over a year since I started to pray again, and I have found that I am still uncertain about how to do it right. I realize that there isn’t just one right way to pray, but it seems I’m not quite on target in the way I do it. I feel clumsy and inadequate.

I mentioned this to my husband the other day, and he was surprised that I would feel uncertain about praying. Apparently to some people, how to pray, is never really a question or concern. But I’ve noticed that there seem to be all sorts of unwritten rules about how to do it that no one really ever teaches you. At least not when you’re 37. I may have learned as a child, but I don’t remember.

Generally speaking, my prayers are just clunky. When I hear other people pray or read prayers that others have composed, I’m always amazed at how fancy and eloquent and religious they sound. My prayers don’t sound like that at all. Mine are more like “Dear-God-Thank-you-for-my-blessings-Please-watch-over-my-husband-and-children-and-um-help-me-to-be-a-better-mom-Amen.” Of course that’s an exaggeration, but not as much as you might think.

I probably wouldn’t worry about this issue so much, except that my lack of confidence has led me to feel insecure in my ability to teach my girls how to pray. I try to tell them how special it is to be able to talk to God and to explain why we pray and so on. But I feel awkward and wonder if I’m saying the right things so they get it.

I do feel hopeful when I see Miss imitating me by bowing her head and murmuring over my rosary, what she calls my “prayer beads.” I smile when Lass tells me that she talks to God in her room during nap time or spontaneously blurts out, “Mom, I love Jesus.” I swoon when Baby Sis clasps her hands in prayer and says “Amen” during grace before dinner.

My girls are all still under five, so it could be that I just need to relax a wee bit. But it feels like such a huge responsibility to be the one teaching them all of this stuff when I barely get it myself half of the time.

My big question is, is it “okay” to pray for something you want? I’ve heard or read opinions on both sides of this question in the past year. I always felt pretty strongly that it was okay, but now I’m not sure. For many months I had been praying and praying and praying for something I reeeeallllly wanted. I prayed this chaplet and that intercessory prayer and such and such novena. I wore little medals and carried one sometimes too. I believed that if I just got it right, if I just prayed the right thing with the right beads wearing the right medal, asking for intercession from the right saint, I’d get what I wanted.

But I didn’t.

I started to realize that it probably doesn’t work that way. That if I was praying, at least much of the time, with my goal in mind instead of with God in mind, maybe I was doing it “wrong.” So instead, I began to pray for help with trusting that He will give me what I need, even if it’s not what I want.

I’m awkward and clunky in prayer, but I try to remember that I’m still learning and re-learning. That God doesn’t mind if my prayers aren’t pretty. That whether I use the perfect words is less important than whether my prayers are heartfelt. That all I need to do is keep praying. So I do.