How the Assumption Saved my Life: a Reflection

It was twenty years ago today, and I was a pagan. Now when I say pagan, I don’t mean that I was unchurched or a “None”. No, I was a card-carrying member of an ancient Egyptian reconstructionist church.

I am often amused by God’s little jokes.

I was raised with no religion, but both my sister and I were sent to Catholic high schools on the south side of Chicago. This was an eminently logical decision made by my parents, given the state of the Chicago public schools at the time.

I found Christianity to be laughable. It certainly wasn’t helped by the dire state of catechesis in the 1980s, but I had so many fundamental disagreements with the doctrines and dogmas as they were presented to me that I’m not sure any level of catechesis would have reached me at the time.

My school was taught by Augustinian Friars, and regardless of my opinion about Christianity I grew to admire these men and their way of life. At one point in my senior year, I had even asked the chaplain about the possibility of becoming in Augustinian.

We met in his office, and he said to me, “I really only have one question for you; do you believe?”

Without hesitation I answered “no”.

If he was surprised by my answer, he gave no sign of it. He told me clearly that I may or may not have a vocation to the religious life, but before discerning that I had some other work to do. He told me to go out and look for Truth.

So I did.

I studied Confucianism, where I became fascinated by the tradition and the rites. I studied Taoism, where I was drawn to the mysticism.

And finally, after a couple of other detours, I ended up in Egyptian reconstructionism – Kemetism. It was here over the course of almost a decade that I grappled with the ideas of sign and symbol versus the merely analytical, myth versus the measurable, the intersectionality of faith and reason, and the miraculous poetry of ordinary life. 

In a way that’s a little too complicated to explain briefly, I even came to embrace the concepts of sacramentality and transubstantiation, albeit under different names.

In short, on this meandering voyage the Lord was lovingly and patiently reconciling me to the basics of Christian belief, and He was doing so in a way and in places where I would not reflexively recoil from them.

And then, when the groundwork was sufficiently laid, on 15 August 2004, Francine and I went for one of our Sunday morning walks through the neighborhood. As we passed by Saint Patrick Church, the doors flung open. Music poured out of the church, and for whatever reason Francine and I walked up the steps and went inside.

It was the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

As we entered the church, two things immediately struck me. The first was that all of my disagreements and doctrinal contempt of Christianity had been, to my surprise, resolved in other contexts. I suddenly saw my entire wandering search for Truth laid bare before me.

And then there was the second thing.

Do you know that feeling you get when you come home from a long trip and you set your suitcases down? That welcoming feeling of relief, of “home at last”? In that moment I was absolutely overwhelmed by that feeling.

Francine and I went home, changed our clothes into something slightly more presentable, and came back to attend the next Mass. I started attending daily Mass after that.

A few weeks later, we were in Virginia visiting Francine’s parents. We attended Mass at a church dedicated to Saint Gregory the Great. I remember very little of it except the final words of the homily, delivered by a priest with a Polish accent and the cadence of a Southern preacher. He said, “I call upon everyone within the sound of my voice to convert to Jesus Christ.”

It was the call I didn’t know I had been waiting for.

When we returned home to Tacoma, I enrolled in RCIA. At the same time, Francine was on her own journey back to the Catholic Church. She started attending “Returning Catholics” sessions at Saint Patrick – effectively undergoing a reconversion.

I was baptized, confirmed, and received the Eucharist at the Easter Vigil the following year. Francine and I were later married in the same church. And now, after a gap of about a decade, Saint Patrick is once again our parish church.

I always marvel at God’s humor. After twenty years of wandering in the desert, I was literally called out of Egypt to be baptized. Today it is twenty years since we first walked into Saint Patrick Church. It’s strange to me to think that my conversion experience is now literally the midway point in my faith journey so far.

Francine and I consider the Solemnity of the Assumption to be our “Catholic anniversary”. And today is our twentieth.

As I reflect on the twenty years since that day, I am astounded at where this journey has led us. My spirituality has been formed by Saint Benedict – I take my obligations as a Benedictine oblate very seriously, even though we haven’t been to the monastery in years. Really, since we started serving in parish ministry.

I find myself most spiritually nourished in the Sacramental life, in the sacred liturgy. This is where I experience the loving and healing presence of Jesus most clearly.

I was called to liturgical ministry by my first mentor, Rev. Carmine Sacco, SJ, and then more definitively by my friend and former pastor, Rev. Jacob Maurer. I helped Bishop Peter J. Elliott with his book on serving at the altar, and I have written my own manual for altar serving. I have trained servers at numerous parishes over the course of the past decade.

Liturgical service is a humbling experience. You are reminded constantly that it is Christ who does the work, and you are there to serve Him and to serve the people of God.

On our first pilgrimage to Rome in 2005 – not a walking pilgrimage! – we found ourselves caught up in the holy chaos that was the death and funeral of Pope Saint John Paul II. It was a grace and a privilege to unexpectedly be there for those days.

Since then, I have received much of my spiritual nourishment from pilgrimage, particularly from the Camino – walking the pilgrimage path to the shrine of the Apostle Saint James the Greater in Santiago de Compostela. We first walked into Santiago in 2013, and we’ve done it four times since. It’s difficult to describe the Camino to anyone who has not walked it, but I think I can safely sum it up in the words of Saint Augustine: solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking”. 

And it is no coincidence that my most recent Camino began on this day last year,

And in another one of the Lord’s funny jokes, which I’m sure many would simply ascribe to coincidence, the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Seattle is Saint James the Greater – Santiago.

And I only recently found out that the archdiocese has a secondary patron. It is of course Our Lady of the Assumption.

There is a kind of poetry to this. I often say that God is a poet to confound the mathematicians, and a mathematician to confound the poets. It’s a good reminder that there are mysteries we will never fathom, and that the quest for Truth is really the quest we are all called to undertake. 

In Saint John’s Gospel, the Lord says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” And our life is an earthly pilgrimage on the way to seek that Truth, until that final moment where by His grace we will see Him face to face.

I wonder what adventures the next twenty years will bring?