This Easter Sunday marked fifty years since I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church.
Briefly, the story goes like this. I was baptised into the Catholic Church as a baby by the Royal Australian Navy chaplain at HMAS Moreton in Brisbane during the war years. After the war my father returned home injured in body and mind. Life was a struggle for my parents. When I came to school age the local priest visited my parents and threatened my father with excommunication for sending me to a state school. This completely alienated my father and I never knew I was baptised until my late teens when one of my aunts told me.
My parents were not irreligious and in fact, looking back I believe both of them had a deep but private and undemonstrative belief in God but my father in particular was to some degree bitter because of the priest’s attitude at a time when they were struggling with the consequences of re-establishing life post-war. Today, Dad would have been diagnosed with PTSD. My mother, I found out later, had a profound and perhaps mystical faith that kept her going through this time but she never spoke of it.
I think that I have always been a ‘searcher’. Even as a small child I remember a sense of something larger than myself that surrounded me and inhabited the world, glimpsed at on rare moments of insight or beauty. By my late teens that searching had become strong with a sense of something empty within me yet something just beyond my reach beckoning me.
One day as I was walking to work in the city, I happened upon a chapel in Elizabeth Street. Out of curiosity, I went in. There I was confronted with Catholics at prayer, some silent, some kissing relics, some lighting small light bulbs – it was all rather strange. In the midst was a priest who seemed like a tolerant still point. I later came to know him as Father Luciano, Capuchin Franciscan. For all the strangeness, I felt I had come home.
I visited the chapel often but never spoke to anyone. One day I approached my aunt and she arranged for me to be instructed. To tell the truth, going through the old penny catechism as an eighteen year old with a thirst for knowledge was far from inspiring but there was that sense of being pulled towards something that kept me going.
By a harmonious co-incidence the priest, Father Bolton, who received me into full communion was the priest who had baptised me. He had finished his chaplaincy with the RAN and was now a parish priest. He was so kind, tender and supportive both to me and to my parents that he reconciled my father and encouraged my mother.
There was no RCIA back then and the Second Vatican Council had not happened. For me, that Easter Eucharist was the moment when my life direction and focus were consolidated. I was given such a sense of the vast yet particular loving presence of Christ permeating every living cell of creation. There was a pulse of life that was both personal and a person. My response was awe and the overwhelming desire to walk with God in all things.
Don’t for a minute think that this life-changing experience has turned me into sweetness and light. It hasn’t by any means. In fact, faith has turned the light towards my darkness in such a way that one illusion after the other gets pulled down. Just as challenging is the light that is turned on to the gifts of nature given to me and the imperative to use them and not find the easy way of life.
I was changed, yet not changed. The desire to walk with God is still strong but from time to time I have to be called back on track. In so many ways these years have all the hallmarks of any valued and deep human friendship in that we abide, we struggle, we learn. This journey has and will take a lifetime to make.
I am grateful for the years of Franciscan formation and study for it is in that spirituality that I have found both comfort and challenge. I am grateful for the theological and biblical studies that have been one of God’s loveliest gifts to me. I am grateful for the paths that faith have taken me down for they are alive with people who give me more than I could ever give them. I am grateful (well, sometimes) for the painful things that have happened for they have taught me to trust in God’s graciousness and leading.
I do not understand the criticisms of Christianity that it is an escape from reality or a fear driven belief which depends on reward or punishment. My faith has been no escape. In fact, it pushes me from complacency both of mind and endeavour. It constantly makes me question my prejudices and unformed judgments and then I have to live out those new insights. This friendship with God asks a growing congruency between insight and action. God in Jesus of the Gospels regularly ferrets me out of my safe hiding places to recognise in others my sisters and my brothers.
If we are neurologically programmed to prefer blood family and people who are like us, then for me to be faithful means to extend that and take the whole, groaning, muddling, beautiful mass of humanity and creation as family - to know in the alien other a brother or sister and know myself as one irrevocably woven in this network of creation. Jesus asks those who follow him to put the family of faith before the family of blood and to care for the outsider as their perfection of God who makes the rain fall on the just and unjust alike.
Many years ago one of my lecturers, a Carmelite friar, was fond of naming God as one who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. It is all about conversion – from day to day and the thing is that the comfort God gives through this process of conversion is not complacency or inertia, it is a sense of being grounded and strengthened in the One who holds everything in being.These years have asked things of me I would never have dreamed of. They have taught me to recognise myself as needing daily conversion. Yet they have, at the same time, given me a joy that is profound and puzzling for it is a joy that is given, not deserved, not a quality of personality born in me. It is something so much more surprising because it abides even in dark times and I know it is a gift from the God who abides.
So I am grateful and rather amazed.
