Journeys Home (45 page)

Then I did what I think every soldier, sailor, Marine, or airman
has done throughout history: I prayed. As they say, there are
no atheists in foxholes. A recent convert to the Catholic faith,
I had learned to pray the rosary by reading the works of St. Louis
Marie de Monfort, and it had been the one form of prayer I had
always been able to use under any circumstances. It did not fail
me that evening.

As I prayed, the words of the Our Father struck me as never before:
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against
us."
Forgive?
How could God possibly ask me to forgive the thugs
who had tortured and killed a brave American sailor?

My mind drifted to the sorrowful mysteries. Jesus is crucified:
"Father, forgive them!" He exclaimed as the nails pierced His
sacred flesh (Lk 23:34). I thought of His admonition from the
Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies" (Mt 5:44).

How could God demand such forgiveness? Surely this teaching had
exceptions. As we circled in the choppy ocean waters off Beirut,
I rediscovered what I already had come to know and believe: The
gospel of Jesus Christ is true, and it does not admit of exceptions.

If I had died that night, my salvation would have been in jeopardy.
I had hated those terrorists from my heart. I wanted them dead.

I didn't just want to protect and free innocent hostages -- a worthy
effort in which one can accept the death of an aggressor as an
unintended consequence. I wanted to send the hijackers and their
accomplices to hell.

If I had died in that state, hell is where I would have found
myself.

But the "go" command never came. Before sunrise, President Reagan
aborted the military operations, and negotiations eventually led
to the release of the remaining hostages.

Thanks be to God! For that night, floating in the darkness off
the coast of Beirut, I had another conversion: I learned the meaning
of mercy, forgiveness, and love. In those hours, God gave me the
actual grace -- the supernatural power -- to help me let go of
my hatred and wrath.

But I relied on another grace that night: the grace I had received
in becoming Catholic. This grace allowed me to know and to believe
in the truth of the teaching of Christ and His Church. In those
moments before battle, if I had for a moment doubted that the
Word of God as revealed in Scripture and Tradition was true, I
believe I would have resisted God's call to "love your enemies,"
probably the most difficult command in Scripture. Without the
faith to believe that the teachings of Christ and His Church are
infallibly true, I would not have had the courage to change that
evening.

God's grace not only saved me from myself that evening. This conversion
from hatred to love -- one of many in my life -- brought me closer
to discovering my call to the priesthood.

The day that I was received into full communion with the Catholic
Church was the most joyful day of my life. At the Easter Vigil
in 1984, in the small chapel of Oxford University's Newman Center,
I was confirmed and received the Eucharist for the first time.
The moment I received the Host, I knew that I was being united
with Jesus Christ in every possible way: physically, spiritually,
emotionally, and intellectually. I knew that I was following the
will of the Father more closely than I ever had before.

But becoming Catholic was about the last thing I had expected
to do while at Oxford.

Often when someone asks me why I became a Catholic, I answer with
a clever line stolen from some famous convert. A favorite is G.
K. Chesterton's quip, "To get my sins forgiven." Another favorite
is the short affirmation: "Because it's true."

Sometimes it's more an accusation than a question. If the person
asks, "Why did you become a
Catholic
?" with the emphasis on
Catholic
,
he has a problem with the Church. If the emphasis is on
you
, he's
usually an intellectual elitist who believes that no educated
person would become (or remain) Catholic. If the emphasis is on
become
, the questioner finds it possible that a person raised
in the Church would remain in it, but inconceivable that someone
with my background would choose to
become
Catholic.

I love to challenge such prejudices, because I too once held them.
When I "went up" to Oxford, as the English say (the expression
assumes that everyone is coming from London, thus going "up,"
north, to Oxford), my religion could have best been described
as lapsed Protestant with strong anti-Catholic biases. In many
ways, I was a functioning pagan steeped in all the fashionable
ideas of modern American ideology. Politically and economically,
I was a conservative with a libertarian tendency. I was a pretty
typical product of my background.

I was born on May 15, 1959, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest
of three children. My parents were and are devout Christians,
and I was baptized a Lutheran soon after birth. When I was three,
my parents moved to rural northeast Pennsylvania. There wasn't
always a Lutheran church close at hand in those parts, so for
the next decade, I attended Methodist and Baptist churches as
well -- each Evangelical, with a strong sense that the Bible was
literally and inerrantly true. My family attended church every
Sunday morning, participated in Sunday school (where my parents
often assisted or taught), frequently attended midweek services
on Wednesday nights, and encouraged prayer and Bible study at
home.

At the age of six or seven, I committed myself to a personal relationship
with Christ, as much as one can as a small child. I deepened this
commitment at twelve, when, as a member of a Baptist community,
I was re-baptized. A few years later, when a Lutheran community
began in our small town, I again recommitted myself when I was
confirmed as a member there.

On each of these occasions, I was truly converting in the sense
of going deeper into my relationship with Christ. I was really
"growing in the Lord," a process that I believe parallels our
Lord's own growth in age and grace and wisdom (see Lk 2:40, 52).
This ongoing conversion is a necessary part of spiritual maturity.

But there was something missing. As I grew spiritually, I began
to question many things.

From my earliest memories, I have always been fascinated with
moral questions, especially those that touch on economic and political
issues. Perhaps this is because I grew up during the revolutionary
times of the late 1960s and early 1970s in a house with a politically
active conservative Republican father. (My earliest political
memory is of my dad's bumper sticker in 1966: "Don't blame me.
I voted for [Barry] Goldwater.") My elder siblings and my dad
argued constantly about Vietnam, the draft, the voting age, women's
rights, civil rights, and a host of other issues.

It was natural for me to search for answers to the questions that
were being argued daily on television, in the newspaper, and at
our dinner table. Having been taught to search for the truth in
the Bible, I began to study it to find out the "right answers."
Even in my late teenage years, I questioned what seemed to be
contradictory answers to the most basic questions from people
who all claimed that God loves us and had given us the truth in
Scripture.

My mother and sister, for example, were working hard for women's
rights because they saw the biblical truth that all people were
created in the image and likeness of God and thus deserved equal
respect. As an educator and administrator, my mother was a pioneer
for women in leadership roles, although she never received the
same pay as her (often less-qualified) male counterparts. But
many Evangelicals condemned her and others like her for failing
to be "submissive" according to their readings of St. Paul's epistles.
Devout Christians read the same texts and came up with opposite
conclusions!

On many issues, from the sublime (the meaning of Holy Communion)
to the ridiculous (whether men could wear their hair long), I
found believing Christians at odds, despite their reliance on
the same Bible. Who was to decide among them? How could I decide
what was right?

If I had stayed in my rural hamlet, these issues might never have
been enough to cause me a crisis of faith. But the larger world
beckoned. Partly because I wanted to get a free, high-quality education,
partly because my parents had instilled in me the important notion
of service, and partly for the prestige of it all, I entered the
United States Naval Academy (USNA) as part of the Class of 1981.

Those in the admissions office informed my parents that they did
not think I could handle the academy academically and not to expect
much. But I was born stubborn, so I needed to hear no more. I
threw myself into my studies (majoring in physics) and graduated
first in my class, winning a Rhodes Scholarship in my senior year.

But my time at USNA was not good for my faith. During my plebe
(freshman) year, I searched for a place of worship. The naval
chaplaincy provided a generic Protestant service that I enjoyed
but didn't find comforting or challenging. So I began to look
for a "civilian" church to attend.

I was in for a shock. When I attended a Lutheran church in the
Annapolis area, I was greeted coldly. After a couple of weeks,
they told me I wasn't welcome back if I was in uniform -- that
the congregation was a "peace church" that had taken an anti-war
stance during the Vietnam conflict. Since plebes had to wear their
uniforms, I couldn't attend this church.

This rejection left me reeling. My home community had celebrated
my military scholarship and sent me forth with a blessing -- and
here were members of the same denomination, reading the same Bible,
condemning me for being in the service. Who was right? How could
I know?

Being a typical eighteen-year-old, this was all I needed to quit
practicing my faith. For the next four years, I was, at best,
an irregular churchgoer. I stopped praying, and instead I threw
myself into my work and studies. I did not resolve these faith
issues; I just bracketed them, dismissing Christianity as a religion
that was hopelessly confused.

When I arrived at Oxford in October 1981, I had an opportunity
to study beyond my technological background. Former Rhodes Scholars
from the Navy, including Admiral Stansfield Turner and Secretary
of the Navy James Woolsey, had convinced me to study P.P.E. (politics,
philosophy, and economics) at Oxford. I decided that this was
the time to search for answers to the ethical and moral questions
that had always interested me. In fact, my tutors at Oxford challenged
me to do just that.

Among the first books they had me read were Rene Descartes' three
works
A Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy,
and
Principles of Philosophy.
Descartes challenges the reader
to place all of his beliefs in the "crucible of doubt." This methodological
doubt means that one should question why he holds any and all
beliefs, even belief in the existence of God, in creation, and
in himself. Through this method, Descartes reaches his famous
"Cogito ergo sum"
-- "I think, therefore I am" -- as the basis
for a philosophical argument for the existence of God and the
universe. I set about applying this method in my life.

Radical doubt is dangerous. By rejecting all received wisdom and
tradition, you place yourself in an intellectual void. Only later
would I understand that we are not isolated atoms, but rather
beings born for and in community. We need to remain connected
to that communion with the living and the dead and with the wisdom
of the ages. As Chesterton said, belief in tradition is just applying
the principles of democracy to the dead.

Having begun to ask myself (and others) to justify all beliefs -- moral, intellectual, and religious -- I soon found myself face
to face with the basic claims of Christianity. I could no longer
simply bracket them. There God's grace worked in me, especially
through certain Christians He placed in my life. As I began my
studies at New College in Oxford, a group of young men and women,
several of them believing Catholics, befriended me. During our
next three years together, their influence, their patience, and
especially the witness of their lives helped lead me into the
Church.

Having inherited all the anti-Catholic prejudice of a typical
Evangelical Protestant, I resisted what was becoming plain to
me: that there is a wisdom in the teaching of the Catholic Church
that is explainable only by its greater-than-human inspiration.
As I searched for answers to the questions my tutors asked me,
I kept finding that the best responses -- the most reasonable,
well articulated, and convincing -- came from the Catholic tradition.
The writings of the saints (especially St. Augustine and St. Thomas
Aquinas and those influenced by them, such as Blessed John Henry
Newman, Elizabeth Anscombe, and John Finnis) were superior to
those proposed by other sources.

It seemed to me that Catholic thought about social questions -- for example, the issues for war and peace (especially the just
war tradition) -- was clearer and better thought-out than other
arguments that I was studying. At first, I thought this was a
coincidence. But as time went on, I could not deny that something
different was behind the writings of these men and women.

On my own, I began to examine the basic assumptions of the Christian
faith. First, did Jesus exist? Yes, this is well documented. Next,
is He who He says He is? I had to admit that I agreed with C.
S. Lewis's ideas that He was either "liar, lunatic, or Lord."
But how could I judge the authority of His claims?