Good afternoon Lady of the Spirit,
Thanks for your note. I see we continue our 2-week read-write-response cycle.
I was happy to hear that you were able read my brief bio. My parents both left a very Catholic form of Anglicanism, so they share something of your dad's experience. Many people in the Plymouth Brethren tradition in which I was raised had left the Catholic and Anglican churches, so my own formation in the Faith was shaped by their pilgrimages away from those traditions. Sadly, I have few memories of their acknowledging anything positive occurring for them within Catholicism or Anglicanism.
Just after I was confirmed by the Episcopal bishop of Chicago, the Right Reverend James Winchester Montgomery, my dad said to me, "Why would God save us from that, just to have you return to it?" When I was leaving The Bahamas to be ordained a priest in the Charismatic Episcopal Church, he said, "So you are saying that your mother and I have been wrong all our lives and you are right?" His sentiments were widely shared among the people who nurtured my love for Christ.
My own journey to Catholicism has been characterized by a series of ever deepening "WOW" moments concerning things about which I was quite familiar. Forgiveness. Grace. Faith. Mercy. Charity. Jesus. Mary. Communion. Fellowship. My first instruction in all these aspects of the Christian experience of the true, the good and the beautiful came at the hands and from the hearts of devote evangelical brothers and sisters. My journey to Catholicism enriched each of them, often adding a mysterious tangibility to them.
Shortly after I was embraced by Christ through the Catholic Church my dad asked me, "How can someone raised the way that I had been become a Catholic?" Almost without thought I found myself saying, "I became Catholic because of what you taught me!" The evangelical faith in which I was formed as a child and young man beckoned me into the depths of the Christian mystery, "that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself".
I pray that I will always follow the counsel of an Orthodox priest that I had occasion to meet on my journey to the Catholic Church. "Christians are called by God ever always to press themselves into the mystery that He is!" My mum and dad lit the spark of my desire to know and to be known by Christ. I pray that I will follow faithfully the Great Apostle's exhortation to Timothy, "fan the flame of the gift that you that is within you" (2 Timothy 1:6)!
May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ lavish you and your husband with His love - and may all those blessed by your love enjoy the fruit God's generosity to you!
Always in Jesus Christ,
Vaughn
P.S. Norma sends her love to you and yours!
