I periodically attend a weekly virtual meet-up with converts through The Coming Home network. Many come from Protestant backgrounds, and while some may have had negative experiences in their respective denominations, many speak warmly and charitably of the tradition they were raised up in, recounting a love of the Bible and being embraced by the community.
But as the saying goes, "Weak Catholics become Protestants and strong Protestants become Catholic."
When I came into the Church in the 1990's, the Novus Ordo was the standard menu fare. Although I was confirmed in the Byzantine rite, most of my experience and formation on campus during those formative years was in the context of the New Mass. I simply didn't know there was an "Old" (Tridentine) Mass.
And for all practical purposes, there wasn't, at least not in my sphere of influence. The 1984 indult granted by Pope John Paul II was before my time, and Summa Pontificum wasn't promulgated until 2007 (nine years after I came into the Church). This squishy middle period in history was where God decreed I land. I was beyond grateful, and with the Psalmist I gave thanks: "You lifted me up from the miry pit, and set my feet upon a rock" (Ps 40:2).
I never fell in love with the Mass--growing up going to the Divine Liturgy with my father, it was not the incense-imbued novelty for me it is with many Latin Catholics. Nor did the New Mass exactly inspire. I felt like there was a lot I had to overlook in it, though like a child, I didn't have the language to articulate the shortcomings (which today, are clear as day).
Instead, the Mass was where I went to meet the Lord who had ransomed me and whom I encountered personally. It was there I placed on the plain, unadorned altar my own inadequate worship through the corporeal body.
The idea then was "it's enough that they (the students) just come." Come as you are. Like the fasting requirements of the universal (Latin) Church during Lent, it was a pretty low bar. And, presumably, whatever it takes to keep people out of mortal sin.
But that was enough for me. Times after Communion were sweet, intimate. The Lord, I felt, had endowed me with the gift of tears during those years, because I often wept over my sins as they contrasted to His divine goodness, Him whom I had just received under guise of bread.
I also found a subset of more serious and well-formed Catholics through various clubs and the Newman Center with whom I could live out my faith in prayer and worship, retreats, and service to the poor. But I think I sensed early on there was more to the Church than the standard fare, a deeper aquifer beneath the surface. When our chaplain invited myself and a handful of other guys out for a vocation weekend at the nearby Benedictine monastery, I thought I had found my calling. This was a true and authentic expression of how the Catholic faith could be lived out. Not that it should be lived out this way, for God does not call all men to the consecrated life. Maybe, though, he would make an exception with me.
Monasticism emerged as a counter-movement to the perceived laxity of post-Constantinian Catholicism in the West. When it was becoming harder to die for the faith as a martyr, those wanting to live out their faith in a more intentional and sincere manner would instead die to self in the desert. I spent part of the summer after my freshman year, six months a Catholic now, in a discernment program at a contemplative (also Benedictine) community in New York state trying to emulate those early Cennobites. Pray, work, study---this was my rented life for five weeks, and I loved it. Or at least, I wanted to love it. But no matter how many monasteries I visited and discerned with over the next ten years, it always fit like a shirt one size too small--chaffing under the arms, and a little too tight in the chest.
If the monastic life didn't fit (even if the idea of being a monk did in my mind), the prospect of marriage didn't seem to be fitting either. I chalked that up to not wanting or having a vocation to the married life. But part of it could have been not having met the right person to be married to. I was content to be alone, but I was simultaneously lonely. The solitary life, attractive as it was, was also a shirt one size too small. My petition to be accepted as a postulant at a monastery in New Mexico was charitably declined, and I was starting to despair that I simply had no vocation at all.
My conversion was not intellectual, but personal. Christ had ransomed me, as in the woods years ago the scripture for me was fulfilled: "For I, the LORD your God, will hold your right hand, saying to you, 'Fear not, I will help you.' (Is 41:13). I fell in love, and the love was not in the adornments, but with the person of Christ himself. In making known that love to me by a kind of personal Transfiguration, Christ revealed his true nature as Redeemer and Sanctifier--his true self.
Because of these revelatory experiences and where they took place for me, I thought Christ made his home in the wilderness, since that was where I encountered him. I wanted to pitch my tent with him on Mount Tabor. But instead, I had to descend to the campus auditorium on Sundays to share him with a crowd of students who didn't seem to care if He showed up. What do I have to do with these people? I thought it was you and me? I would pray. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands (Acts 17:24-25). I had fallen in love and had never wanted the honeymoon to end. But the day after the wedding feast, you have to move in and get about to the task of being married day after day.
When I was in discernment, I was (in between visits to different communities as an Observer) dating a sweet, wonderful Catholic girl who would have made a great spouse. But the timing just never worked out. And timing is never an accident. When you meet someone is as important as anything else and it doesn't happen apart from God's will.
But what if I had met her at a different time--when I was more settled, ready to get married? I did reach that point in my life eventually, but it ended up being with a different person. Again, this did not happen apart from God's will and for His intended purpose. His way is perfect, and all things work for the good for those who love him (Ps 18:30; Rom 8:28))
I think about that in the context of the Latin Mass. Like many people who have discovered it, you think "Where have you been all my life?" But were it God's will that I found it when I first came into the Church, would it have been an adornment that could, God forbid, be taken off like a robe? What if it were the Mass itself that attracted me, rather than the One who was on the altar there? I was fed and sustained with my daily manna in the New Rite without fail during this long liturgical sojourn. When I grumbled unknowingly in my heart about the manna He sustained me by, he sent meat by way of the Latin Mass (Ex 16:12).
But it was grace that saved me, not the Mass. It was God who found me, not the other way around. And He that was born in a unadorned and uninspiring stable willed that I have my upbringing be under this roof. I cannot change that any more that I can change when or how I met my wife, or the parents I was born to. For if the course of that history had changed by my will rather than His, I might never have met her, and might never had been born at all.
God has given me the grace of sustained faith over the past twenty five years not because of the (New) Mass but, oftentimes, in spite of it. Because for the majority of that time, I did not have the benefit of beautiful churches or always-reverent liturgies. I was not in the company of Navy Seal Catholics, but often the opposite. I could not rest on the laurels of orthodox teaching, so I had to learn discernment. In this marriage, I really had to work at it to stay married. And it forced me to dig deep and keep at the forefront of my mind just Who it was I was married to. To do otherwise was to risk sinking into the sea of unbelief (Mt 14:22-23).
I realize that this experience is my own, but I don't think I am alone in it. Even Moses had an affinity for his kin though he was raised up as an Egyptian (Ex 2). Most of us (some more than others) have a degree of trauma from our childhoods, whether we realize it or not. Even though many of us who attend the TLM act like enlightened college freshmen coming back home after their first semester of college, telling our parents how wrong and stupid they are about basically everything, they are still the ones who raised us, fed us, educated us, and did the best they could for us. They made you who you are today, even though you are not the same person now that you were then. You be grateful for that, and give thanks that you, too, have been born from and ransomed by this hand.
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