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Prepared to Give an Answer: Introduction

Published on by Kimberly

There’s probably not a more honest way of framing everything I want to say about my present journey with Christ than this: I’m so tired.

You would think that the quintessential “I went to college and went so much deeper in my walk with Jesus!” story would be marked by evangelical zeal, intellectual curiosity, and a voracious appetite for more of Christ, His Church, and His teachings. I did go to college (I graduate this April), and I have gone fathoms deeper in my walk with Christ; but my story could not be more opposite in so many ways.

My journey over the last four years has been marked, instead, by spiritual isolation, intellectual burnout, and a reluctance so great that I’ve used the phrase “kicking and screaming” to describe it more times than I can count. I have drug my feet to Scripture, Church history, and back again, through countless church buildings and traditions, and over a thousand pages of theology from Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, to Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Wesley, Lewis. I’ve fasted, prayed, cried, discerned, talked late into countless nights with friends and mentors, begged my God to lead me into what was true and away from what was false.

And now, I have arrived on the doorstep of the Catholic Church.

For so many people I have spoken with, this fact alone invalidates every moment of the journey before it. 

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Portland Oregon skyline

Testimony III | Prepared to Give an Answer

Published on by Kimberly

If you’re a regular human being, the idea of an hour-long commute, one-way, probably sounds ghastly—and I wouldn’t blame you.

That’s unfortunately what I had for an internship the summer after my sophomore year. While I lived with family in downtown Portland, I took the bus to and from work every day, with multiple line switches and a fair amount of waiting at stops in the heart of Portland, Oregon. It was quite the commute—but I loved it.

For one, the cardinal rule of public transport is that you don’t talk to anyone, so I was free to have my headphones in without fear of being rude. For two, when you’re not the one driving, you don’t have to think about anything—and so my mind was free to wander. 

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Sola Scriptura | Prepared to Give an Answer

Published on by Kimberly

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a private university, in want of support from wealthy donors, must be at odds with a sizable portion of its student body.

George Fox, my alma mater, has had its fair share of media coverage for some of the student backlash from administrative decisions. I mean, we have a dry campus, a history of really poorly-handled assault cases, and a “lifestyle policy” that requires abstinence and Chapel attendance, among other things. Did anyone really expect peace?

One of the tamer issues on campus—and one I was actually fairly vocal about within my circles—was how George Fox conducted its Chapel services. Not only were students required to attend (under threat of an actual monetary fine), the services themselves were… mediocre at best, actively heretical at worst. Students had been protesting the way these services were run for years with little progress; but one year, on the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to a church door, a student posted 95 theses of their own to our Chapel doors.

At the time, I had only a small inkling of who Luther was—but just a year later, we would read some of his work in our Great Books program, and I would learn a lot more than I’d bargained for.

Read more: Sola Scriptura | Prepared to Give an Answer

Reading Luther

I should preface this with a quick note: Martin Luther is not some intrinsic villain to the Catholic Church, he’s a brilliant theologian, and I highly respect the vast majority of his work. The 95 Theses were a much-needed wake-up call for the Catholic Church; there was a lot of corruption and, frankly, evil within the Church, and Luther was absolutely right in calling it out.

That said, the longer Luther preached and wrote, the more… bold he grew, in both his criticisms and his theology.

When we hit the Reformation period in our Great Books program, we read the 95 Theses and the responses to them, we read Luther’s “Treatise on Christian Liberty”, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, we read his “Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude”. Suddenly, we were confronted with an entirely foreign opinion:

“I therefore refuse [James] a place among the writers of the true canon of my Bible,” Luther wrote. “I do not hold [the book of James] to be of apostolic authorship.”

Something… wasn’t right there. I learned shortly afterwards that Luther had printed his own Bibles that put the books he considered “disputed” at the end in an appendix—these included James, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation. This also included, I learned, a subset of other books called the “Apocrypha,” or the Deuterocanonical books: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Sirach, and Wisdom (as well as some additions to both Esther and Daniel).

Luther had legitimate reasons for separating the Deuterocanonical books—they appeared in the Greek collection of Jewish scriptures, the Septuigent, but not in the original Hebrew collection. For books like James or Hebrews, though… Luther wanted them separated, for the most part, because he disagreed with them theologically.

And then he turned around and put forth Sola Scriptura.

The question demanded to be asked: How can you claim your only authority is Scripture while you’re actively arguing about what Scripture is?

Scripture Alone?

I know I’m running the risk here of grossly misrepresenting Luther’s positions; I can already feel the Lutherans from Twitter crawling out of the walls to correct me. I’ll be the first to say that I’m no Lutheran scholar—but I do know that Luther was highly educated and very much not stupid.

It still didn’t follow for me, though, how Luther could claim Sola Scriptura—that the Christian’s sole authority is Scripture—while arguing that certain books weren’t theologically sound enough to remain a part of the main canon.

If Scripture was his only authority, by what authority was he essentially editing Scripture? I couldn’t figure it out.

There are all sorts of arguments for and against Sola Scriptura out there; the internet is littered with articles, podcasts, and YouTube debates on the subject. I spent a long time consuming as many of them as I could, learning all about the origins of Biblical canon, the many councils it was debated at, the Septuigent, what Catholics meant by “Sacred Tradition”—but none of it truly stuck. I think maybe I didn’t want it to. After all, there was only one group who didn’t adhere to that particular Sola—and it wasn’t the Protestants.

But then I found the turning point I never wanted in a single sentence from Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid, re-worded here:

If the Bible is our only authority, but the Bible never states that Scripture is to be our only authority, saying it is our only authority is already imposing an external authority.

It was a self-defeating argument. 

I’m fairly certain I paused the interview to just.. process. Madrid was absolutely right. There was nothing to be done. The common verses appealed to in defense of Sola Scriptura didn’t work here—verses like the famous 2 Timothy “all Scripture is God-breathed…” didn’t prove anything. All they said was that Scripture was from God, not that it was the only thing from God.

Pretty much against my will, I could no longer say I believed in the “Scripture Alone” view of Biblical authority. I also had no idea where this left me. 

If I didn’t believe the Bible was our only authority… what else was? There was no way that some guy dressed in white living at the Vatican was the only answer—I wasn’t going to touch that for quite a while. There was also no way that I’d ever believe that the Bible didn’t have intrinsic and imperative authority—arguing that the Bible never declared itself a sole authority was nowhere near believing Christians weren’t still bound to follow all of its teachings.

But despite that… I knew I couldn’t honestly defend Luther’s doctrine of Sola Scriptura. It changed very little about my faith at the time—there was no other authority I submitted to, so I still lived with Scripture as my sole authority—but it left cracks in my foundation.

If I didn’t have Sola Scriptura, what would defend me against the claims certain other churches made about authority?

If I didn’t have Sola Scriptura… what would defend me against the Pope?

As it turned out, there were far more historical and scriptural arguments to be picked through before I got anywhere near understanding the Papacy, much less (spoiler alert) deciding to submit to it. But the damage was done—a huge barrier had just been removed, and I couldn’t go back.

So—sorry, Martin. You’re brilliant… but I guess I love James’s epistle too much to agree with you here. 🙂

Next post in this series: Testimony III

Previous post in this series: Testimony II

Testimony II | Prepared to Give an Answer

Published on by Kimberly

God still wasn’t speaking directly to me very often when, crawling out of Freshman year into Sophomore, I began to trust Him again. I was faithfully attending a tiny Church of Christ, a member of multiple Bible studies, a sometimes-worship-leader for a small group—and it was finally starting to touch my spirit again. That was when, just as I’d been planning to find a new church, I heard Him speak: in the middle of dressing for church on Sunday morning, something certain in my spirit said Go to Church of the Vine.

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Reflections on a Year of Catholicity

Published on by Kimberly

One year ago, the words “Kimberly, be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit” were spoken over me—and nothing has ever been the same.

I’ve put off writing anything about my first year as a Catholic because it feels so – so big, you know? And it really is. In very Christian-ese fashion: I can’t begin to total the growth, the spiritual formation, and the ways Christ has made himself known to me in new & unexpected places. I think, though, that my real reflection this Easter season is the opposite of that. 

When I think back on the last year—big things and all—I think about how quiet everything has become.

My conversion was not an easy one. I went kicking and screaming, begging God to lead me anywhere but the Catholic Church; every free moment, every quiet hour I had was spent listening to podcasts, watching debates, reading articles and books and forum discussions and Twitter threads, trying to decipher what God’s will was and where the truth lay. I didn’t give official notice to my parish that I would be received last Easter until less than a month before the day it would happen—because I was just that terrified.

It was exhausting. And then—it was over.

This year has been, primarily, one of great Rest. The decision is over; the searching is finished. I’ve been able to rest in a way I hadn’t for the previous two-and-a-half years (and, considering even the non-Catholic wrestlings of my faith journey, far longer than that.) I’ve never once regretted any of my journey, nor any ounce of my decision. It’s been a year of quietly treasuring up all of the things of my Church in my heart.

I know it can be difficult to really get it when someone has “found peace/joy/rest” in a decision you don’t share or even necessarily understand; that’s okay. I just wanted to share the answer I’ve been giving more frequently as people ask, “So, how has it been being Catholic?”

It’s been so peaceful and full of joy, friends. 🙂

Christ is risen! Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Prayer to the Saints | Prepared to Give an Answer

Published on by Kimberly

Let’s get the obvious out of the way here: praying to dead people as though they are God is wrong, idolatrous, and blasphemous.

Alright—I hope that was a sigh of relief! We are, in fact, not intending to tread heretical ground today.

The teaching is this: Saints in Heaven are connected to saints on Earth through Christ, and they still pray to God. Therefore, asking for the “prayer of a righteous person” who’s in Heaven isn’t any different than asking a friend to pray for you on Earth.

This is a pretty frequent point of confusion for so many people who ask me about Catholicism, and I absolutely get it. Part of this is the Catholic Church’s use of the word “prayer” to describe talking to the Communion of Saints (which just causes unnecessary confusion, in my opinion). Part of it is also just that there are some… wild speculations out there about ancestor-worship, idolatry, and intercession. It also doesn’t help that, like Apollos, there are plenty of ill-informed Christians who don’t understand the actual Catholic teachings but still speak about them with authority.

Correcting False Assumptions

In my sophomore year of college, my Fall Honors seminar was led by both of the Catholic professors in the program. It was also the semester that we were covering medieval Christian texts—it was, needless to say, very Catholic. Drs. Favale and McCullough did an excellent job of explaining context and answering questions we had without imposing their views or assuming we held similar ones.*

One such time was when we encountered prayer to the Saints in one of the texts we were reading—well, multiple texts, actually. The Early Church was pretty big on intercessory prayer!

When we asked about it, Dr. Favale explained it like this: if we’re all one Body, and Jesus conquered death, that means even Christians who have died are connected in the Body—otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to say that “neither death nor life […] will be able to separate us from the love of God”. To say that we’re not connected to the Saints who have passed on, then, is cutting Christ’s sacrifice short—did He conquer death, or didn’t he?

O Death, Where is Your Sting?

Now, the nature of this living-and-dead connection is debatable. Obviously, just “being connected” to Saints in Heaven doesn’t naturally lead to the conclusion that we can speak with them—but we do see examples throughout Scripture of this connection between the living and the dead being far more than just a vague “we’re all connected in Christ”! 

Elijah and Moses are present on Earth for the Transfiguration. Abraham can speak to the rich man in Hell, and he sees what the rich man’s family is doing. Paul prays for a man who has died: “may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day” (2 Tim. 4:18). Saints around God’s throne offer up prayers as incense—what might they be praying for?

I don’t write this as a formal argument for the Catholic-specific teaching of prayer to the Saints; there are hundreds of theologians and scholars who’ve already done that! All I hope to impart here is simply this: that the belief that those who have died in Christ are still present in the Body, and that we are connected with them, isn’t idolatrous or heretical or crazy. Death isn’t an impenetrable divide anymore.

It’s All about Christ

It took me a very, very long time to get from “we’re more deeply connected to the Saints than other souls, living and dead, through Christ” to “it’s not totally out there to think Saints could hear us” to “I guess, if they can hear us, they’re probably praying for us”. It’s okay if you’re sitting there thinking Those are crazy jumps! How could anyone ever get there? I totally get it, and I’m not trying to convince you of every stepping stone here—I just hope it makes sense that, once you recognize that the veil being torn means the line between death and life has been forever blurred, a whole bunch of other stuff starts blurring, too.

Prayer to Saints does not replace prayer to Christ. Like I said at the beginning—it’s like asking friends to pray for you here on Earth. If you’re only ever asking others to pray for you and never praying yourself, you’ve got a problem, whether your friends are alive or dead. 

Acknowledging the fullness of the unity of Christ’s Body can look like acknowledging the Saints—but what it should always, always look like is that unity carrying you closer to Christ Himself.

*  Let it be known that my Catholic professors definitely did not coerce me or encourage me to become Catholic! I did all this investigation pretty much on my own; they were happy to answer questions occasionally, but the most “coercive” thing they ever did was pray for me—interpret that as you will. 😉

Next post in this series: Testimony II

Previous post in this series: Sacramental Theology

Sacramental Theology | Prepared to Give an Answer

Published on by Kimberly

Church traditions and early Christian texts often use language I used to be wholly unfamiliar with growing up in an Evangelical Protestant context—entering their circles brings you to a lot of strange Latin phrases, jargon, and philosophical vocabulary. One of the first examples of this I encountered was the idea of “sacramental” theology.

The idea is so simple, but it changes everything: it’s the belief that physical things can have spiritual effects.

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kimberly is sitting on a beanbag, looking exhausted, with three heavy tomes written by St. Augustine in her arms

Prepared to Give an Answer: Testimony Part 1

Published on by Kimberly

The easiest place to start this particular story is to jump to the start of the era: my first year of college. 

Much of my faith was deeply formed in my later high school years – my graduating class had something of a dramatic, charismatic revival in our senior year – and that will be relevant later; but for now, I’d like to start with the very first college assignment I ever received, the summer before I entered my freshman year: my university’s Honors Program had us read the entirety of St. Augustine’s Confessions.

St. Augustine changed my world.

He opens his part-autobiography, part-philosophical meanderings with the question of whether we should know God before we call upon him, or whether we should call upon him first to know him: having recently been troubled by whether my own conception of God was “correct enough,” I scribbled, “Is this guy me?” in the margins. Thus began an immediate kinship with a man who lived nearly a millennium ago.

reading St. Augustine in St. Augustine, FL!

Someday, I’d love to write a memoir of how so much of my journey mirrors St. Augustine’s; we have defining moments of innate sinfulness from our childhoods, strong ties to rhetoric and academia, incredibly gradual conversion narratives, and a deeply-rooted struggle with the same sinful temptation. For now, though, it’ll suffice to say only that his writing gripped me. Here was someone who had the same questions I did, a journey I saw myself on, and the same inability to express profound ideas with brevity. (I say this with the deepest love – neither Augustine nor I know how to be succinct!)

All this to say – perhaps my very first gateway to Catholic theology was discovering that “the Great Cloud of Witnesses” had real people in it, people whose stories I’d never been told but found utterly compelling. “The Communion of Saints” that we recite in the Athanatian creed felt more accessible than it ever had.

Subtle Scruples

Perhaps the second-most notable part of my journey in this same time period was my struggle with what some call “Scrupulosity” – or Religious OCD.

In my senior year of high school, the faith communities I was a part of began to run very charismatic; there was a lot of prophesying, visions, healing, and a general connectedness to the Holy Spirit I’d never encountered before. I learned to hear from God in new, far-more-present ways, and it was a whirlwind of a spiritual high.

Somewhere in the middle of my first semester of college, though, I began to realize that some of the little tugging sensations I’d felt in my brain during those times… weren’t God. The little things that had “just felt right” began to grow into more and more nonsensical ideas – you need to go sit with that man over there right now or he won’t know that God loves him; if you don’t fully explain exactly why you were late to lunch, you’ll be lying and a horrible Christian – that didn’t align at all with what Jesus would say or do.

And if those thoughts weren’t from God… how could I trust anything God might be trying to tell me?

I prayed and prayed. There was no clear answer. Eventually, I threw up my hands and cried, “Fine. God, if you’re not going to speak to me in a way that’s clear, I’m not going to speak to you.”

I never lost my faith, but I effectively crossed my arms and turned my back on prayer for a long while – for most of my second semester of college – and fell into a deep pit of apathy. Why wasn’t God speaking to me? What was wrong with me? If that voice wasn’t God, then what was it?

Finding Hope

So much made sense when I started seeing a therapist. As it turns out, a lot of the ‘promptings’ I’d thought were from God were instead a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, called ‘Scrupulosity’ (or Religious OCD). It’s characterized by intense compulsions and feelings of guilt directly linked to morality, goodness, and one’s own personal faith – in my case, Christianity. I would feel like I was sinning or disobeying God if I didn’t act on my compulsions – often things like talking to people who sat alone in the cafeteria, or picking up litter on the ground. Learning that there was a name for this and that I wasn’t just “bad at hearing God’s voice” or a “Bad Christian” was more liberating than I can say.

I came out of that period of time, like most who experience dark seasons, a stronger person. I knew myself better, and I knew more of my own mind. What I still didn’t know (and what I’m still learning) was how to re-engage with some of the more mystical, Holy Spirit-borne gifts and experiences I know I engaged with when I ran in more Charismatic circles. Would God still give me leadings that were from him and not OCD? Could I still get specific words from him? It felt like stepping out onto the ice; I moved slowly, not wanting to fall through the surface into the frigid fear of thoughts that weren’t mine.

The heart, I’d learned, could well and truly be deceitful above all things; which was why, unsurprisingly, when the Great Books program I was studying under began to introduce texts that made up the ancient pillars of Christian Theology, I was more than ready for something solid to cling to.

Next post in this series: Sacramental Theology

Previous post in this series: Introduction

but the Lord was not in the wind | (freeform)

Published on by Kimberly

When I was young, I used to lay under the covers and clench a muscle in my jaw that made the ever-present hissing in my ears rise in pitch, just for a moment, and then fall to something like a ringing rain, something that sounded like what the thousands of tiny pinpricks in my vision looked like in the dark. Hiss. Clench. Ring. Rain. Sleep.

Continue reading “but the Lord was not in the wind | (freeform)” →

Lidocaine & Liturgy

Published on by Kimberly

[NOTE: There are a couple of medical details in this post in the paragraph between the three-dot separator symbols; if that makes you squeamish, feel free to skip it! You won’t miss anything important.]

I had to go to the ER today, and while I can’t say I had a spiritual experience, I certainly tried.

My tailbone had been in progressively worse pain starting on Friday – just three days prior – and by Monday morning I was finding it difficult to walk or sit down. Something wasn’t right; I made it to our university’s health center before bursting into tears at the friendly receptionist I’ve gotten to know asking, “Kimberly! How are you?” The nurse practitioner, a new face but just as friendly, took one look at my tailbone and told me I’d need to go to the ER.

As I limped across campus, I tried to call to mind the sparse doctrines I remembered from St. Julian of Norwich and St. Ignatius of Loyola about using pain to bring glory to Christ – I couldn’t recall anything aside from the mere fact that they’d addressed it, so I remember praying, “Jesus, if there’s a way to use this pain for you… help me figure that out.” I’m… not really sure he did, but I’m also not really sure Ignatius or Julian had very healthy relationships with pain, so that’s likely a good thing.

.   .   .

A pilonidal cyst is a fairly uncommon kind of cyst, affecting 26 out of every 100,000 people – lucky me. It’s also statistically very likely I’ll get another one in my lifetime, since they tend to come back – lucky me again! The procedure is simple but not very fun: I needed to have the area numbed with an injection, and then they needed to lance the cyst to get rid of the fluid inside. The injection was easily the worst part of the whole ordeal, and in second place was the times they needed to do things inside the wound, since the numbing agent only worked on the surface of my skin. At least it wasn’t too big of a deal when the nursing student had to make at least five incisions to get it right – that was the only part I couldn’t feel!

.   .   .

As I lay face-down in the room alone, waiting for the nurses to come back and perform the procedure, I remember thinking, Wait, I should be praying right now. I was pretty scared, in pain, and feeling rather exposed (hospital gowns, man.) My brain floundered for some kind of anchor to stop the flow of tears, and it ended up settling on mentally chanting a psalm in an Orthodox church common chant*, a very repetitive melody that wound up being quite calming. Somewhere in between the “Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean”s and the “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy”s, my muscles stopped feeling as tense, and I felt more peaceful than I had all day. From a psychological perspective, this was most likely a welcome consequence of the chant’s gentle monotony; I was thankful anyway.

There is something about needles, hospital smells, acute pain, and trying to remember when to take your pills that makes forgetting the metaphysical realm just a little too easy. I was not “remembering Christ on the cross” as injections were being administered; I was not “praying ceaselessly” as the student nurse struggled to poke and prod the wound; I wasn’t even thanking God as he provided a wonderful friend to drive me home from the hospital and help me pick up my prescriptions from the pharmacy. That last one makes me feel a little lousy, if I’m being honest.

But that’s real. This is real. Pain is something that makes itself known and difficult to ignore; and the recovery from it is a weird, slow climb out of a valley that has you acting like yourself before you’re really feeling like yourself again. I’m certain something might have been gained had I ground my teeth and hissed out a constant stream of prayer as my tailbone wailed in protest – but I’m also just as certain that there is something to be gained from turning around and reflecting on the patch of ground that only holds one set of footprints.

Sometimes life needs a little more liturgy to center us on what’s most important; but sometimes, each day gives us enough liturgy of its own. Today’s was more than I ever wanted on my plate, for sure – but there is no shame in finding God in the rearview mirror instead of through the windshield. If you’re going through a particularly difficult time, it’s not always easy (or even possible, truthfully) to find him through the pain; but my friend, I pray you will find him at the end, when you’re able to stand back up and turn around.

I promise he will have been there the whole time; he always is.

 

 

* Funny detail: the only psalm I have totally memorized is Psalm 51 (which is a little depressing) because a former middle school teacher had our class memorize it – and he has since converted to Orthodoxy. Thanks, Mr. Bullock!
[cover image: not from this most recent hospital visit, but a shot of my uncles and I being goofy when my aunt was in the hospital last year]