Then, finally, the cold waters of Baptism flowed over my forehead, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of mercy. It all seemed so simple — almost too simple. I was all too aware of my many years of sinfulness. I had regrets. In fact, I had loads of them. Were they all truly washed away by such a little bit of water, I wondered? If so, that changed everything — and I was born again at the age of twenty-five. I was new again. I was newer than my young sons.
And now, more than two decades later, I am deeply aware that it really did change everything. As I look back on the night when I became a newborn for the second time in my life, I recognize that a new world opened for me, or perhaps the world simply opened in a different way, enabling me to discern what had been there all along but which I had been unable to see — miracles that I had walked past like a blind man. Whatever the case, I was given something for which I had unknowingly yearned for most of my life: a sacramental world, a world that was simply suffused with God, a world in which holiness could be touched.
I was given tools that night to build a life of sanctity — tools I had never had before. I was offered new perspectives, new insights into human life, particularly regarding suffering and hardship — things that all those many years ago I didn’t even know I would need. The waters of Baptism may have been cold that night, but through those waters I entered a relationship with Christ that was far deeper and far warmer than any I could have imagined otherwise.
By the way, my doubts, my uncertainty, disappeared a long time ago. I don’t know exactly when. They just faded away over time until one day I realized that they were simply gone and I knew for certain that I really had found the place God wanted me to be. The Catholic Church is my home, and I have never thought about leaving it. In fact, after all this time, I don’t think I could ever leave it.
Chapter 2
An Event and a Process
May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.
— 2 Thessalonians 3:5
My baptism took no more than five minutes, but the journey to the baptismal font took the better part of ten years — or maybe I should say twenty-five years. In the beginning — and the beginning lasted for a long time — I wasn’t even aware that a journey was underway, but it was, and God was directing me down strange and sometimes uncomfortable paths, usually in ways I didn’t even notice. Along those paths, there were countless obstacles, humiliations, misunderstandings, and even estranged relationships. Yet they were somehow all a part of that journey, all leading me, all nudging me in one direction.
Slow Start
When did it really begin in earnest? It’s hard to say, but I usually date it to the time I was sixteen and exasperating everyone.
Looking back at my life, I can finally see something that completely escaped my notice when I was in my teens, but it was something my parents (and probably everybody else) saw all too clearly: something needed to be done with me.
To put it mildly, I was as cocky as they come. Since the time I’d been a small child, I’d been considered gifted; by the time I was sixteen, I thought that meant I was extraordinary. Not only that, I was running amok in the manner of many teenage boys: having a good time, not caring about (or even believing in) the future, driving everyone crazy with my world-class self-centeredness and devil-may-care approach to life. I was within a few months of graduating high school but had no inkling concerning what I would do next. For some reason that didn’t bother me much: I was living for the day, for the moment, for the second, and the world was full of fun and overflowing with possibilities.
Out of all those many possibilities that stretched before me, however, there was one that did not occur to me. In fact it would never have occurred to me if I had been left to my own devices. Yet it was that very possibility that was to change my life, and it was offered to me one fine day by my dad, who, as I mentioned, was a Presbyterian minister.
He almost casually suggested that I take a few days off from school, which was just the sort of proposal guaranteed to capture my attention. Let me tell you, I lost no time in informing him that as far as I was concerned, he had come up with an excellent — perhaps even spectacular — idea. I was all ears when he told me he was contemplating a trip that just he and I would make: it was to be a road trip (great!) of international character (even better!). We would leave our native Ontario and drive south to the exotic and unknown (at least to me) land of Ohio. Why Ohio, you might ask (and, of course I did). Well, that was because Ohio was where a small university was located; it was a school my dad thought I might consider attending. “Terrific,” I said, imagining beautiful college girls with flowing blond hair, “Let’s go!”
At some point in the conversation (perhaps when I was emptying my sock drawer into my suitcase), he mentioned that it was a Catholic university, and that sort of startled my Protestant sensibilities a bit. I think I must have given him a quizzical look (maybe I even stopped dumping socks), but after my usual two-and-a-half seconds of deep analysis I decided I couldn’t care less if the place was Zoroastrian, as long as I could have a few days off from school and take the promised road trip (and meet those girls with the flowing blond hair). Besides, I was just looking after all, not signing up for four long years. This was to be an adventure, not a commitment. And I was certainly up for an adventure.
Road Trip
So we were soon on the road — my dad, me, some carefully folded maps (these being the days before GPS), and an absurd number of my socks. Our family station wagon was firmly pointed in a southerly direction, and I was still blissfully unaware that I was falling into a trap that my dad, my mom, and probably God had set for me. I hadn’t a clue that my road trip would become more than a teenage boy’s adventure, that it would irrevocably change the path of my life. All I saw was the possibility of having fun, of meeting new people. It never dawned on me to question why my father had chosen the school we were going to from all the possible schools in the world. I never even wondered very much why a Protestant clergyman was considering entrusting his son’s education to a Catholic institution.
Religion, faith, the things of the soul, didn’t show up on my radar screen very often back then. I’m a little embarrassed to say that even my parents’ deep Christian faith didn’t mean that much to me. Like most teenagers in our contemporary culture, I lived on the shiny surface of life, unconcerned with the possibility of any depth. I believed that God existed, and I had “accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and savior” in all sincerity during my pre-teen years (well … at least with all the sincerity of which a child that age is capable), but by the time I was sixteen, He had become remote — or perhaps I had. I had no trouble believing that God might be helpful in an emergency, but I had yet to encounter many real emergencies, so I usually kept God at a distance, out of sight and out of mind, like that fire extinguisher my parents had once bought, just on the off chance that it might be needed one day.
From Toronto we went through Buffalo, Erie, and finally on to Pittsburgh. Having received my license a couple of months before, I proudly shared the driving with my dad. As far as I was concerned, I was on the cusp of manhood, and with every passing mile I was feeling more and more collegiate. My time had come. I was on the move, and life was wide open before me, as wide open as the highways on which we traveled.
The drive lasted seven rather long hours, and I spent a lot of it committing everything I saw to memory. After we crossed the border, I found myself admiring the expensive and shiny new cars that so many Americans drove. I would have one of those someday, I decided, putting such a car on the rather extensive list of things I intended to acquire as I got older.