The full article is at the above link. Here is a quote from it that speaks to me:
. My journey towards the Catholic faith has not, at core, been a journey of personal enlightenment or one in which I have held up the Church to my own opinions and finally found it acceptable. This would be to make the Church too small, and as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the Church is ever so much larger on the inside than it seems from the outside. Mine has been a journey towards faith. I have learned to believe first so that I might later begin to understand rather than understand so that I might then believe. My intellect simply isn’t up to the challenge that the latter option presents. I trust that when Jesus breathed His Holy Spirit into His disciples He was anointing His Church to be, among other things, the guardian of the sacred and simple truth of the Gospel.
I have learned to rest in the truth that the Church teaches. I do not make my own salvation through knowledge or emotional experiences, through following this teacher or that. Whether I realize it or not, God is doing a great work in me. It was begun at the Cross, is sustained by the Holy Spirit, and will be completed at the final judgment.
I borrow this analogy from the English poet and convert John Dryden, but it fits me. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes about an encounter that Aeneas has in the forest outside of Carthage. He has wandered there after losing many of his men at sea during a storm. In the forest, a woman approaches him, falls into conversation with him, and comforts him in the midst of his troubles. It is only after she turns and walks away that he recognizes her. It is his mother. He recognizes her by the way that she walks.
I am sure that I could put up a good fight on all of the various theological and biblical reasons why I believe in the Catholic Church, but I would really prefer to say simply that the visible, undivided Church, the Church that Jesus prayed for in His last moments with His disciples, the Church that is the Mother of us all not on her own merits but because she holds Christ within her womb; this I have recognized by the way that she walks.
Even though I’m making a bit of an attempt, this is not the kind of thing that one explains between the soup and dessert course while at dinner. At least this is what Newman once said when asked “why become Catholic?” It is a deeply personal and intimate spiritual journey. It is the search for one’s mother. In this case, she has been here all along.
I can say this, in turning to the Catholic Church I do not turn to something foreign and alien to Anglicans or evangelicals. I turned, rather, to the Catholic Church in order to become more fully what I already was. I have been raised to expect joyfully the activity of the Holy Spirit in my life; I expect Him all the more. I have come to understand the beauty of the English liturgy, the patterns that are formed through Common prayer, the primacy of Scripture, and salvation through Christ alone apart from my own efforts; I believe in those all the more.
I have decided to give what I am to God, which means to take my place in his Body here on earth. My hope in Christ is that my gift given and carried along by the work of the Cross will be acceptable and pleasing to God, and that the promise to those who die to the old life is that they will have new life more abundantly.
I would like to quote from the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, also a convert to the Church, who spoke these words to his parishioners. I too spoke these words to my parishioners during a tearful farewell. I wish I had written them, but I will make these words mine: “To those of you with whom I have traveled in the past, know that we travel together still. In the mystery of Christ and His Church nothing is lost, and the broken will be mended. If, as I am persuaded, my communion with Christ’s Church is now the fuller, then it follows that my unity with all who are in Christ is now the stronger. We travel together still.”
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