For nearly twenty years, from the ages of 15 to 35, I dedicated my life to a Pentecostal sect of Christianity, the Assemblies of God. I served in various capacities within it: Sunday school teacher, street minister, gospel singer, song leader, and even as a preacher. I graduated from one of my sect’s Bible colleges with a B.A. in Bible and religious education. The Assemblies of God was my life, and its mission was my mission.
I got involved in the AG (as members of the Assemblies of God call it) when my widowed mother left the Episcopal church for it, taking her children with her. She had encountered members of the sect through an interdenominational Bible study/prayer group. At those home meetings she was introduced to the teachings and practices of Pentecostalism, which she quickly adopted. It allowed her to release her emotions in its freeform style of prayer, plus she gained a sense of security through uncompromising beliefs.
Pentecostals believe in the in-filling of the Holy Spirit characterized by the gifts of the Spirit, especially speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing. Unlike Fundamentalists, AGers teach that sanctification is a process that continues until death. They are millenarists who believe in the “rapture” (basing this doctrine on 1 Thess. 4:14-16) and a literal thousand-year reign of Christ (Rev. 20:4-5). Fear of being left behind at the rapture was one of the things that kept me in the AG for so long.
I didn’t like the AG services when I first started going to the church. The style of worship was alien to me; I thought it bizarre and irreverent. The congregants shouted and threw their hands in the air, babbling incomprehensibly with tears streaming down their faces, as the song leader whipped them into ever greater fervor through hand-clapping, foot stomping music that led to a cacophony of spontaneous worship.
Nevertheless, the lively music appealed to my teenage tastes, and I was impressed by the zealous devotion to the cause. The Agers maintained a constant cheerfulness–which in practice became a type of tyranny. As G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown pointed out, “Cheerfulness without humor is a very trying thing.” And it was humorless. We weren’t to laugh at anything that wasn’t considered appropriate; it might imply to others we approved of sinful behavior.
In Sunday school we were taught the Bible from a Pentecostal perspective that embraced the doctrine of sola scriptura and the literal interpretation of Scripture. We virtually worshiped the Bible. It was our sole guide in everything.
The Jesus we followed, having rejected all Church Tradition as man-made, was based strictly on our private illumination of him in Scripture–more accurately, it was based on the sect’s portrait of him in which he loved those who responded favorably to his message, but condemned everyone else. We believed anyone who hadn’t accepted Jesus according to our formula was doomed to hell.
Getting people saved (and into the sect) was our top priority, for God would hold us personally accountable for each lost soul we hadn’t witness to. I became a soldier for Christ, witnessing to people anywhere and everywhere I could. I worked to save every soul I met: school mates, relations, strangers on the bus, everyone with whom I had any contact. It was a heavy burden.
By the time I had graduated from high school I was a fully-committed member of the AG. Convinced I had an obligation to learn all I could in order to spread the gospel, I entered the nearest AG Bible college. I was to have a checkered college career. It took me ten years to earn my degree, as I quit several times due to a lack of interest or funds.
Something was missing. For years I had believed that all I had to do was claim my inheritance of grace, seek the Lord in “Spirit-filled” prayer, and then “rest in God” to obtain spiritual growth. But I wasn’t gaining anything new from God; I feared I was slipping away, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I felt abandoned by God and misunderstood by my fellow AGers, who were bewildered by my sudden lack of enthusiasm. With tears I sought the Lord to “return unto me the joy of my salvation” (Ps. 51:12). God was not only silent, he was absent as well. Like the Beloved in the Song of Solomon (5:6), he had left me to my own devices–something my Pentecostal sect knew nothing of.
There was no such thing as aridity in the AG. Any scriptural references to such experiences were glossed over or explained away as a testing of our loyalty to Jesus. But the withdrawing of all consolation was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was forced to look beyond the AG’s explanations for the answer to my dilemma. This hadn’t happened in a vacuum. During the last few years of my involvement with the AG I read several books by C. S. Lewis, he based faith on reason, not on feelings. This was a revelation to me. In the AG we were proud of putting “heart knowledge” before “head knowledge.”
Our take on biblical interpretation ran like this: “We have a personal knowledge of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit; we don’t need any man to tell us what the Bible means.” Regarding the last part of this statement, just the opposite was true. We relied almost entirely on our sect’s interpretation of every verse. Any lay person’s “personal interpretation” that didn’t line up with the sect’s was not tolerated.
Whenever I read the sixth chapter of John, verses 53-58, my heart burned with the question, “If Jesus really meant we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, where does that leave me?” But I pushed my uncertainty away, denying the plain sense of this passage in favor of the symbolic interpretation promulgated by my sect; I feared being ostracized if I dared voice my doubts.
Imbued with the AG reading of the Bible (and its fear of losing my salvation if I strayed from it), I had no way of knowing who, if anyone, taught the right interpretation of Scripture, prejudiced as I was against any church outside of Evangelical Christianity, especially the Catholic Church. So when I found myself doubting long-held convictions while having no better ones on which to rest my hopes, I was in a quandary.
In desperation I cried to God, “Lord, in order to know the truth, to find your true Church on earth, I would even follow you into the Catholic Church if you wanted me to.” For an AGer like me this was tantamount to my saying, “I’d follow you into hell itself, if necessary.” God remained silent (or perhaps I was deaf), but, not long after I had made this declaration, I had a dream.
I saw a Man dressed in ragged clothes and looking like a poor Bedouin. He was crawling painfully on his stomach, unable to rise up. As I got closer I saw he must have been attacked by an angry mob and left to die. He looked so ghastly I was repelled at the sight of him, but I approached anyway and knelt beside him. He looked up at me with such compassion I knew he had been beaten for love of me. We gazed into each others eyes with love. Then, as happens in dreams, I began to doubt who he must be and said something to challenge him. He replied, as if using a countersign: “As Mary is our mother.”
As a Pentecostalist I considered devotion to Mary idolatry; it sent a shock wave over me to think Jesus himself might see it differently. “What if we are to regard Mary as our mother?” I asked myself. “Could Catholics be right about her after all?” To ask the question was a breakthrough, but I couldn’t accept the concept at that time.
I usually put no more stock in dreams than do most people, but that dream was so vivid and disturbing that I felt compelled to explore its meaning. The dream had shown me a Jesus with whom I had been unacquainted. The Jesus I knew differed in two significant ways:
First, he was more the risen, triumphant Lord than the Crucified. Though we Pentecostals preached Christ crucified, we lived as followers of the risen Christ whose command to “take up your cross” did not entail having to suffer for our salvation–as a martyr, perhaps, but certainly not to gain salvation. To us all suffering was caused by the devil. We had won the victory with Christ over the devil; we were to rebuke suffering, not embrace it.
Second, we claimed Jesus for our Beloved, but all the love went one way–from us to him. That he would or could love us in turn was not possible within our philosophy because we saw mankind as totally corrupt and unable to become holy. (Our holiness came from a one-time “washing in the blood” [in the strictly spiritual sense] after we’d said the “sinner’s prayer,” not as the culmination of a lifetime of being perfected in grace and love.)
Dreaming of Jesus as radically different from the AG’s conception of him helped me to reevaluate the sect’s tenets, its claims on me, and my true spiritual state. I realized I was weary of the holier-than-thou attitude toward the rest of the world and burned out from trying to live up to artificial standards of behavior.
I asked God what he wanted me to do. I understood him to say, “Go home.” I took this direction to mean “Return to the Episcopal Church,” which I did while attending the AG Bible college in my senior year. At that point I was in a state of mental and spiritual flux; it didn’t get resolved until nine years later, when I was received into the Catholic Church.
In returning to the church of my childhood I hoped to find the moderate faith of my pre-AG days. Even though it was obvious my dream had pointed to the Catholic Church, I was terrified of committing idolatry by becoming a Catholic. For this reason, returning to the Episcopal Church was the safe choice. The Episcopal Church became my haven from Pentecostalism as well as a rest-stop on my journey toward my final destination.
The priest at my home parish happened to be a charismatic, which helped me justify my return to the Episcopal Church both to myself and my AG friends. To my joy I felt at home again within liturgical Christianity. The candles, the stained-glass, and the cross gleaming on the altar all seemed right and proper to me.
More importantly, the reverent dignity of the worship restored to me my sense of awe. I found the order of the service didn’t impede my worship of God, nor did the stately hymns; both lifted my heart and mind toward him. I was unhindered by a need to “get something from the Lord,” which had been the norm in the AG.
Along with my renewed appreciation for liturgical worship, I was deeply influenced by a community of Lay Episcopal Franciscans. Here was a group of deeply-religious people who exuded peace and joy without resorting to emotional display. Refreshingly, they were blessedly normal. They felt no need to question the appropriateness of laughing when something struck them as funny.
In the AG I had been made to feel a worthless sinner whose only recourse had been to throw herself on the mercy of Christ. I had no power to obtain saving grace. This belief restricted my every action for fear it might be sinful and “displeasing to the Lord.” The Lay Franciscans enjoyed freedom of action because their consciences had been freed from false guilt. They believed they could do something to change their state of grace. I saw then that being responsible for the consequences of our actions frees, does not bind, us.
I was so impressed by those Franciscans I considered becoming an Episcopal nun, but I married instead. My husband, who had been brought up Catholic, was going to my Episcopal parish, so we contentedly settled down in the denomination of my childhood. This satisfaction lasted until I participated in my first Stations of the Cross while on a Cursillo at a Lutheran church.
When we prayed the station at which Jesus meets his mother, I thought about the emotional pain Mary endured as she watched her Son suffering for sinners. I understood she did not want the adoration due to God alone. On the contrary: She was the supreme adorer, silently assenting to God’s will though it pierced her heart to do so.
This revelation had not taken place in a vacuum. Along with C. S. Lewis, I had read the Faith of Millions by John A. O’Brien, a book I had picked up out of curiosity, believing I could easily refute his arguments for the Catholic faith. I ended up throwing it away, partly because I couldn’t find any flaw in his arguments, but mostly because he had had the audacity to invite his readers to “enter the Church of Christ,” the Catholic Church. How wrong I believed him to be–and how frightened I was by the pull toward his Church I felt as I read his invitation! Then I read The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel, again out of curiosity. (I had seen the movie version as a child and had been moved by it.) I likewise threw that book away, being put off by Bernadette’s unconditional devotion to Mary and a sense of mystery that was too Roman for me.
When I threw those books away, I thought I had eliminated their influence, but Mary deigned to speak to me. I heard her voice in my heart and knew who it was. She said, “Won’t you let me help you?” With due respect I replied, “Oh, no! Don’t ask me to do that,” adding as my defense, “I belong to Jesus alone.”
She laughed good-naturedly at me and my Protestant scruples and said, “We’ll talk again sometime.” With that, she was gone. I felt relieved, yet sad–which surprised me.
Though I could not have said “yes” to her at that point in my life, our Lady’s graciousness in accepting my decision worked a grace in my heart; it bore fruit later. As an AGer I had been convinced people converted to Catholicism through coercion from a spouse, a religious, or even the devil himself. That Mary used humor to challenge my preconceptions, and then left me to reconsider her offer even after I had rejected her, told me I had been dealing with a heavenly person who meant me only good.
I now realize my reluctance to accept Mary was due in part to my minimalistic need for God to be plain, understandable, and controllable. I believed I had it all screwed down. I knew who God was and what he would and wouldn’t do. I wanted no outsiders, such as Mary, unraveling it all for me. But it already started to unravel as I tried to square my perception of God with reality. Only a humble acceptance of my ignorance could deliver me from it, so God had provided the humble Maid of Nazareth to show me the way.
Mary’s name didn’t come up again until I was being counseled by my Episcopal priest in preparation for my becoming a nun. He read to me a Marian prayer which asked her intercession for women religious. Scandalized, I questioned his rationale for praying to Mary. He reminded me the Episcopal Church believes in the communion of saints, adding, “Remember, God is the God of the living, not the dead” (Matt. 22:32).
Though I was not convinced by his citation from Matthew (I had learned how to quote Scripture to fit the AG’s arguments, so I didn’t trust quoting verses anymore), his answer later allowed me to accept Mary as the Mother of all Christians. This in turn led me to reinvestigate the teachings of the Catholic Church.
I had pushed any such inquiry far back in my mind at that stage though. I was happy being an Episcopalian again, and I planned on remaining one. Jim and I moved to a another city and thus another parish. Freed from childhood associations with the Episcopal Church, I began to question its claims of authenticity as the true Church of Christ. I knew that, like all Protestant churches, it was founded by someone other than Christ; it was founded in protest against Church teaching and the pope.
The founder of the Episcopal Church, Henry VIII, had been no saint. The very fact it boasted of being so like and yet independent from the Catholic Church made me wonder. What made my Protestant church better than any other? That it wa s English? That it had been formed by a king instead of a monk or layman? I didn’t thin k so.
I began to look into the Catholic Church’s teachings in earnest to see if they could be accepted by a reasonable person, and I saw they could–all except those regarding the Virgin Mary. I just couldn’t get past the notion that veneration of Mary would take glory from Jesus.
The AG’s spin on Mary in the New Testament was of an interfering mother whose attempts to influence her Son had been quashed by him at every turn. I had bought into this idea partly out of jealousy for Jesus but mostly out of envy of Mary’s unique position. “Why should she be treated any differently from any other Christian?” I complained. “After all, God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).
One day I saw the truth: God is perfectly free to choose anyone to be or to do whatever he wishes–even before the person is born. He had done so in the Old and New Testaments, I recalled (Samuel and John the Baptist popped to mind), so why couldn’t he have chosen Mary, even sanctified her, before her birth?
I gave up my resentment against the Blessed Virgin and accepted God’s right to exalt whom he pleases. Then I realized the true Church of God must be the Catholic Church, the Church in which Mary has had such an integral role through the centuries. Even so, I was reluctant to embrace the Church I had feared and hated for so many years as “the whore of Babylon” (Rev. 17:1-6, 18).
One day I bought a rosary and began praying its decades after waging a brief interior battle against the accusation of idolatry. Mary came to my rescue, helping me to parry each blow as three times the charge was raised. Then, as I finished saying my beads, she blessed our victory by lifting my soul to regions of joy I’d never known existed. A sweet consolation, indeed!
Seeking such spiritual gratification is no longer the backbone of my spiritual life, as it was in the AG. I believe I was given that momentary delight to boost my confidence in Mary. The consolation was not something to strive for or even to hope for; it was a single blessing to be accepted along with the less pleasant experiences of life.
Soon after this I asked my husband if he wouldn’t mind going to the local Catholic church, just for the summer, to see if we liked it. In his typically low-key manner Jim said, “Sure, we can do that.” He had known I was being drawn into the Church. I learned only later that he had been longing to return himself, but had been afraid of rushing me into anything.
We attended Mass that summer, and in the fall I enrolled in RCIA. The first time I attended I literally shook with fear, but my fears were relieved when no one forced us to do anything we didn’t want to do or tried to pressure us into joining the Church. Just the opposite occurred. We were encouraged to be sure of any decisions we might make before acting on them–a far cry from the tactics used by my former sect when recruiting new members.
I learned how ignorant of Church history I was, especially concerning the Bible, which, I now heard for the first time, was produced by the Church, not the Church by the Bible. I also learned that the liturgy of the Mass is biblical all through.
I was reassured to hear confirmed what I had learned from the Lay Episcopal Franciscans–holiness is a lifelong endeavor in which we “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12); we do not presume to have it after merely praying the “sinner’s prayer.” We can become “perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) through prayer, acts of charity, and the graces provided in the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist.
I discovered that the Church believes Jesus meant it when he said, “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:55-56). Within the Church Christ founded I can receive his Body and Blood, soul and divinity, in the consecrated host at every Mass in which I participate.
At Easter Vigil 1987 I was received into the Catholic Church, where God, through his grace and the guidance of Blessed Mary, had led me. Here I discovered Jesus in his infinite mercy and grace. I have experienced the renewal of my mind in the Church’s teachings and have come to love both its Tradition and its holy book, the Bible.