Keith Nester shares a personal story of how the sacraments transformed his marriage and faith. Keith talks with Cy Kellett about the incredible impact of the Louis de Montfort consecration to Mary and the power of sacramental marriage in bringing couples closer together in an unexplainable way.
Transcript:
My wife and I, she was an atheist when we got married. She’s now a Catholic and I was a Catholic who became Catholic.
I was Catholic, but I still needed to become Catholic.
I do not know how my wife heard about this, but the consecration, the Louis de Montfort consecration to Mary.
And we did that consecration together and I can’t describe it. It’s very hard. It would be very hard for me to convince anyone or explain to anyone what it means when grace just pours into your marriage. And this is the truth of the Catholic Church.
And I mean, my job is to be a communicator, a Catholic communicator. I don’t know how to communicate that to people. I don’t know how to convince them. Trust in what the Church is offering. It really, it’s miraculous what it does.
It is. I mean, it is a sacrament. It’s a means of grace. It’s not just a power trip that the Church has to control people. It’s a means of grace. The best thing you can do for your marriage if you are not sacramentally married in the Catholic Church is to get that done. I talk to so many people who are interested in Catholicism, but they say, “Oh, I can’t come into the Church fully because my spouse is not on board with this and I don’t want to rock the boat. So I just kind of have to side-alep to Catholicism, but I’m afraid to broach that subject with them.” And I tell them all the time, “Look, do whatever you have to do to get that taken care of, to work through that. Play whatever chips you have to play. Do whatever you have to do. Get them to agree to do that, whatever it takes.” Because that is oftentimes, because people are like, “Well, my husband or my wife, they’re still against the Catholic Church, so they wouldn’t want to do that.” And what they need to understand is getting your marriage done in the Church and receiving that grace, that’s going to lead to that effect that you want. It’s going to help. It’s not going to hurt. But a lot of people are afraid to go there because it sounds so weird because then you have to have that conversation. “Well, what are you trying to say? Does our marriage not count? Is it not real?” And I get that because I had those conversations, too. And I remember feeling like, “Man, this is not going to go well when we have this talk.” But by the time we were at that point, my wife was just like, “Okay, I know that you really want to do this.” And she wasn’t going to hold up anything. She wasn’t going to be like, “Well, I’m standing in the way.” Even though she wasn’t quite fully there, she was willing to do that because she saw that I was fully there. And I think sometimes people underestimate that in their marriages. If you have a mixed marriage and some people are like, “Well, my spouse, they’re going to resist what I do in the Catholic faith, so it’s almost like there’s these two options. They have to convert and become fully Catholic right now, or I have to not become Catholic at all.” And I’m like, “There’s a third option.” And the third option is show them how important this is to you. And because they love you, they will not want to stand in your way, but don’t force them into anything they’re not ready for and be like, “Well, hey, guess what? If I’m going to be Catholic, that means you have to be Catholic.” The church allows for that situation because it’s merciful and understands that sometimes the way that people can come to a greater understanding of grace is to be exposed to a smaller understanding of grace. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And through that smaller understanding of grace, it unlocks a greater level of that. I saw that in my own life and in our marriage. I saw that when my wife would come into Mass,
not because she wanted to be there, but because she knew I wanted to be there and she was willing to sacrifice that for me. And I knew that I couldn’t argue her into the Catholic faith or to care about it more. But here’s the beautiful thing, Cy. I didn’t have to do that. God did that. The Blessed Mother did that. And through her willingness to crack the door a little bit to that experience and to start to pay attention and listen on her own, she had to get to that point. But through that experience, God did a thing. He opened the door to her in that grace. And I’m watching this conversion happen in front of my eyes that I’m not doing. Part of our problem is we want to control everything. We want to engineer the situation. We want to say, how do I get my son or my daughter or my spouse to become Catholic?
You can’t do that. God does that. But God can use you to show them why it’s made a difference in your life. And when they see that, that might open that door. I see that all the time. I’m seeing it right now in a few other situations that are so amazing. And I give thanks to God. And most people, they don’t give God enough credit with that.
That could be the title of a book about Catholicism. God did a thing.
I know you love, because you were a Protestant pastor and youth pastor and all that, and you have an abiding love for the Protestant communities that you were a part of. And so it’s not like with trying to argue somebody into something, but there’s a kind of sadness I feel, and I wonder if you feel it, about the sacraments being treated as works of the law or something. And you want to say, no, what a sacrament is, is total abandonment to God doing something. I’m not doing anything. I guess, theological, I shouldn’t say I’m not doing anything. But I mean, basically what I’m doing is I’m showing up and letting God operate on me. And when he operates, he actually gives you what he said he was going to give you. And this, I think, we need to convince more Catholics of. If you will open yourself to it, the sacraments work. But this is a…
We have debates and arguments and all that between Catholics and Protestants. But I think at the fundamental level, what the Catholic who has experienced the power of the sacraments would like to say is, please don’t think this is some kind of work of the law or magic that we’re talking about. God promised things and he does them. We don’t do them. Anybody really, really does them.
Amen. That’s the thing that we have to get our focus off of the sacraments as something we do. They’re something we receive. But the sacraments, and maybe this is wrong, I don’t know, you could ask a better theologian than me. I don’t look at the sacraments as something that, like a work that I do. I look at the sacraments as a work that God does in and through me and to me. Oftentimes without my full understanding or even the ability to really grab it. And a great example of that is confession, of course, because I’ve had people ask me, “Why do you guys have to confess your sins to a priest?” And whenever I hear that, I’m like, “You do not understand what confession is about.”
Confession is not a have to, it’s a get to. Because I’ve talked to so many people, I’ve experienced this myself, who have received such a tremendous level of healing from the Lord through that sacrament. They’ve been to therapy, they’ve been to rehab, they’ve done everything they can kind of do that the world has thrown at them. And none of it has had anywhere near the effect as receiving the sacrament of reconciliation.
And that’s a gift that God gives us. But the world is so wrapped up, especially a lot of Protestants are wrapped up in this idea of, “Well, you don’t do anything to work to earn your salvation.” So they’ll take that to the extreme and they’ll find anything that you do at all and say, “No, you’re trusting in yourself, you’re trusting in your salvation for yourself.” It’s not at all what we’re doing. It’s not at all what we’re doing at all. We can’t do that. I can’t make a sacrament in and of myself. I can’t baptize myself, I can’t marry myself, I can’t consecrate the Eucharist and give it to myself, I can’t confess my sins to myself, I can’t give holy orders to myself, not that I’m going to do that. I can’t give myself the extreme unction. That’s not anything I can do.
So why do we feel like everyone is accusing us of doing all this work, this sacraments? We’ve got to do a better job showing people that these are an act of God.