The original conversion story...

This will soon be published in an anthology of Catholic women's stories. It got heavily edited along the way, and while it's a voice that fits the book, it's not MY voice. It doesn't flow in the same way, it doesn't quite capture what I mean (I'd never call my parents' faith 'lukewarm', that's *not* quite what I mean by 'their Islam was cultural at best', the editor put an exclamation point when I meant the tone to be dry), but it will do. 

Don't get me wrong; I'm incredibly grateful - I know that's part of the editing deal when someone's bringing together a compilaton. I am thrilled to have the story out there to a fairly wide audience: but anyone reading it will never quite catch me. An author friend who read both versions noted that it seemed as if it was edited to cut out the strong emotion, to feel more neutral. I think she's right. But my feeling is that the messiness is part of the story; it's part of the human experience. And I think sharing that messiness is necessary if we're going to be real, to connect, so that others don't feel alone. To quote a song from The Greatest Showman:

I am brave, I am bruised,
I am who I am meant to be - this is me.
Look out because here I come and I'm marching on to the beat I drum:
I'm not scared to be seen, I make no apologies,
This is me.

So if you're interested in the abbreviated tale full of messiness and transformation, tolle lege:

“Daddy, daddy, you left Mommy in there!”

No response from the head I could see resting against the driver’s seat, so I repeated myself relentlessly as he drove off unheeding. As the cry reached its desperate crescendo, my 5-year-old eyes popped open and I found myself staring at my bedroom ceiling.

 A dream. Of course. Even my kindergarten self knew how unlikely it was that we’d stop at the Catholic church that fascinated me every time we drove by it, let alone my mother getting out to actually walk in. However, none of that stopped me from telling my father, every time we drove past the church for weeks afterwards, that he had left my mother in there. 

He finally turned to me in exasperation, “We’ve never been in there. We are NEVER going into a Catholic church or any church. Ok?”

Speak for yourself, Father.

As time passed and the dream receded into the background of study, Islamic Saturday school, struggling with a deeply dysfunctional family, an uncle’s sexual abuse, one might think that the fascination with a strange church might disappear into the depths without a trace or hope of return.

Instead, it turned out to be the faint, early glimmer of my road home.

No matter how far away I seemed, seeds of Catholicism found me. My paediatrician mother would get copies of Bible Stories to put in her waiting room and I would devour them before they left the house.  In 1978, young me rejoiced when John Paul I was elected and sobbed when he died. Oscar Romero and Denis Hurley were my first clerical crushes, causing a subsequent priest friend to wryly observe, ‘No wonder the rest of us have disappointed you.’ But above all, even as a child, it was where I found home – my closest friends were Catholic, and the love I received from them became my first taste of sanctuary.

But those seeds could so easily have fallen by the wayside, on stony ground, or amongst thorns, where they could have been easily lifted, scorched, or choked. It took a long time to realise that I drew the road to me as much as the road drew me to it.

My parents believed in God because they were told to. From the time I was very young, I could feel God brushing against my skin in all things – I’d even talk to dust particles as if they were sentient. That sense of an immanent God clashed with the Islamic concept of a God far above us who required submission.

That wasn’t the only point of discord. I grew up in an immediate family that viewed other people as objects: to use and discard, to step over on the way up. At best, my parents’ Islam was cultural, but was far more often a means of control, especially over a girl who had the nerve to yell back at her raging father. Somehow, in the midst of it all, I had an unshakeable sense that ‘this isn’t how you treat people’, that you sacrifice yourself for that which is greater than you are: a child, the many, to end the suffering of others, for the One. Even before I had any clear idea who He was, I understood why Jesus was on that cross. He felt like a kindred spirit.

Eventually the rift between Islam’s theology and my innate understanding became too great, and in my adolescence, I lapsed, with all the requisite snark of a Generation Xer. It wasn’t until I moved out after my mother juxtaposed ‘arranged’ and ‘marriage’ in a sentence (I didn’t tell them I was leaving, but I did leave them a note on the fridge) that I felt safe enough to do something other than rebel.

The path picked up with my lab colleague, Janice Briscoe, a convert to Catholicism, who, on hearing my childhood dream, muttered, ‘He DID leave your mother in there.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

I worried at that throwaway remark for years, during which time the two final parts of my journey slotted into place: my time as a teacher at the Hebrew Academy, a Modern Orthodox Jewish school, and my friendship with Anni.

In September 1992, I walked into Hebrew Academy with great trepidation because I knew it was reasonably obvious I’d been a Muslim. I need not have worried: it felt like home within a week. For four years, my work world was a school in which the sound of prayer punctuated the rhythm of the day; wonderful, warm staff who invited me to their Seders, Purim services, and cantorial concerts; cheeky students who patiently explained rabbinical commentary; affectionately shaking my head as I passed rabbis who argued in hallways and became good friends. I became immersed in a religion that was grounded in daily life, one that was a way of being, not just an identity ritual or something to learn on a Saturday. To this day, this homegoy™ (my friend Dorothy’s term for her non-Jewish friends) can feel the rhythm of the Jewish liturgical calendar in her bones.

I joke that I nearly converted to Judaism, but bacon and shellfish got in the way. That’s not quite true: it was that kindred spirit, Jesus, who did.

October 1992 brought the final step in the road, befriending my sister from another mister, Anni, a fellow Renaissance Festival dancer, whose parents took me in as if I were their long lost eldest daughter. Wrapped in that love, I learned that American Catholicism was as much about boisterous affection, fuzzy toilet seat covers, pictures of Our Lady and the pope, and ‘tuna casserole Friday’ as it was about going to church. It was with Anni that I discovered the joy of Latin mass in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception’s crypt church, where I was able to articulate my sense of the sacraments as being Heaven kissing our lives on Earth, invisible love made visible. It was about telling Anni, ‘The guy I’m dating just asked why I don’t become Catholic,’ punctuated with an eye-roll.

I could have saved my eyes the exercise. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1993, I suddenly realised that I needed a spiritual community, somewhere to fall. In one of our numerous phone calls, I said to Anni, ‘If only I could become Catholic.’

‘You can,’ she said.

My squeal of glee left her ears ringing.

RCIA had already started for that year, so I joined the next one in September 1994, becoming Catholic at St Michael’s, Mt Airy, MD (USA) on 15 April 1995, baptised by Fr Mike Ruane and confirmed by Bishop Frank Murphy (RIP).

That’s all, she wrote? Hardly. As a wedding is to a marriage, so is a baptism/first communion to a faith journey. Eighteen months after that, I left the cosy world of being a Eucharistic Minister at  St Mike’s to come to Oxford for an MSc and stumbled over a church which had a Sunday 11am Latin mass. I rejoiced – a seamless transition, a church that would be a home here.

Let’s just say it was about as smooth as a Himalayan mountain road.

English Catholicism’s victim mentality jolted me, coming from an unselfconscious American Catholicism, as I noted most of those who played the victim were not recusants, but converts whose ancestors had been on the right side of history. The victimhood led to insularity, leaving parts of the Church suffocating. The reactionary right wing baggage that accompanied the Latin (and later, the return of the Tridentine) mass went from a stream to a tsunami, leaving those of us who were committed to Catholic social teaching yet loved a smoking (only incense, I hasten to add) high liturgy betwixt and between. The ‘male servers only’ and ‘no EM’ rules left women out of the sanctuary except to read. Any argument was met with a mocking ‘You’re just an angry feminist.’ Shades of my emotionally sadistic father were omnipresent.

But as with a butterfly beating its wings against a chrysalis, growth needs resistance, and that resistance turned out to be a blessing – the space to push against the patriarchy as an adult with the resources to do so helped heal the child who couldn’t. Whether it was in my particular church, or more broadly with the growing neoconservative traditionalist movement encouraged by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, staying and pushing forced into clear relief what mattered, stripping my faith right back to the essentials: my relationship with God, my unshakeable faith in the events of Holy Week, my belief in the sacraments (particularly the Real Presence) as emanations of the holy into the mundane, my commitment to our social teaching, the oneness of G-d’s creation.

That faith keeps my feet on the pilgrim road, my conversion new every morning, my prayer one with Charles Wesley’s:

Ready for all thy perfect will,
my acts of faith and love repeat;
till death thy endless mercies seal,
and make the sacrifice complete.