Conclusions of a Guilty Bystander
Patrick Madrid
I'm writing this in front of the Blessed Sacrament, in the quiet solitude of a monastery chapel near my home. Being alone here with the Lord helps me gather my thoughts as I search for the right way to recount my story.
St. Peter's words echo in my mind: "Lord, it is good for us to be here." Christ had led him and James and John to the lonely heights of Mount Tabor one day and there revealed things to them that evoked Peter's exclamation, startling things, previously hidden.
"Lord, it is good for me to be here with you in the Eucharist," is the refrain that resonates within me as I write. For in this setting, before the tabernacle, Christ has shown me many things about myself that I needed to see and repair. His hammer and chisel of grace delivered their most effective blows to my heart during those times when I knelt in front of Him, head bowed, in the silence of another Catholic church, years ago and far from here.
I'm not a convert in the standard sense of the term. I was born into a Catholic family, raised in the Faith by devout and loving parents, and have remained in the Church, believing all her teachings with all my heart. ("So what is your story doing in a book like this?" you ask yourself.) I'm not a convert to the Catholic Church, but I am the unworthy recipient of the grace of a conversion of the heart, a recommitment to Christ at a time when I thought I knew what it means to be Catholic. How wrong I was.
In my mid 20s, I went through a kind of creeping spiritual crisis that led me into a reconversion that was neither sudden nor dramatic, although it shook me powerfully and reached the deepest recesses of my heart.
Like a painful, prolonged medical treatment that's necessary to save a patient's life, my reconversion entailed pain and uncertainty, but the result, thank God, was a cure - not an instant one, forever banishing the symptoms of the disease we call "sin," but a cure nonetheless. As St. Paul explained, "Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death." This malaria of sin, contracted in the Garden of Eden through the bite of an apple, courses through our veins with all its deadly effects. Only God's grace can combat and overcome it. His love is the sole antidote.
At the height of my conversion of heart, I discovered, or more specifically, the Lord showed me, that through years of infrequent and minimal use, I had allowed the "muscles" of my interior life - prayer, mortification, and recollection - to atrophy and wither. My spiritual "arteries" - which carry the love of Christ as the lifeblood of the soul - had hardened and Iconstricted as a result of the lukewarm, halfhearted complacency into which I had settled.
I think my situation wasn't unlike that of many Catholics. We who are born into the Faith easily take it for granted, and we make the fatal mistake of assuming that conversion is for Protestants or Mormons or atheists who, being outside the Church, make their way into it. Many Catholics - I being a good example - lull themselves into a state of comfortable, "do not disturb" spiritual incapacitation. They make no real or consistent effort to grasp Christ with all their might and to work daily at keeping and strengthening that grasp, as His grace enables.
Simply being Catholic isn't enough. What is required by Christ is love, and true love means effort, work, and time spent in prayer - things that so often fall by the wayside in the daily lives of many Catholics. We call him Lord in our prayers, but so often we don't live our lives as if He really is. Membership in the Church, even a strong conviction about things Catholic, is in itself no guarantee of a real friendship with Christ.
That's the condition in which I found myself. I lived a life of Catholicism that comprised good and important but largely external things such as regular Sunday Mass attendance, grace before meals, and praying the Rosary occasionally. These weren't enough. I lacked a deep interior commitment to Christ, to living virtuously and to deepening my prayer life. My parents had taught me the Faith and how to live it, but these lessons were surprisingly easy to forget, at least for a time, once the powerful distractions, temptations, and concupiscence of young adulthood crowded them into the background.
But our Lord is kind and faithful. "If we are unfaithful, He will remain faithful, for He cannot deny Himself." He seeks out, not just the lost sheep that has wandered far from the flock, but also the one that remains within the flock but gradually grows dull and lazy and becomes deaf to the sound of the Shepherd's voice. I was once like that second sheep, and this is the story ofhow the Good Shepherd rescued me from my spiritual stupor and gathered me to Himself.
California dreamin' ...of Christian martyrdom
I was born in 1960 into a devout Catholic family. My parents were loving and wise in the way they raised us children, especially in the way they taught us about Christ and imparted to us the truths of the Catholic Faith. I grew up and lived most of my life in Southern California. In 1970 our family moved to Mission Viejo, a sparkling new, "master planned" bedroom community in Orange County, about forty-five miles south of Los Angeles. It was a great place to grow up, each tract of newly built homes filling quickly with an influx of young families. In our neighborhood, one thing became noticeable: ours was by far the biggest family.
One important lesson I learned from my parents' example was the importance of generosity with God and openness to life. As the oldest of eight children, I lived in a world where it was natural for parents to spend themselves totally in their love and devotion to their family. Only later, as I began to encounter secular culture, in high school, college, and beyond, did I see how deliciously radical and countercultural my parents were in having a large family in the 1970s. But I certainly didn't realize that while I was growing up. As far as I could see, my parents never saw themselves in that light. They never put on the "We're the parents of a large family and you're not" sort of airs one sometimes encounters in others. Nor can I recall my mom and dad ever rolling their eyes or looking askance at another family with the maximum one or two children that modern society tells people to have. At that time, the only Iarge families people generally saw were on television: the Brady Bunch, which had six (although the plot line for their Iarge family was a consequence of remarriage), and the Bradford family on Eight Is Enough. Even the title of that show betrayed the media and cultural disapproval of large families.
We weren't poor, but we certainly weren't what people would call middle-class comfortable. Although my parents' monthly budget was pretty tight most of the time, my mom chose to pursue her vocation as a homemaker; and for that I thank God. My dad went to work to pay the bills, and my mom stayed home to cook, clean, change diapers, do laundry, and chauffeur the kids around town on an endless series of treks to school, Little League games, and dance practices. (Someday, I'll film a documentary tribute to her career behind the wheel of our family station wagon. I'll call it "Taxi Driver.") She made our home comfortable and beautiful, settled disputes, spanked us when we needed it, and otherwise rode herd on her thundering pack of kids.
My dad, a brilliant, under-appreciated, overworked computer engineer, daily endured the mind-crushing drudgery of a Southern California commute from our home in the 'burbs of Orange County to his workplace in Los Angeles and back.
The Madrid family sprawl was a great environment in rich to grow up Catholic. It was loud, loving, rambunctious, and devout without ever being kooky or weirdly pious - generally a pretty happy place.
I wasn't by any stretch bad, but, like most kids, I was accomplished and diligent in the arts of boyhood mischief, chore-shirking, impertinence, and random acts of slacking and disobedience. I received plenty of spankings, groundings, and "How many times do I have to tell you to clean up your room?" lectures. I loved playing sports, swimming, and rough-housing with my neighborhood pals, but I was also a bookworm and spent a lot of time engrossed in adventure tales, lives of the saints, and war stories. I remember countless hours ensconced in my room, mesmerized by some book or another, imagining myself as a brave, "laugh in the face of the pagan emperor" early Christian martyr, or as an explorer, or as Teddy Roosevelt, waving his men forward with saber in one hand, a colt revolver in the other, charging up San Juan Hill into a hail of Spanish bullets and artillery Then my mom would call me downstairs to take out the trash. (Sometimes, being grounded wasn't so painful - although I never told my parents that - because being banished to my room for the day meant along stretch of uninterrupted reading. )
From Kumbaya to Kyrie
Another important element of my Catholic upbringing was being an altar boy. For several years, I actually dwelt in two different liturgical worlds, serving at the ancient Tridentine rite on weekdays at my school and at a freewheeling Novus Ordo guitar Mass on Sundays in my parish. That strange, although providential, circumstance gave me valuable insights into what the Catholic Church is as ail entity, established and safeguarded by Christ regardless of its outward circumstances and the frailties of its members.
The latter part of my grammar school career was spent at the Mission San Juan Capistrano parochial school. The parish church adjacent to the school is one of the many California missions established by Bl. Junipero Serra, the Spanish Franciscan who planted the seeds of Christianity throughout California, shortly after the Spaniards arrived in Mexico. Built in 1776, this church was the oldest thing I had ever seen, and its hoary beauty impressed me. The chapel still has its original high, whitewashed adobe walls, timber and tile roof, stone floor, and ancient wooden pews. In fact, of all the twenty- one California missions, San Juan Capistrano has the only intact chapel where BI. Junipero Serra had celebrated Mass. And it was there, at the early daily Mass, that I served as an altar boy.
The elderly pastor of the parish had received a special indult from Pope Paul VI to continue the celebration of the sacraments there in Latin, according to the pre-1963 Tridentine rite. So while I was an altar boy at Sunday Mass at the parish near our home { where the Novus Ordo Mass was celebrated exclusively), on 'weekday mornings, when I served the Latin Mass, I could step back in time for half an hour, away from the din of the Southern California kaleidoscope of traffic jams, fast-food restaurants, and shopping malls. Inside the dim, incense-Iaden sanctuary of the Old Mission chapel, I felt profoundly connected with the ancient, timeless Catholic Church. Now I can understand and articulate a fundamental truth that, even as a boy, I sensed clearly: the Catholic Church, like Christ, her Spouse {and because ofHim), is the same yesterday, today, and forever.145 She has sojourned on His behalf for more than twenty centuries on this earth, has seen every epoch's unique set of problems and challenges come and go, and she is still here.
Years later, writing about the Liturgy for a Catholic journal, I recalled that remarkable experience fondly: "1 have vivid memories of serving Holy Mass in that elaborate sanctuary, cloudy with incense, where Bl. Junipero Serra had celebrated Mass two centuries earlier: on my knees, reciting the acolyte's responses in Latin, watching the priest's every motion. So many realities of the Faith were communicated to my young soul by the elements of that Traditional Latin Mass."
Herein arose a strange dichotomy. During the week, I was an acolyte at the Traditional Mass. On Sundays, I was an acolyte {although they never used that word there) at our local parish. The pastor was a good man and by all appearances personally orthodox, but he wasn't forceful in the way he ran the parish. His "hang on loosely" approach to dealing with the various lay ministries and the srrong egos of some of the parishioners meant that the parish was liturgically liberal- not kooky liberal, but it had a general atmosphere of "almost anything goes." This included relatively new practices such as hand-holding during the Our Father, out-of-tune folk guitarists twanging through sappy songs being written in those days, a stark interior with no statues or votive candles, and a bizarre orange-and-silver-foil wallpaper that formed a space-age, floor-to-ceiling backdrop behind the altar {it drove my dad crazy).
Mass at the Old Mission was, in its externals; the polar opposite: majestic and mysterious. The incense and Gregorian chany the Latin prayers, the imposing, intricately carved, gold-Ieaf reredos that towered above the altar, the flurry of bells rung at the moment of Consecration -all of these stamped on my young imagination a powerful imprint of the Mass's mystical, transcendent beauty. (Now I see clearly and appreciate that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, whether celebrated according to the New Order promulgated by Vatican II, or according to the ancient Byzantine form of the Divine Liturgy, or according to the ancient Latin Tridentine rite codified by Pope Pius V, is still the same Holy Sacrifice.)
A faith built on imagination
As odd as it might sound, it's here, I believe, that the beginnings of my gradual decline into lukewarmness began. My imagination was being fed with all the richness and glory of the Faith and its history. I avidly read the lives of the saints - particularly those martyrs who died for the Faith by being burned alive or speared or beheaded. The more gore, the better. It was so easy to imagine the Catholic Church and its romantic, fiercely beautiful, two-thousand~year panoply of saints, sinners, and martyrs. On that rich diet, my ravenous imagination was very well fed- and that in itself isn't bad -but whether it was due to some character flaw of mine, or a general spiritual and intellectual laziness (which is a character flaw, I suppose), I allowed my Catholic Faith to subsist almost entirely at the level of imagination. That, I think, was a significant cause of my later bout with lukewarmness.
As Scripture tells us, God created humans "in His own image." This means each of us was fashioned as a person, just as He is a person. As such, God created our human nature to have an intellect and a will, the two rational faculties by which we know and love. The intellect is the apparatus of reason with which a human person perceives, measures, and makes decisions about himself and the world around him. The will is the component of the person that assents to and carries out one's decisions and actions based on what his intellect tells him.
Now, since God also created us to be material and spiritual beings (i.e., body and soul), we must contend with the input that our physical senses give to our minds. This is where the imagination comes into play. The imagination isn't the entire intellect, but merely a component of it. The imagination is what provides the mind with "pictures," images of our experiences that come through the senses. And our imaginations are powerful and often vivid in the images - both good and evil - they present to our mind.
This is why many people gradually lose interest in using their intellects to penetrate deeper into the spiritual and moral (and even scientific) truths of the world around them. Like a muscle, the intellect must be exercised regularly or it will become lazy, flabby, and unable to heft the weight of the many moral dilemmas and choices we face in life. When the intellect is weak and ineffectual as a result of laziness, the imagination sets itself up as dictator. It feeds the mind on a steady diet of mental junk food. Those images and impressions it generates soon become mistaken for acts of the intellect. At that stage, a person finds himself reduced to the shabby condition of living in a world constructed predominantly (and governed ruthlessly) by his imagination. It becomes an ever, present ringmaster at the center of a circus of swirling images, smells, sounds, and feelings with which the five senses constantly bombard the mind. Such a person becomes hostage to his own emotions and appetites. Left unchecked, his imagination works solo while his intellect stays quiet and sluggish in the background. This gradual abdication of the intellect will inevitably cause the Christian to drift into indifference to the spiritual struggle raging around him, or worse, he may lay down his anus entirely and give up the fight.
In my case, the drift started when I was a high school senior.
Minor seminary days
When I was in eighth grade, I thought that God might be calling me to the priesthood. It wasn't an overwhelming call, but I sensed that the thing to do was to "come and see," as Christ told the Apostles when He first called them to follow Him.147 Through the generosity of the kindhearted pastor of our parish, who agreed to pay for my tuition, I was given the privilege of spending nearly three years in Our Lady Queen of Angels diocesan minor seminary in San Fernando, California. It was a good if uneventful time for me; I enjoyed my studies, developed an appreciation for a more regimented prayer and liturgical life, and formed some friendships that have lasted even to today. Eventually I saw that God wasn't calling me to the priesthood. So, near the end of my junior year, I left the seminary and enrolled at the local public high school. It was like being dropped into a very large aquarium filled with hoards of exotic and sometimes beautiful fish, as well as some dangerous predators.
Small-time rocker, part-time Catholic
I quickly slipped into the groove of dating, going to parties, hanging out at the beach, and many of the other pastimes teens pursued in sunny Southern California. My upscale high school had about three thousand students and was awash in drugs, alcohol, sex, recklessness, and materialism. There were many good students and teachers, but many students lived lives of excess and pleasure-seeking. They came from affluent homes, and Mommy and Daddy had the bucks to buy them stylish clothes, a new car on their sixteenth birthday, and pretty much anything else they wanted. I found myself swimming in the pleasant, warm waters of this aquarium of hedonism.
When I got into public high school, I didn't go berserk with my new relative freedom. I didn't dye my hair purple or pierce any body parts (that silliness among teenagers was still several years away). There were no shouting matches with my parents, or sneaking out of the house at night, or any of those things. My slide into complacency was furtive and unobtrusive; even I wasn't fully aware of just how slippery the slope had become.
I grew lazy in prayer and no longer made an effort to cultivate virtue, but compared with many of my peers, I was still a "good kid," and I didn't get mixed up with a lot of the craziness around me.
I never took drugs of any kind -not even once. I'm grateful to God for protecting me from that snare. Large amounts of marijuana, cocaine, various mind-bending pills, acid, and even hardcore injectables such as heroin were used all around me by many young people.
In 1979, I heard from a friend that a drummer I had played a few gigs with and whom I had known from school - a guy my own age and an excellent musician - had died of a heroin overdose the month before. He was eighteen.
I can't take much credit for avoiding drugs; God protected me from that scourge. I have a vivid memory of being at a party one night and being offered a joint by a cute girl. "No thanks," I muttered sheepishly, glancing at the mari, juana cigarette she held out to me. I looked down in embar, rassment. I knew she was surprised and was thinking, "What a geek." She wrote me off with a roll of her eyes and walked away. I can see now that that was a moment of grace - one of many unrecognized moments of grace - and it taught me that although my willingness to avoid sin had been weakened through compromise, it hadn't been destroyed.
I didn't follow the crowd in its pot, addled, binge, drinking quest for new chemically induced highs, but I'm sorry to say that I hung out with many who did. Not everyone was a bleary-eyed pothead, but many of the young people I knew were. Some graduated from "weed" to the harder stuff: acid, hash, and cocaine were common fare at parties.
Easy access to the party scene and all the temptations that entailed came as a result of my growing involvement with rock 'n' roll. If anything was a passion for me, it was playing music. I had a solid background in music, having studied violin for a short time and played the trumpet in the school orchestra for several years. When I was fifteen, I taught myself to play the bass guitar and quickly discovered I was good at it.
I spent countless hours in my bedroom with my bass guitar, practicing and learning how to play the songs on the radio and on my albums. Chicago, the Cars, Boston, the Stones, Kansas, Fleetwood Mac, The Police, America, and especially the Beatles were among the rock groups whose music I loved and learned, note by note. By the time I was seventeen, I was playing with several pretty decent garage bands in Southern California. One particularly successful band I played bass for was Geneva Brown. We never did make it to the "medium time" {much less the big time), but we developed a local following and played at parties, weddings, and clubs. Besides playing songs by Top-40 groups, we wrote and performed a lot of our own music, mostly bouncy pop tunes, which even today I can honestly say were pretty good.
For me and many others, this interlude as a wannabe rock star contributed to the growth of narcissism, superficiality, and vanity. It engendered a vivid fantasy world that catered to my ego and my appetites. Not virtue or strength of character, but seeing myself as a "popular, talented, successful" musician was the measure of success. My desire for success as a rock star wasn't balanced with a strong spiritual life and good spiritual direction, so it fed and empowered my imagination, at the expense of my intellect.
In 1979, Geneva Brown won first place in a widely publicized, well-attended "Battle of the Bands" competition, beating twenty other local bands. I'll never forget the adrenal in rush I felt when we walked onto the stage in front of a couple of thousand screaming teens and young adults and knocked them dead with our first number, Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London." A few songs later, we finished our set, unplugged our guitars, and sauntered offstage to the roar of boisterous applause.
We thought for sure we were headed for big things in music. But when you're nineteen and stupid, as I was, what do you know? We collected our trophy, posed for some cheesy publicity pictures, and piled into our cars and went home to celebrate. Back at the house we shared, there was a big party that lasted into the early morning.
When I woke up, the shadow across the room showed it was nearly noon. I had a throbbing headache - too much beer- and my head felt as if it were the size of a filing cabinet. My mouth was dry. There seemed to be small mittens on my teeth. I trudged into the bathroom, looked into the mirror at my bloodshot eyes, threw up, and went back to bed.
Small-time rock 'n' roll was doing nothing to enhance my spiritual life.
During this time, I remained Catholic, but all around me were drugs, girls, alcohol, and the band's ubiquitous hangers- on. It was inevitable that these negative influences would harm me. I dated different girls, although I was never a predator with only one goal in mind. With dating came many of the dangers inherent in being alone with a pretty girl. It was fun, I thought, and I found it easy to push aside the lessons I had learned about chastity and moderation. While I didn't get drawn into the worst excesses that were common among many young people at the time, I look back with remorse (and with gratitude for (God's mercy) on the sins I committed during my "young and stupid" period.
I now find it odd that, even amid my spiritual laziness, the music, and the party~scene craziness, I still went to Mass every Sunday, prayed before meals, and went to Confession every few months. I also enjoyed defending Catholicism against the criticisms of non~Catholics - and was even good at it.
Protestants force me to think about the Faith
The truth is, I had been doing this for years. For example, the summer before my senior of high school, I was going out with a beautiful girl named Christi. She was a sweet, lively person, and her parents took a strong interest in me. Christi and her family were what I call "hardcore" Baptists. They talked a lot about the Bible and seemed to have an appropriate Bible verse to quote at any moment and in any situation. Christi's parents knew I came from a strong Catholic background, of course, and I think these two good, sincere people saw me as a challenge - especially since I was dating their daughter - and they went to work on me with vigor. Since Christi and I spent a lot of time at her house, listening to music and swimming in her pool, her parents had plenty of time to work oil their "Pat Madrid" project. They often sat with us, a well-worn King James Bible open on her dad's knee, and posed friendly but pointed questions to me about my Catholic Faith.
"The Bible says in Exodus 20:4 that God condemns the use of statues and other graven images," her mom would say with a smile. " As a Catholic, Patrick, and since the Catholic Church promotes praying to statues, doesn't that bother you?"
Of course I knew we Catholics don't worship or pray to statues, so I knew enough to reject that part of her argument, but what I lacked was a solid knowledge of Scripture that would have enabled me to point out passages such as Exodus 25:18-20, Numbers 21:8-9, and 1 Kings 6:23-28, where God approves of and even commands the carving of religious statues. I would have been able to show Christi's well-meaning mom that what God condemned in Exodus 20 was not graven images per se, but idolatry - the worship of graven images. Idolatry under any guise is a sin, and the Catholic Church has always strenuously condemned it. If I had had this family's level of biblical knowledge, I could have stood my ground better.
Over several weeks, Christi's parents and their circle of Evangelical Protestant friends presented me with a variety of biblical challenges to my Faith: "Mary worship," the Catholic Church's alleged "false gospel of salvation by works," the heresy of infant Baptism, the Pope and his outrageous claims of being infallible, the magic of the sacraments, especially the issue of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist - these and other arguments against the Catholic Faith were thrown (smilingly, of course) in my face.
Such arguments were often accompanied by a venomous anti-Catholic "Chick Tract" dredged up from a seemingly limitless supply that came from a hidden stash somewhere in their house. I read these garish anti-Catholic comic books carefully. Time after time, I could see that they offered slick but bogus arguments against the Catholic Church. It was so obvious that the wild, angry charges these tracts made against Catholicism weren't true -and I was able to check Scripture to see this for myself. I soon began to refuse the anti-Catholic literature that Christi's parents proffered. Once, I even had the gumption to invite them to come to Mass with us, so they could see what the Catholic Church taught and that it resembled nothing like the caricatures in the tracts they gave me.
I recall one particularly tense conversation about the Eucharist with Christi's parents. Her dad said, "Hang on a minute" and went into the house. He came back with a Chick Tract called "The Death Cookie," which he handed to me with great seriousness, asking me to read it prayerfully. I was asked repeatedly if I had "been saved." As a Catholic, they regarded me as a "lost soul," an "unsaved" person who still needed to "find Christ" (even though they let me see their daughter, for which I give them credit).
It's ironic that in one sense, their view of me was actually not far from the truth. My intellectual certitude, even as a teen, was insufficient to save me. I needed a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ," and I'm grateful that these encounters helped me see how important that is. Of course, Catholics don't typically speak in this way, but semantics aside, I was beginning to learn a deep truth.
There were times when I'd think to myself in frustration, "I just want to spend time with Christi! I don't want to be put on trial about the Bible." Looking back on those months of being grilled regularly by these good but deeply anti-Catholic people, I realize how beneficial this experience was for me. It forced me to defend my Catholic convictions, to move beyond my imagination and use my intellect to grapple with these challenges and the truths I claimed to believe in, and to determine for myself why I believed what I believed as a Catholic. I thank Christi's parents for conducting this project on me, because even though Christi and I soon drifted apart, they helped propel me into a more mature, more introspective level of Faith. Little did I ( or they) realize then how they were preparing me for my later work as a Catholic apologist.
My so-called spiritual life
Even though my theological jousting with Christi's parents and other aggressive Evangelicals forced me to think more deeply about why I believed what I did, I was still being moved along by the current of those things that appealed to me in life. Without even realizing it, by the time I was nineteen and in college, I had slipped almost entirely into relying mainly on imagination, fed by my senses. Parties, beer, music, and cute available girls had become the fixtures of my life.
True, I went to Mass every Sunday; I believed in and loved the Catholic Church; I said my prayers, but sporadically and without much fervor. (I did experience fleeting moments of fervor that I now believe were moments of God's prevenient grace, like the tugboats that nudge an ocean liner in the direction it should move while it's building its own head of steam.)
I knew enough to get to Confession when my sinful actions thrust me out of the state of grace, but my spiritual life had be, come little more than a sentimental fondness for the image of Catholicism I had created. It didn't dawn on me that I was empty. Outwardly, intellectually, even emotionally, I was a Catholic. But in that hidden place where the soul and God are alone with each other, I was mushy and superficial.
I spent far more time with Paul McCartney, learning to play the bass guitar exactly as he did, than I did in prayer with Jesus Christ. I cared much more about dating and having fun than I did about cultivating virtue. Although I was never tempted to leave the Catholic Church, I had drifted into the comfortable cult of Myself.
My assent to Catholic teaching and practice was still simply an edifice of faith, not Faith itself. Just as a mansion may appear solid and well built from the outside, but on the inside may well be cold, dreary, and empty of the furnishings that would transform it from a hulk of wood and plaster into a home where people live, so it was with me: the externals were there, but there was little inside. Still, the edifice was sturdily built and, in spite of my drift, the Lord continued to protect me and even bless me with new and amazing graces. Foremost among these was the grace of discovering my future wife.
...Then comes marriage
She was sixteen and I was seventeen when I met her. Slim, lovely, and always smiling, Nancy was one of those vivid young women people instinctively like and want to be around. For a year and a half, we were just friends, and we dated other people. We often saw each other casually, and I sometimes even played bass for the parish choir she sang in. When the relationship with my girlfriend fizzled, I got my nerve up to ask Nancy on a date.
The next year was a blur of happy times spent with Nancy: long walks on the beach, bike rides, holding hands and talking for hours, playing Frisbee, laughing, quiet moments gazing at the stars on warm summer nights. She was fantastic and wonderful, alive in a deeper and more attractive way than any girl I had ever known. She was Catholic and beautiful, and I loved being with her. Best of all, Nancy never allowed herself to get caught up in any of the typical teenage vices, and that was immensely attractive to me. I was drawn by her radiant goodness as much as her beauty and sweet personality. She amazed me with a wisdom and depth of vitality that was beyond anything I had to offer her. She loved with chaste yet stirring intensity. Her love was a current of goodness that was wide, deep, and unstoppable, the way a mountain stream surges onward to find its waterfall. I came to realize that I loved her.
Even though they knew I wasn't a "high confidence" candidate for her affection, Nancy's family was very patient with me. They were worried by my frivolity and aimlessness, but guided Nancy as she and I grew closer.
My parents and family all loved Nancy, and I can remember one particular conversation with my dad: He put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, "Pat, you have no idea what a wonderful girl you've found in Nancy. If you let her get away from you, it will be the worst thing ever to happen to you. If you don't grow up and turn away from the music scene, you'll lose her." His words cut me; I knew he was right. His remark was one of the milestones in my journey back to a serious practice of my Faith.
But I still had a long way to go.
After a year's courtship, we got engaged in July of 1980. I had no idea how dramatically this young woman was about to change my life for the better.
We were married on February 7, 1981. She was nineteen; I was twenty. Young, yes, but we knew that marriage was what we wanted. Our parents supported us in our decision, and we saw no reason for waiting. After an idyllic if simple honeymoon driving up the coast of California, we came home and started the process of setting up house and adjusting to married life. We were very happy. I worked as a clerk at a nearby bank, and Nancy taught at a local preschool. In the evenings, we'd talk about our dreams for the future, especially the dream of starting a family. God was already beginning to draw me home. Getting married and assuming the responsibilities of husband and father signaled the death of my rock 'n' roll days. The band wanted to keep playing and start recording, but I let them know I needed to be home with Nancy, not on stage.
And so I left the band.
As if they had been written for and about me personally, I found myself learning firsthand the meaning of St. Paul's words: "When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things." I was slowly, but not entirely, putting away my childish thinking and ways. The next several years were the stage on which the drama of my reconversion unfolded fully.
The crisis was drawing near.
Nancy and I had no specific plans for starting a family, but decided to see what would happen. It happened quickly. I got laid off by the bank a few weeks after we got married and then was quickly hired in the retail field. I had just started a new job as a store manager and was unloading boxes one afternoon when Nancy showed up unexpectedly.
"I just came ftom the doctor," she said, her eyes wide and brimming with tears of happiness.
"You mean. .." I stammered, slackjawed with the impact of her unspoken news.
She hugged me. "Yes, we're going to have a baby."
Phase Two of God's "Patrick Madrid reconstruction project" was underway. Becoming a husband was a big step toward maturity, but becoming a father was even more dramatic. Our first son, Jonathon, was born on Thanksgiving of 1981. By 1985, we had bought our first home and had two more children, Bridget in 1983 and Timothy in 1985. We had a happy, fun-filled marriage, and I marveled now and then at how dramatically different my life had become. I was, happily, being forced to grow up and get away from my earlier selfish ways as I did my best to shoulder the load of being a father and husband.
A soul divided cannot stand
In time, the effects of my years of immoderation and lukewarmness began to catch up with me. I can't recall when the feeling started, but I eventually became aware of a growing sense of discontent and restlessness. Even though I was now married with kids, a mortgage, and car payments, I hadn't shed many of the lax, pleasure-seeking attitudes I had cultivated earlier. These attitudes shaped aspects of our marriage, and iince we both had enough training in the Faith to know better, there were things in our marriage that Nancy and I mew didn't conform to what God wanted. I take the blame for being the one who led the way down wrong paths.
In many ways, I was still immature and superficial. My combination of doctrinal staunchness and moral laziness was very much at work in my life. Even as I found time to develop skills as an apologist (relishing opportunities to debate religion with Protestant and other non-Catholic friends), I did other things I knew I shouldn't have. I knew what was right, but still did what was wrong. St. Paul's words were reflected in me: "1 do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."
I was empty inside, a vacuum of selfishness where my interior life with Christ should have been. I grew frustrated about who I was and wanted to know what I was supposed to be doing with my life. In my twenty-sixth year, I went through an identity crisis, precipitated by God's grace. Lovingly but firmly He shook me out of my stupor.
First, I grew deeply troubled about my past and present sinfulness. Guilt is the nervous system of the soul. In the physical body, the nerves alert us to danger, galvanizing us toward self-preservation. Guilt is a spiritual pain that alerts us to spititual dangers we're in; it's our conscience's way of prodding us to repent and amend our ways. Over the course of that year, my conscience prodded me ruthlessly. By now, I had abandoned the drudgery of my retail job (too much time away from Nancy and the kids) and was working in sales. I enjoyed my new work and was successful at it, but even that didn't muffle the anxiety and discontent that rang like a bell in the gathering dark night of my soul.
This pain of conscience commingled with frustration at knowing that I wasn't doing with my life what God had planned for me to do. I'm not referring here to marriage and family; I knew with certainty that this was His plan for me. But I thought my job was a dead-end; I sensed that there was something particular I should be doing, and I wasn't doing it. No matter how I tried to discern what it was, I came up empty. I felt like an explorer without a map or a compass. I had no des- tination. Alii knew was where I didn't want to go. I felt like a bystander to my own life.
My emptiness, spiritually and emotionally, couldn't be filled with various and sometimes sinful fixes I tried. Nancy and I, although still very much in love, were also suffering the effects of my year of discontent. Our marriage was under stress, I was unhappy, she was unhappy, and neither of us really knew why.
I find Christ in the tabernacle
One day - for the one and only time in our marriage - we actually spoke the words: "I don't know if I want to be married to you." Tears and silence overcame us after that remark. We knew that divorce was not an option. As unhappy as we were, we knew we loved each other and realized we wanted to be together. That was the grace of marriage coming to our rescue. We never again felt the cutting despair and loneliness that raked us that dark afternoon. By God's grace, our marriage was going through - and surviving - "the worse" of "for better or for worse," the often-forgotten words of our marriage vows.
I was like a sailor trapped in a sunken ship. I had my head above water in a small pocket of air, only enough to breathe for a short while before I drowned. And so I did the one thing I knew was my only hope: I went in search of Christ to ask Him to rescue me from the danger I found myself in.
I found Him where I knew He would be waiting for me - where He had always been waiting for me - in the tabernacle. I was working as an account executive for a firm whose offices weren't far from a beautiful Catholic church. For about a month, I spent my lunch hour in that church on my knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Day after day, I skipped lunch as a minor act of mortification, asking God to purify me. As noontime hunger gnawed at my belly, I knelt down, closed my eyes, and surveyed my life, grateful to the Lord for giving me Nancy and my children, but also shuddering at other things I saw.
For the first time, I saw my life in perspective: the time I had wasted, the frivolity, the furtive sins, the laziness, vanity, and even the smug intellectual certitude I had felt for so long as a Catholic. My years of compromise and complacency accused me. Christ's words resonated in my soul: "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you?"
A fountain of anguish burst forth inside me, and I wept. I was overwhelmed with contrition and a desire to be close to Christ in a way I never had before. I felt clawing pangs of sorrow for sin and a hunger for virtue and renewal, as I'm sure St. Mary Magdalene felt as she wept over Christ's feet and anointed them with oil.
I spent a holy hour with Christ in the Eucharist each day, prayerfully listening and asking - begging - Him to show me what He wanted me to do with my life. Even though I could discern no answer to that question, I sensed that I had finally begun my climb out of the darkness. The ascent wasn't smooth, though, and I saw that my journey homeward with Christ would be extensive and arduous.
During one of those holy hours, I ran across a phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas in a book someone had left in the church: "Inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin." I recognized the truth of that teaching and began asking Christ as part of my petitions to help me overcome and uproot the self-love that, like a weed, had choked my interior life and nearly suffocated me. I saw how I had for so long conspired against myself, allow, ing temptation to take root and flourish, bringing forth its in, evitable dark fruit of sin - a harvest of my own planting.
Praying the Rosary, slowly and with concentration, was a huge benefit to my progress. I asked Mary to pray for me and with me that I would become the person her Son wanted me to lbe. Her words of guidance and encouragement from the Gospel wafted gently through my soul: "Do whatever He tells you."
Lord, answer me!
After a month of holy hours before the Blessed Sacrament, imploring Christ to tell me what to do, I still had not heard an answer. On one hand, I had emerged from the crucible of self, reproach and repentance. I was strengthened and determined to avoid sin and cultivate virtue and a serious interior life. On the other hand, God still hadn't shown me what to do with my life. I felt a sense of healing and inner peace, and Christ's loving admonishment stilled my fears: "Take courage, it is I. Do not be afraid."153 In response, I called to the Lord from my storm-tossed fishing boat: "Lord, if it is y ou, command me to come to You on the water."And He said, "Come." The problem was that I didn't know how.
So I decided to force the issue. I quit my job that Friday so I could find the new career to which God was calling me, regardless of where it might be. Nancy was extremely loving and supportive during this month-long process, and I had shared with her the general outline and even many details of the struggle through which I had come. Our marriage was happy and peaceful again. Nancy encouraged me to do what I thought best and prayed for me to see and follow God's will for my job. I had a little money saved up, so I figured I'd have a few weeks to sort out what my next step would be.
God didn't wait that long.
God makes me an offer I can't refuse - but I do
That weekend I talked with my friend Karl Keating, a Catholic layman and attorney in San Diego. He and I shared a deep interest in apologetics (defending the Faith), and he had recently started a modest part-time apologetics apostolate called "Catholic Answers." Karl and I had become phone friends and talked frequently about our mutual interest in apologetics. That conversation with Karl changed my life forever.
After sharing with him a little about my recent spiritual renewal, I got to the punch line: "I quit my job on Friday, and I'm trying to determine what my next move should be. Would you keep this intention of mine in your prayers as I figure out what to do?"
Karl's response was immediate. "Sure, I'll pray for you, but I can do something even better. I'm getting ready to close up my law practice and open an office to do apologetics work full-time. Why don't you come work with me at Catholic Answers? We'll build it into something big."
It never entered my mind that apologetics could be a career; I hadn't devoted even a moment to contemplating that as an option, so even as Karl brought it up, I declined. "Thanks, Karl, but I don't think this is what God wants from me. I appreciate the offer, but whatever God wants me to do, it's not apologetics."
But God's grace can penetrate even my thick skull. Karl persisted in his invitation, and twenty minutes later, I had promised to give it a try.
That was in early 1988. Several months later it struck me that apologetics work was exactly what God had called me to do. It was the answer to my prayer. I laughed when I thought of the saying: "There is none so blind as he who will not see." I thank and praise God for the privilege of being able to work in the apostolate of apologetics and evangelization. I see it as a way that I can make at least partial restitution for the wasted time and bad decisions of my youth.
His grace abounds! Praise Him!
How poetic are God's ways. Here I am now, years later, again in front of the Blessed Sacrament reliving the details of my experience. It was here that my story began, and it's appropriate that it should end here. In the light of grace that radiates from the tabernacle, we see many things about ourselves that would otherwise remain obscured.
As I look back on my reconversion to Christ and the way in which it came about, I am struck by how ordinary the circumstances were. There was no dramatic, "bolt of lightning" moment of conversion, no voice from Heaven. I didn't have to forsake family or friends to recommit my life to Christ.
The gradual way I supped into my spmtuallaziness was all so ordinary. In fact, I think it's a common problem with Catholics who live a life of outward allegiance to Christ, but inwardly find themselves empty and arid. Perhaps you see yourself reflected in my story.
Conversion of the heart is a long, difficult process - not a quick fix. We remain vulnerable to sin and prone to the tendencies and weaknesses we suffered from before. The difference is that we recognize these things for what they are and the road to Heaven.
As He called me out of spiritual lethargy, so Christ is calling you now. Before you turn the page and move on to the next story, close your eyes and spend a moment meditating upon these words of Christ. Let them flood your soul with peace and draw you close to his Sacred Heart: "Come to me, all you who are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest."
Patrick Madrid
I'm writing this in front of the Blessed Sacrament, in the quiet solitude of a monastery chapel near my home. Being alone here with the Lord helps me gather my thoughts as I search for the right way to recount my story.
St. Peter's words echo in my mind: "Lord, it is good for us to be here." Christ had led him and James and John to the lonely heights of Mount Tabor one day and there revealed things to them that evoked Peter's exclamation, startling things, previously hidden.
"Lord, it is good for me to be here with you in the Eucharist," is the refrain that resonates within me as I write. For in this setting, before the tabernacle, Christ has shown me many things about myself that I needed to see and repair. His hammer and chisel of grace delivered their most effective blows to my heart during those times when I knelt in front of Him, head bowed, in the silence of another Catholic church, years ago and far from here.
I'm not a convert in the standard sense of the term. I was born into a Catholic family, raised in the Faith by devout and loving parents, and have remained in the Church, believing all her teachings with all my heart. ("So what is your story doing in a book like this?" you ask yourself.) I'm not a convert to the Catholic Church, but I am the unworthy recipient of the grace of a conversion of the heart, a recommitment to Christ at a time when I thought I knew what it means to be Catholic. How wrong I was.
In my mid 20s, I went through a kind of creeping spiritual crisis that led me into a reconversion that was neither sudden nor dramatic, although it shook me powerfully and reached the deepest recesses of my heart.
Like a painful, prolonged medical treatment that's necessary to save a patient's life, my reconversion entailed pain and uncertainty, but the result, thank God, was a cure - not an instant one, forever banishing the symptoms of the disease we call "sin," but a cure nonetheless. As St. Paul explained, "Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death." This malaria of sin, contracted in the Garden of Eden through the bite of an apple, courses through our veins with all its deadly effects. Only God's grace can combat and overcome it. His love is the sole antidote.
At the height of my conversion of heart, I discovered, or more specifically, the Lord showed me, that through years of infrequent and minimal use, I had allowed the "muscles" of my interior life - prayer, mortification, and recollection - to atrophy and wither. My spiritual "arteries" - which carry the love of Christ as the lifeblood of the soul - had hardened and Iconstricted as a result of the lukewarm, halfhearted complacency into which I had settled.
I think my situation wasn't unlike that of many Catholics. We who are born into the Faith easily take it for granted, and we make the fatal mistake of assuming that conversion is for Protestants or Mormons or atheists who, being outside the Church, make their way into it. Many Catholics - I being a good example - lull themselves into a state of comfortable, "do not disturb" spiritual incapacitation. They make no real or consistent effort to grasp Christ with all their might and to work daily at keeping and strengthening that grasp, as His grace enables.
Simply being Catholic isn't enough. What is required by Christ is love, and true love means effort, work, and time spent in prayer - things that so often fall by the wayside in the daily lives of many Catholics. We call him Lord in our prayers, but so often we don't live our lives as if He really is. Membership in the Church, even a strong conviction about things Catholic, is in itself no guarantee of a real friendship with Christ.
That's the condition in which I found myself. I lived a life of Catholicism that comprised good and important but largely external things such as regular Sunday Mass attendance, grace before meals, and praying the Rosary occasionally. These weren't enough. I lacked a deep interior commitment to Christ, to living virtuously and to deepening my prayer life. My parents had taught me the Faith and how to live it, but these lessons were surprisingly easy to forget, at least for a time, once the powerful distractions, temptations, and concupiscence of young adulthood crowded them into the background.
But our Lord is kind and faithful. "If we are unfaithful, He will remain faithful, for He cannot deny Himself." He seeks out, not just the lost sheep that has wandered far from the flock, but also the one that remains within the flock but gradually grows dull and lazy and becomes deaf to the sound of the Shepherd's voice. I was once like that second sheep, and this is the story ofhow the Good Shepherd rescued me from my spiritual stupor and gathered me to Himself.
California dreamin' ...of Christian martyrdom
I was born in 1960 into a devout Catholic family. My parents were loving and wise in the way they raised us children, especially in the way they taught us about Christ and imparted to us the truths of the Catholic Faith. I grew up and lived most of my life in Southern California. In 1970 our family moved to Mission Viejo, a sparkling new, "master planned" bedroom community in Orange County, about forty-five miles south of Los Angeles. It was a great place to grow up, each tract of newly built homes filling quickly with an influx of young families. In our neighborhood, one thing became noticeable: ours was by far the biggest family.
One important lesson I learned from my parents' example was the importance of generosity with God and openness to life. As the oldest of eight children, I lived in a world where it was natural for parents to spend themselves totally in their love and devotion to their family. Only later, as I began to encounter secular culture, in high school, college, and beyond, did I see how deliciously radical and countercultural my parents were in having a large family in the 1970s. But I certainly didn't realize that while I was growing up. As far as I could see, my parents never saw themselves in that light. They never put on the "We're the parents of a large family and you're not" sort of airs one sometimes encounters in others. Nor can I recall my mom and dad ever rolling their eyes or looking askance at another family with the maximum one or two children that modern society tells people to have. At that time, the only Iarge families people generally saw were on television: the Brady Bunch, which had six (although the plot line for their Iarge family was a consequence of remarriage), and the Bradford family on Eight Is Enough. Even the title of that show betrayed the media and cultural disapproval of large families.
We weren't poor, but we certainly weren't what people would call middle-class comfortable. Although my parents' monthly budget was pretty tight most of the time, my mom chose to pursue her vocation as a homemaker; and for that I thank God. My dad went to work to pay the bills, and my mom stayed home to cook, clean, change diapers, do laundry, and chauffeur the kids around town on an endless series of treks to school, Little League games, and dance practices. (Someday, I'll film a documentary tribute to her career behind the wheel of our family station wagon. I'll call it "Taxi Driver.") She made our home comfortable and beautiful, settled disputes, spanked us when we needed it, and otherwise rode herd on her thundering pack of kids.
My dad, a brilliant, under-appreciated, overworked computer engineer, daily endured the mind-crushing drudgery of a Southern California commute from our home in the 'burbs of Orange County to his workplace in Los Angeles and back.
The Madrid family sprawl was a great environment in rich to grow up Catholic. It was loud, loving, rambunctious, and devout without ever being kooky or weirdly pious - generally a pretty happy place.
I wasn't by any stretch bad, but, like most kids, I was accomplished and diligent in the arts of boyhood mischief, chore-shirking, impertinence, and random acts of slacking and disobedience. I received plenty of spankings, groundings, and "How many times do I have to tell you to clean up your room?" lectures. I loved playing sports, swimming, and rough-housing with my neighborhood pals, but I was also a bookworm and spent a lot of time engrossed in adventure tales, lives of the saints, and war stories. I remember countless hours ensconced in my room, mesmerized by some book or another, imagining myself as a brave, "laugh in the face of the pagan emperor" early Christian martyr, or as an explorer, or as Teddy Roosevelt, waving his men forward with saber in one hand, a colt revolver in the other, charging up San Juan Hill into a hail of Spanish bullets and artillery Then my mom would call me downstairs to take out the trash. (Sometimes, being grounded wasn't so painful - although I never told my parents that - because being banished to my room for the day meant along stretch of uninterrupted reading. )
From Kumbaya to Kyrie
Another important element of my Catholic upbringing was being an altar boy. For several years, I actually dwelt in two different liturgical worlds, serving at the ancient Tridentine rite on weekdays at my school and at a freewheeling Novus Ordo guitar Mass on Sundays in my parish. That strange, although providential, circumstance gave me valuable insights into what the Catholic Church is as ail entity, established and safeguarded by Christ regardless of its outward circumstances and the frailties of its members.
The latter part of my grammar school career was spent at the Mission San Juan Capistrano parochial school. The parish church adjacent to the school is one of the many California missions established by Bl. Junipero Serra, the Spanish Franciscan who planted the seeds of Christianity throughout California, shortly after the Spaniards arrived in Mexico. Built in 1776, this church was the oldest thing I had ever seen, and its hoary beauty impressed me. The chapel still has its original high, whitewashed adobe walls, timber and tile roof, stone floor, and ancient wooden pews. In fact, of all the twenty- one California missions, San Juan Capistrano has the only intact chapel where BI. Junipero Serra had celebrated Mass. And it was there, at the early daily Mass, that I served as an altar boy.
The elderly pastor of the parish had received a special indult from Pope Paul VI to continue the celebration of the sacraments there in Latin, according to the pre-1963 Tridentine rite. So while I was an altar boy at Sunday Mass at the parish near our home { where the Novus Ordo Mass was celebrated exclusively), on 'weekday mornings, when I served the Latin Mass, I could step back in time for half an hour, away from the din of the Southern California kaleidoscope of traffic jams, fast-food restaurants, and shopping malls. Inside the dim, incense-Iaden sanctuary of the Old Mission chapel, I felt profoundly connected with the ancient, timeless Catholic Church. Now I can understand and articulate a fundamental truth that, even as a boy, I sensed clearly: the Catholic Church, like Christ, her Spouse {and because ofHim), is the same yesterday, today, and forever.145 She has sojourned on His behalf for more than twenty centuries on this earth, has seen every epoch's unique set of problems and challenges come and go, and she is still here.
Years later, writing about the Liturgy for a Catholic journal, I recalled that remarkable experience fondly: "1 have vivid memories of serving Holy Mass in that elaborate sanctuary, cloudy with incense, where Bl. Junipero Serra had celebrated Mass two centuries earlier: on my knees, reciting the acolyte's responses in Latin, watching the priest's every motion. So many realities of the Faith were communicated to my young soul by the elements of that Traditional Latin Mass."
Herein arose a strange dichotomy. During the week, I was an acolyte at the Traditional Mass. On Sundays, I was an acolyte {although they never used that word there) at our local parish. The pastor was a good man and by all appearances personally orthodox, but he wasn't forceful in the way he ran the parish. His "hang on loosely" approach to dealing with the various lay ministries and the srrong egos of some of the parishioners meant that the parish was liturgically liberal- not kooky liberal, but it had a general atmosphere of "almost anything goes." This included relatively new practices such as hand-holding during the Our Father, out-of-tune folk guitarists twanging through sappy songs being written in those days, a stark interior with no statues or votive candles, and a bizarre orange-and-silver-foil wallpaper that formed a space-age, floor-to-ceiling backdrop behind the altar {it drove my dad crazy).
Mass at the Old Mission was, in its externals; the polar opposite: majestic and mysterious. The incense and Gregorian chany the Latin prayers, the imposing, intricately carved, gold-Ieaf reredos that towered above the altar, the flurry of bells rung at the moment of Consecration -all of these stamped on my young imagination a powerful imprint of the Mass's mystical, transcendent beauty. (Now I see clearly and appreciate that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, whether celebrated according to the New Order promulgated by Vatican II, or according to the ancient Byzantine form of the Divine Liturgy, or according to the ancient Latin Tridentine rite codified by Pope Pius V, is still the same Holy Sacrifice.)
A faith built on imagination
As odd as it might sound, it's here, I believe, that the beginnings of my gradual decline into lukewarmness began. My imagination was being fed with all the richness and glory of the Faith and its history. I avidly read the lives of the saints - particularly those martyrs who died for the Faith by being burned alive or speared or beheaded. The more gore, the better. It was so easy to imagine the Catholic Church and its romantic, fiercely beautiful, two-thousand~year panoply of saints, sinners, and martyrs. On that rich diet, my ravenous imagination was very well fed- and that in itself isn't bad -but whether it was due to some character flaw of mine, or a general spiritual and intellectual laziness (which is a character flaw, I suppose), I allowed my Catholic Faith to subsist almost entirely at the level of imagination. That, I think, was a significant cause of my later bout with lukewarmness.
As Scripture tells us, God created humans "in His own image." This means each of us was fashioned as a person, just as He is a person. As such, God created our human nature to have an intellect and a will, the two rational faculties by which we know and love. The intellect is the apparatus of reason with which a human person perceives, measures, and makes decisions about himself and the world around him. The will is the component of the person that assents to and carries out one's decisions and actions based on what his intellect tells him.
Now, since God also created us to be material and spiritual beings (i.e., body and soul), we must contend with the input that our physical senses give to our minds. This is where the imagination comes into play. The imagination isn't the entire intellect, but merely a component of it. The imagination is what provides the mind with "pictures," images of our experiences that come through the senses. And our imaginations are powerful and often vivid in the images - both good and evil - they present to our mind.
This is why many people gradually lose interest in using their intellects to penetrate deeper into the spiritual and moral (and even scientific) truths of the world around them. Like a muscle, the intellect must be exercised regularly or it will become lazy, flabby, and unable to heft the weight of the many moral dilemmas and choices we face in life. When the intellect is weak and ineffectual as a result of laziness, the imagination sets itself up as dictator. It feeds the mind on a steady diet of mental junk food. Those images and impressions it generates soon become mistaken for acts of the intellect. At that stage, a person finds himself reduced to the shabby condition of living in a world constructed predominantly (and governed ruthlessly) by his imagination. It becomes an ever, present ringmaster at the center of a circus of swirling images, smells, sounds, and feelings with which the five senses constantly bombard the mind. Such a person becomes hostage to his own emotions and appetites. Left unchecked, his imagination works solo while his intellect stays quiet and sluggish in the background. This gradual abdication of the intellect will inevitably cause the Christian to drift into indifference to the spiritual struggle raging around him, or worse, he may lay down his anus entirely and give up the fight.
In my case, the drift started when I was a high school senior.
Minor seminary days
When I was in eighth grade, I thought that God might be calling me to the priesthood. It wasn't an overwhelming call, but I sensed that the thing to do was to "come and see," as Christ told the Apostles when He first called them to follow Him.147 Through the generosity of the kindhearted pastor of our parish, who agreed to pay for my tuition, I was given the privilege of spending nearly three years in Our Lady Queen of Angels diocesan minor seminary in San Fernando, California. It was a good if uneventful time for me; I enjoyed my studies, developed an appreciation for a more regimented prayer and liturgical life, and formed some friendships that have lasted even to today. Eventually I saw that God wasn't calling me to the priesthood. So, near the end of my junior year, I left the seminary and enrolled at the local public high school. It was like being dropped into a very large aquarium filled with hoards of exotic and sometimes beautiful fish, as well as some dangerous predators.
Small-time rocker, part-time Catholic
I quickly slipped into the groove of dating, going to parties, hanging out at the beach, and many of the other pastimes teens pursued in sunny Southern California. My upscale high school had about three thousand students and was awash in drugs, alcohol, sex, recklessness, and materialism. There were many good students and teachers, but many students lived lives of excess and pleasure-seeking. They came from affluent homes, and Mommy and Daddy had the bucks to buy them stylish clothes, a new car on their sixteenth birthday, and pretty much anything else they wanted. I found myself swimming in the pleasant, warm waters of this aquarium of hedonism.
When I got into public high school, I didn't go berserk with my new relative freedom. I didn't dye my hair purple or pierce any body parts (that silliness among teenagers was still several years away). There were no shouting matches with my parents, or sneaking out of the house at night, or any of those things. My slide into complacency was furtive and unobtrusive; even I wasn't fully aware of just how slippery the slope had become.
I grew lazy in prayer and no longer made an effort to cultivate virtue, but compared with many of my peers, I was still a "good kid," and I didn't get mixed up with a lot of the craziness around me.
I never took drugs of any kind -not even once. I'm grateful to God for protecting me from that snare. Large amounts of marijuana, cocaine, various mind-bending pills, acid, and even hardcore injectables such as heroin were used all around me by many young people.
In 1979, I heard from a friend that a drummer I had played a few gigs with and whom I had known from school - a guy my own age and an excellent musician - had died of a heroin overdose the month before. He was eighteen.
I can't take much credit for avoiding drugs; God protected me from that scourge. I have a vivid memory of being at a party one night and being offered a joint by a cute girl. "No thanks," I muttered sheepishly, glancing at the mari, juana cigarette she held out to me. I looked down in embar, rassment. I knew she was surprised and was thinking, "What a geek." She wrote me off with a roll of her eyes and walked away. I can see now that that was a moment of grace - one of many unrecognized moments of grace - and it taught me that although my willingness to avoid sin had been weakened through compromise, it hadn't been destroyed.
I didn't follow the crowd in its pot, addled, binge, drinking quest for new chemically induced highs, but I'm sorry to say that I hung out with many who did. Not everyone was a bleary-eyed pothead, but many of the young people I knew were. Some graduated from "weed" to the harder stuff: acid, hash, and cocaine were common fare at parties.
Easy access to the party scene and all the temptations that entailed came as a result of my growing involvement with rock 'n' roll. If anything was a passion for me, it was playing music. I had a solid background in music, having studied violin for a short time and played the trumpet in the school orchestra for several years. When I was fifteen, I taught myself to play the bass guitar and quickly discovered I was good at it.
I spent countless hours in my bedroom with my bass guitar, practicing and learning how to play the songs on the radio and on my albums. Chicago, the Cars, Boston, the Stones, Kansas, Fleetwood Mac, The Police, America, and especially the Beatles were among the rock groups whose music I loved and learned, note by note. By the time I was seventeen, I was playing with several pretty decent garage bands in Southern California. One particularly successful band I played bass for was Geneva Brown. We never did make it to the "medium time" {much less the big time), but we developed a local following and played at parties, weddings, and clubs. Besides playing songs by Top-40 groups, we wrote and performed a lot of our own music, mostly bouncy pop tunes, which even today I can honestly say were pretty good.
For me and many others, this interlude as a wannabe rock star contributed to the growth of narcissism, superficiality, and vanity. It engendered a vivid fantasy world that catered to my ego and my appetites. Not virtue or strength of character, but seeing myself as a "popular, talented, successful" musician was the measure of success. My desire for success as a rock star wasn't balanced with a strong spiritual life and good spiritual direction, so it fed and empowered my imagination, at the expense of my intellect.
In 1979, Geneva Brown won first place in a widely publicized, well-attended "Battle of the Bands" competition, beating twenty other local bands. I'll never forget the adrenal in rush I felt when we walked onto the stage in front of a couple of thousand screaming teens and young adults and knocked them dead with our first number, Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London." A few songs later, we finished our set, unplugged our guitars, and sauntered offstage to the roar of boisterous applause.
We thought for sure we were headed for big things in music. But when you're nineteen and stupid, as I was, what do you know? We collected our trophy, posed for some cheesy publicity pictures, and piled into our cars and went home to celebrate. Back at the house we shared, there was a big party that lasted into the early morning.
When I woke up, the shadow across the room showed it was nearly noon. I had a throbbing headache - too much beer- and my head felt as if it were the size of a filing cabinet. My mouth was dry. There seemed to be small mittens on my teeth. I trudged into the bathroom, looked into the mirror at my bloodshot eyes, threw up, and went back to bed.
Small-time rock 'n' roll was doing nothing to enhance my spiritual life.
During this time, I remained Catholic, but all around me were drugs, girls, alcohol, and the band's ubiquitous hangers- on. It was inevitable that these negative influences would harm me. I dated different girls, although I was never a predator with only one goal in mind. With dating came many of the dangers inherent in being alone with a pretty girl. It was fun, I thought, and I found it easy to push aside the lessons I had learned about chastity and moderation. While I didn't get drawn into the worst excesses that were common among many young people at the time, I look back with remorse (and with gratitude for (God's mercy) on the sins I committed during my "young and stupid" period.
I now find it odd that, even amid my spiritual laziness, the music, and the party~scene craziness, I still went to Mass every Sunday, prayed before meals, and went to Confession every few months. I also enjoyed defending Catholicism against the criticisms of non~Catholics - and was even good at it.
Protestants force me to think about the Faith
The truth is, I had been doing this for years. For example, the summer before my senior of high school, I was going out with a beautiful girl named Christi. She was a sweet, lively person, and her parents took a strong interest in me. Christi and her family were what I call "hardcore" Baptists. They talked a lot about the Bible and seemed to have an appropriate Bible verse to quote at any moment and in any situation. Christi's parents knew I came from a strong Catholic background, of course, and I think these two good, sincere people saw me as a challenge - especially since I was dating their daughter - and they went to work on me with vigor. Since Christi and I spent a lot of time at her house, listening to music and swimming in her pool, her parents had plenty of time to work oil their "Pat Madrid" project. They often sat with us, a well-worn King James Bible open on her dad's knee, and posed friendly but pointed questions to me about my Catholic Faith.
"The Bible says in Exodus 20:4 that God condemns the use of statues and other graven images," her mom would say with a smile. " As a Catholic, Patrick, and since the Catholic Church promotes praying to statues, doesn't that bother you?"
Of course I knew we Catholics don't worship or pray to statues, so I knew enough to reject that part of her argument, but what I lacked was a solid knowledge of Scripture that would have enabled me to point out passages such as Exodus 25:18-20, Numbers 21:8-9, and 1 Kings 6:23-28, where God approves of and even commands the carving of religious statues. I would have been able to show Christi's well-meaning mom that what God condemned in Exodus 20 was not graven images per se, but idolatry - the worship of graven images. Idolatry under any guise is a sin, and the Catholic Church has always strenuously condemned it. If I had had this family's level of biblical knowledge, I could have stood my ground better.
Over several weeks, Christi's parents and their circle of Evangelical Protestant friends presented me with a variety of biblical challenges to my Faith: "Mary worship," the Catholic Church's alleged "false gospel of salvation by works," the heresy of infant Baptism, the Pope and his outrageous claims of being infallible, the magic of the sacraments, especially the issue of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist - these and other arguments against the Catholic Faith were thrown (smilingly, of course) in my face.
Such arguments were often accompanied by a venomous anti-Catholic "Chick Tract" dredged up from a seemingly limitless supply that came from a hidden stash somewhere in their house. I read these garish anti-Catholic comic books carefully. Time after time, I could see that they offered slick but bogus arguments against the Catholic Church. It was so obvious that the wild, angry charges these tracts made against Catholicism weren't true -and I was able to check Scripture to see this for myself. I soon began to refuse the anti-Catholic literature that Christi's parents proffered. Once, I even had the gumption to invite them to come to Mass with us, so they could see what the Catholic Church taught and that it resembled nothing like the caricatures in the tracts they gave me.
I recall one particularly tense conversation about the Eucharist with Christi's parents. Her dad said, "Hang on a minute" and went into the house. He came back with a Chick Tract called "The Death Cookie," which he handed to me with great seriousness, asking me to read it prayerfully. I was asked repeatedly if I had "been saved." As a Catholic, they regarded me as a "lost soul," an "unsaved" person who still needed to "find Christ" (even though they let me see their daughter, for which I give them credit).
It's ironic that in one sense, their view of me was actually not far from the truth. My intellectual certitude, even as a teen, was insufficient to save me. I needed a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ," and I'm grateful that these encounters helped me see how important that is. Of course, Catholics don't typically speak in this way, but semantics aside, I was beginning to learn a deep truth.
There were times when I'd think to myself in frustration, "I just want to spend time with Christi! I don't want to be put on trial about the Bible." Looking back on those months of being grilled regularly by these good but deeply anti-Catholic people, I realize how beneficial this experience was for me. It forced me to defend my Catholic convictions, to move beyond my imagination and use my intellect to grapple with these challenges and the truths I claimed to believe in, and to determine for myself why I believed what I believed as a Catholic. I thank Christi's parents for conducting this project on me, because even though Christi and I soon drifted apart, they helped propel me into a more mature, more introspective level of Faith. Little did I ( or they) realize then how they were preparing me for my later work as a Catholic apologist.
My so-called spiritual life
Even though my theological jousting with Christi's parents and other aggressive Evangelicals forced me to think more deeply about why I believed what I did, I was still being moved along by the current of those things that appealed to me in life. Without even realizing it, by the time I was nineteen and in college, I had slipped almost entirely into relying mainly on imagination, fed by my senses. Parties, beer, music, and cute available girls had become the fixtures of my life.
True, I went to Mass every Sunday; I believed in and loved the Catholic Church; I said my prayers, but sporadically and without much fervor. (I did experience fleeting moments of fervor that I now believe were moments of God's prevenient grace, like the tugboats that nudge an ocean liner in the direction it should move while it's building its own head of steam.)
I knew enough to get to Confession when my sinful actions thrust me out of the state of grace, but my spiritual life had be, come little more than a sentimental fondness for the image of Catholicism I had created. It didn't dawn on me that I was empty. Outwardly, intellectually, even emotionally, I was a Catholic. But in that hidden place where the soul and God are alone with each other, I was mushy and superficial.
I spent far more time with Paul McCartney, learning to play the bass guitar exactly as he did, than I did in prayer with Jesus Christ. I cared much more about dating and having fun than I did about cultivating virtue. Although I was never tempted to leave the Catholic Church, I had drifted into the comfortable cult of Myself.
My assent to Catholic teaching and practice was still simply an edifice of faith, not Faith itself. Just as a mansion may appear solid and well built from the outside, but on the inside may well be cold, dreary, and empty of the furnishings that would transform it from a hulk of wood and plaster into a home where people live, so it was with me: the externals were there, but there was little inside. Still, the edifice was sturdily built and, in spite of my drift, the Lord continued to protect me and even bless me with new and amazing graces. Foremost among these was the grace of discovering my future wife.
...Then comes marriage
She was sixteen and I was seventeen when I met her. Slim, lovely, and always smiling, Nancy was one of those vivid young women people instinctively like and want to be around. For a year and a half, we were just friends, and we dated other people. We often saw each other casually, and I sometimes even played bass for the parish choir she sang in. When the relationship with my girlfriend fizzled, I got my nerve up to ask Nancy on a date.
The next year was a blur of happy times spent with Nancy: long walks on the beach, bike rides, holding hands and talking for hours, playing Frisbee, laughing, quiet moments gazing at the stars on warm summer nights. She was fantastic and wonderful, alive in a deeper and more attractive way than any girl I had ever known. She was Catholic and beautiful, and I loved being with her. Best of all, Nancy never allowed herself to get caught up in any of the typical teenage vices, and that was immensely attractive to me. I was drawn by her radiant goodness as much as her beauty and sweet personality. She amazed me with a wisdom and depth of vitality that was beyond anything I had to offer her. She loved with chaste yet stirring intensity. Her love was a current of goodness that was wide, deep, and unstoppable, the way a mountain stream surges onward to find its waterfall. I came to realize that I loved her.
Even though they knew I wasn't a "high confidence" candidate for her affection, Nancy's family was very patient with me. They were worried by my frivolity and aimlessness, but guided Nancy as she and I grew closer.
My parents and family all loved Nancy, and I can remember one particular conversation with my dad: He put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, "Pat, you have no idea what a wonderful girl you've found in Nancy. If you let her get away from you, it will be the worst thing ever to happen to you. If you don't grow up and turn away from the music scene, you'll lose her." His words cut me; I knew he was right. His remark was one of the milestones in my journey back to a serious practice of my Faith.
But I still had a long way to go.
After a year's courtship, we got engaged in July of 1980. I had no idea how dramatically this young woman was about to change my life for the better.
We were married on February 7, 1981. She was nineteen; I was twenty. Young, yes, but we knew that marriage was what we wanted. Our parents supported us in our decision, and we saw no reason for waiting. After an idyllic if simple honeymoon driving up the coast of California, we came home and started the process of setting up house and adjusting to married life. We were very happy. I worked as a clerk at a nearby bank, and Nancy taught at a local preschool. In the evenings, we'd talk about our dreams for the future, especially the dream of starting a family. God was already beginning to draw me home. Getting married and assuming the responsibilities of husband and father signaled the death of my rock 'n' roll days. The band wanted to keep playing and start recording, but I let them know I needed to be home with Nancy, not on stage.
And so I left the band.
As if they had been written for and about me personally, I found myself learning firsthand the meaning of St. Paul's words: "When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things." I was slowly, but not entirely, putting away my childish thinking and ways. The next several years were the stage on which the drama of my reconversion unfolded fully.
The crisis was drawing near.
Nancy and I had no specific plans for starting a family, but decided to see what would happen. It happened quickly. I got laid off by the bank a few weeks after we got married and then was quickly hired in the retail field. I had just started a new job as a store manager and was unloading boxes one afternoon when Nancy showed up unexpectedly.
"I just came ftom the doctor," she said, her eyes wide and brimming with tears of happiness.
"You mean. .." I stammered, slackjawed with the impact of her unspoken news.
She hugged me. "Yes, we're going to have a baby."
Phase Two of God's "Patrick Madrid reconstruction project" was underway. Becoming a husband was a big step toward maturity, but becoming a father was even more dramatic. Our first son, Jonathon, was born on Thanksgiving of 1981. By 1985, we had bought our first home and had two more children, Bridget in 1983 and Timothy in 1985. We had a happy, fun-filled marriage, and I marveled now and then at how dramatically different my life had become. I was, happily, being forced to grow up and get away from my earlier selfish ways as I did my best to shoulder the load of being a father and husband.
A soul divided cannot stand
In time, the effects of my years of immoderation and lukewarmness began to catch up with me. I can't recall when the feeling started, but I eventually became aware of a growing sense of discontent and restlessness. Even though I was now married with kids, a mortgage, and car payments, I hadn't shed many of the lax, pleasure-seeking attitudes I had cultivated earlier. These attitudes shaped aspects of our marriage, and iince we both had enough training in the Faith to know better, there were things in our marriage that Nancy and I mew didn't conform to what God wanted. I take the blame for being the one who led the way down wrong paths.
In many ways, I was still immature and superficial. My combination of doctrinal staunchness and moral laziness was very much at work in my life. Even as I found time to develop skills as an apologist (relishing opportunities to debate religion with Protestant and other non-Catholic friends), I did other things I knew I shouldn't have. I knew what was right, but still did what was wrong. St. Paul's words were reflected in me: "1 do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."
I was empty inside, a vacuum of selfishness where my interior life with Christ should have been. I grew frustrated about who I was and wanted to know what I was supposed to be doing with my life. In my twenty-sixth year, I went through an identity crisis, precipitated by God's grace. Lovingly but firmly He shook me out of my stupor.
First, I grew deeply troubled about my past and present sinfulness. Guilt is the nervous system of the soul. In the physical body, the nerves alert us to danger, galvanizing us toward self-preservation. Guilt is a spiritual pain that alerts us to spititual dangers we're in; it's our conscience's way of prodding us to repent and amend our ways. Over the course of that year, my conscience prodded me ruthlessly. By now, I had abandoned the drudgery of my retail job (too much time away from Nancy and the kids) and was working in sales. I enjoyed my new work and was successful at it, but even that didn't muffle the anxiety and discontent that rang like a bell in the gathering dark night of my soul.
This pain of conscience commingled with frustration at knowing that I wasn't doing with my life what God had planned for me to do. I'm not referring here to marriage and family; I knew with certainty that this was His plan for me. But I thought my job was a dead-end; I sensed that there was something particular I should be doing, and I wasn't doing it. No matter how I tried to discern what it was, I came up empty. I felt like an explorer without a map or a compass. I had no des- tination. Alii knew was where I didn't want to go. I felt like a bystander to my own life.
My emptiness, spiritually and emotionally, couldn't be filled with various and sometimes sinful fixes I tried. Nancy and I, although still very much in love, were also suffering the effects of my year of discontent. Our marriage was under stress, I was unhappy, she was unhappy, and neither of us really knew why.
I find Christ in the tabernacle
One day - for the one and only time in our marriage - we actually spoke the words: "I don't know if I want to be married to you." Tears and silence overcame us after that remark. We knew that divorce was not an option. As unhappy as we were, we knew we loved each other and realized we wanted to be together. That was the grace of marriage coming to our rescue. We never again felt the cutting despair and loneliness that raked us that dark afternoon. By God's grace, our marriage was going through - and surviving - "the worse" of "for better or for worse," the often-forgotten words of our marriage vows.
I was like a sailor trapped in a sunken ship. I had my head above water in a small pocket of air, only enough to breathe for a short while before I drowned. And so I did the one thing I knew was my only hope: I went in search of Christ to ask Him to rescue me from the danger I found myself in.
I found Him where I knew He would be waiting for me - where He had always been waiting for me - in the tabernacle. I was working as an account executive for a firm whose offices weren't far from a beautiful Catholic church. For about a month, I spent my lunch hour in that church on my knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Day after day, I skipped lunch as a minor act of mortification, asking God to purify me. As noontime hunger gnawed at my belly, I knelt down, closed my eyes, and surveyed my life, grateful to the Lord for giving me Nancy and my children, but also shuddering at other things I saw.
For the first time, I saw my life in perspective: the time I had wasted, the frivolity, the furtive sins, the laziness, vanity, and even the smug intellectual certitude I had felt for so long as a Catholic. My years of compromise and complacency accused me. Christ's words resonated in my soul: "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you?"
A fountain of anguish burst forth inside me, and I wept. I was overwhelmed with contrition and a desire to be close to Christ in a way I never had before. I felt clawing pangs of sorrow for sin and a hunger for virtue and renewal, as I'm sure St. Mary Magdalene felt as she wept over Christ's feet and anointed them with oil.
I spent a holy hour with Christ in the Eucharist each day, prayerfully listening and asking - begging - Him to show me what He wanted me to do with my life. Even though I could discern no answer to that question, I sensed that I had finally begun my climb out of the darkness. The ascent wasn't smooth, though, and I saw that my journey homeward with Christ would be extensive and arduous.
During one of those holy hours, I ran across a phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas in a book someone had left in the church: "Inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin." I recognized the truth of that teaching and began asking Christ as part of my petitions to help me overcome and uproot the self-love that, like a weed, had choked my interior life and nearly suffocated me. I saw how I had for so long conspired against myself, allow, ing temptation to take root and flourish, bringing forth its in, evitable dark fruit of sin - a harvest of my own planting.
Praying the Rosary, slowly and with concentration, was a huge benefit to my progress. I asked Mary to pray for me and with me that I would become the person her Son wanted me to lbe. Her words of guidance and encouragement from the Gospel wafted gently through my soul: "Do whatever He tells you."
Lord, answer me!
After a month of holy hours before the Blessed Sacrament, imploring Christ to tell me what to do, I still had not heard an answer. On one hand, I had emerged from the crucible of self, reproach and repentance. I was strengthened and determined to avoid sin and cultivate virtue and a serious interior life. On the other hand, God still hadn't shown me what to do with my life. I felt a sense of healing and inner peace, and Christ's loving admonishment stilled my fears: "Take courage, it is I. Do not be afraid."153 In response, I called to the Lord from my storm-tossed fishing boat: "Lord, if it is y ou, command me to come to You on the water."And He said, "Come." The problem was that I didn't know how.
So I decided to force the issue. I quit my job that Friday so I could find the new career to which God was calling me, regardless of where it might be. Nancy was extremely loving and supportive during this month-long process, and I had shared with her the general outline and even many details of the struggle through which I had come. Our marriage was happy and peaceful again. Nancy encouraged me to do what I thought best and prayed for me to see and follow God's will for my job. I had a little money saved up, so I figured I'd have a few weeks to sort out what my next step would be.
God didn't wait that long.
God makes me an offer I can't refuse - but I do
That weekend I talked with my friend Karl Keating, a Catholic layman and attorney in San Diego. He and I shared a deep interest in apologetics (defending the Faith), and he had recently started a modest part-time apologetics apostolate called "Catholic Answers." Karl and I had become phone friends and talked frequently about our mutual interest in apologetics. That conversation with Karl changed my life forever.
After sharing with him a little about my recent spiritual renewal, I got to the punch line: "I quit my job on Friday, and I'm trying to determine what my next move should be. Would you keep this intention of mine in your prayers as I figure out what to do?"
Karl's response was immediate. "Sure, I'll pray for you, but I can do something even better. I'm getting ready to close up my law practice and open an office to do apologetics work full-time. Why don't you come work with me at Catholic Answers? We'll build it into something big."
It never entered my mind that apologetics could be a career; I hadn't devoted even a moment to contemplating that as an option, so even as Karl brought it up, I declined. "Thanks, Karl, but I don't think this is what God wants from me. I appreciate the offer, but whatever God wants me to do, it's not apologetics."
But God's grace can penetrate even my thick skull. Karl persisted in his invitation, and twenty minutes later, I had promised to give it a try.
That was in early 1988. Several months later it struck me that apologetics work was exactly what God had called me to do. It was the answer to my prayer. I laughed when I thought of the saying: "There is none so blind as he who will not see." I thank and praise God for the privilege of being able to work in the apostolate of apologetics and evangelization. I see it as a way that I can make at least partial restitution for the wasted time and bad decisions of my youth.
His grace abounds! Praise Him!
How poetic are God's ways. Here I am now, years later, again in front of the Blessed Sacrament reliving the details of my experience. It was here that my story began, and it's appropriate that it should end here. In the light of grace that radiates from the tabernacle, we see many things about ourselves that would otherwise remain obscured.
As I look back on my reconversion to Christ and the way in which it came about, I am struck by how ordinary the circumstances were. There was no dramatic, "bolt of lightning" moment of conversion, no voice from Heaven. I didn't have to forsake family or friends to recommit my life to Christ.
The gradual way I supped into my spmtuallaziness was all so ordinary. In fact, I think it's a common problem with Catholics who live a life of outward allegiance to Christ, but inwardly find themselves empty and arid. Perhaps you see yourself reflected in my story.
Conversion of the heart is a long, difficult process - not a quick fix. We remain vulnerable to sin and prone to the tendencies and weaknesses we suffered from before. The difference is that we recognize these things for what they are and the road to Heaven.
As He called me out of spiritual lethargy, so Christ is calling you now. Before you turn the page and move on to the next story, close your eyes and spend a moment meditating upon these words of Christ. Let them flood your soul with peace and draw you close to his Sacred Heart: "Come to me, all you who are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest."
Excerpted from Surprised by Truth 2 edited by Patrick Madrid
Copyright 2000, Sophia Institute Press, Used with permission of the author and the publisher