Encouraged by a believing friend, I was advised to read the Bible after an argument. I did, and it opened floodgates, says Thomas Colsy
While reflecting on my journey to Catholicism, I think it right to explain how and why I came to believe the Catholic Faith was the truth, rather than merely something in which I found meaning or comfort and belonging.
All too often the latter gets emphasised – as if we’re part of a particularly welcoming yoga group or are studying stoicism. (We’re not.)
I come from an essentially agnostic but nominally Anglican confessional background. For the first twenty years of my life the record number of times I must have entered a church in a single year may have been five (compelled to by my school).
I was 20-years old when it struck. I was studying in Oslo on a year-abroad and after a breakup, I experienced something of an existential crisis.
“How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?” asks Oscar Wilde. Touché.
I don’t know if the reader has ever been to Oslo. A strange city. The place experiences the most arresting, spectacular sunsets and sunrises. In the outer suburbs, there are forests and lakes and brightly painted Scandinavian wooden farmhouses. It also suffers from the worst bleakness and most vapid aspects of urban post-industrial modernity: soulless metal-glass buildings animated by restlessly shallow yuppie lifestyles.
Europe
I’d properly travelled around Europe for the first time only the Summer prior to my time there. This juxtaposition seemed to describe my impression of the entire continent around me in the modern age: bleakness, with glimmers of real beauty from nature and the civilisational things older and more dignified. I felt something was missing; something had been lost.
This Scandinavian setting, and the disorder and meaningless in my own life – my high disturbance at the wrongness of contemporary culture, the values espoused by Hollywood and the music industry – lay the foundation for me to search for something more solid.
I found it. Or it found me.
Gently encouraged bone Norwegian evening by a believing friend, I was advised to read the Bible after an argument. I later did, and it opened floodgates. Of course, I was confused by much of what I heard in the Gospel of Matthew. I understood but little, but what I heard was enough.
I found myself (like many before me) mesmerised and confronted by a voice so ancient and mysterious. The Christ of the Gospels always spoke with a matter-of-fact forthrightness – “as one with authority” – indeed, as if He were a God.
This man behaved as if He were the light – exposing the sicknesses and causes of wrongdoing even in the hidden innermost inward parts. Hating a man was murder; a careless eye was adultery. This Yeshua Maschiach was not looking for popularity, offering an alluring creed or doctrine. He simply said what is.
I didn’t find it hard to believe there could be a God. Now I wanted to know who He was. I began looking for a Church.
Looking into Church History from my home not only confirmed that the Catholic Church had the greatest claims to be in continuity with the Church founded by Christ with the Apostles – it made me surer of this whole Christian thing.
I found the martyrs of the early Church converted and evangelised for the first three centuries of the Faith’s existence with almost no worldly incentive to do so – only the threat of torture and Colosseum death. They embraced this fearlessly. Powerless, dying slaves conquered the Roman Empire in their bravery and meekness. Like their master.
Nothing else from the ancient world even comes close to the verifiability or authenticity of these texts”
Another big step towards believing in the objectivity of the truth of this new Faith I was discovering came when a friend introduced me to an American Evangelical film called The Case for Christ. It follows the true story of an atheistic journalist who tried to write a scathing hit-piece on the Christian Faith after his wife’s unwelcome conversion. It’s well-worth watching, if you can tolerate how American it is.
It powerfully conveys how robustly the New Testament has stood up to textual criticism. We have manuscripts from within ten years of original composition in the first century AD. Nothing else from the ancient world even comes close to the verifiability or authenticity of these texts. Even hostile, atheist scholars now must concede the Gospels and books of the New Testament were each of them written within a lifetime of Christ’s life.
This has profound implications when you read of Jesus’ bold and now fulfilled prophecies about the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem, or about His obscure, dwindling movement spreading to every corner of the planet.
The film also emphasises love. A corrupted and overused and abused word in our age, too often associated with the merely sentimental. But most realise it’s the purpose of human life – the one most prized resource we struggle to go without. To believe God’s presence and character is found herein was hardly any arduous task.
When I began reading and receiving Catechesis, I found the depth and wisdom of the Church’s philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine. This made sense of all areas of existence from science to the anthropology of who and what a human is.
Confirmation
As I neared my confirmation in 2021, I had my first experience with something that would continue: the metaphysical sacramental power of confession. It’s something I refuse to and cannot believe is merely psychological. My peers agree when I often describe how it sincerely seems as if the colours drain from the sky when one is in a state of mortal sin.
There’s more that could be said – discovering all the indicators of the impossibility and authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, of ecstatic consolations after reception of Holy Communion at a Tridentine Mass, a Latin Novus Ordo, and a new rite Mass separately. The influence of GK Chesterton’s apologia. The hand of grace guided me to each of these.
I may have begun my journey by becoming conscious of the light and dark, but I now know they were not equals. The light was more powerful and varied. The light was the first and final say. And I had experienced this light; I now knew His name.
“Faith is certain” says the Catechism. If you want to heed this, you can’t do so naturally or without grace and prayer, but the evidence is all there. Seek, and ye shall find.
