The first time I attended a Catholic lecture, I was wholly and truly lost. This guy was a Ph.D. who knew a whole lot about St. Augustine, and my little non-Catholic brain couldn’t grasp any of it. This entire religion is over my head, I thought, even as I picked out bits that I did understand.
But there was one thing he said during the Q&A that I never forgot. The question had something to do with other religions, but the question itself right now is irrelevant. In his answer, he explored the “missing pieces” of non-Catholic faiths. His comment, of which I am grossly paraphrasing, was, “All the other denominations broke off from the Catholic Church. They took bits and pieces of what they liked, and created their own religions. It’s no wonder why so many of them feel like something is ‘missing’ in their faith. They don’t have the full picture. The fullness of the Catholic faith is required for full communion with God.”
Afterward, as I walked with my friend back to the bus depot, I wouldn’t shut up about it. “I’ve said that!” I declared, trying to have a deep conversion as we dodged Times Square tourists. “I’ve told you something is missing!”
I’d suspected this for years. I’d sit in church services and feel a disconnect, like God is just out of my reach. I’d go about my life aimless, unsure if He even heard my prayers, convinced there was something more I should be doing. That night, it finally clicked: something was missing. And that “something” was the fullness of the Church. I hadn’t the first clue of Tradition in those days—and I certainly didn’t know a word of Mass—but I was comforted when surrounded by it, for reasons I didn’t fully understand.
Being raised non-denominational will only get you so far. There comes a point that you desire more—more for your life, more connection to God, more in your worship. But the answer was always there. We all have bits and pieces of what our non-Catholic church founders thought was relevant, and they threw away the rest. But that leaves you with an emptiness that no offshoot religion will fill. At least, that was the case for me.
This was before I’d started RCIA. It was before I’d even decided to convert. I may not have understood most of the lecture, but God brought me there anyway to hear that one answer. And hearing that one answer already started filling in that emptiness.
