“There are two ways of getting home,” G. K. Chesterton wrote in the first line of The Everlasting Man. “And one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”
Even as life as a Catholic felt less new and more normal, occasionally I’d be overcome with the thundering thought, How did I GET HERE? I’d traveled a long, rocky path to end up in this place, and it would have been so easy for me to stray off course at countless points along the way. It gave me chills to consider how often a slight difference in the way events played out would have thrown me onto an entirely different path.
The thought came to mind again as I dashed around the house on a September morning, hours before Donald was to be baptized. I realized that almost my entire wardrobe was black, with a few gray pieces mixed in for color, and I dug feverishly through long-forgotten drawers in hopes of finding something to wear for an occasion whose traditional color is white. All the while, that question lingered in my mind. Not so long ago, I was the atheist girl who worked at a high-tech company and hopped on planes to travel the world with her boyfriend. Was I really now the Catholic mother with three young children, a Miraculous Medal dangling from her neck as she scurried through the house to prepare for her son’s baptism?
How did I GET HERE?
I yanked open a drawer that I thought might contain my scarves. There were no scarves inside, but instead, a long, rectangular box slid to the front. Its white color was faded to a dusty pearl, the once-red lines around its edges now a weak orange. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen it before. A long object rattled inside. I opened the small flap at the end of the box and slid its contents into my palm.
A candle landed in my hand. My baptism candle.
I rarely thought about my baptism. It almost never came to mind before Joe and I were Catholic, and even throughout the process of my conversion, I only considered it once or twice. I saw our religious explorations as being a purely intellectual endeavor; it didn’t seem relevant that a Catholic priest had poured water over my head at a church in the summer of 1977. Even once I understood that the sacrament of baptism contained real power, I couldn’t imagine how it would apply to my life, so I put it out of my mind. It was like a seed planted in the ground: I knew it was there, but since I never did anything to help it flower, it was easy to forget.
Now I thought of the moment of my baptism again. I imagined my grandparents looking on as the priest spoke the sacred words over the water. I pictured my baptism candle flickering to life after being held to the flame of the Easter candle, a symbol of the power of Christ to bring light to the world. I looked down and noticed that the wick on the candle in my hand was still darkened from its encounter with the flame.
The sounds of the bustling house faded away, and I closed my eyes. This, of course, was the answer to my question.
The moment the priest baptized me, I was sealed with the sign of belonging to Christ, an indelible mark on my soul that not even a life as an avowed atheist and unrepentant sinner could wipe away. God and his Church were set as my home base, and something deep within me would never truly be at peace until I returned to it, even as I traveled the whole world trying to find an alternate destination. My entire conversion was less of a journey to a foreign place, and more of a discovery of my long-lost home.