When my mother recovered, I returned to London with a spiritual zeal such as I had never before exhibited. My two decades as an atheist now appeared for what they were: squandered years, during which I had turned my back on God and neglected my immortal soul. The realization was cause for trembling, yet it also brought great joy: the joy that comes with perceiving the proper order of things, with exercising spiritual muscles long atrophied, with fresh murmurings of prayer and mystical understanding in the heart.
Life had taught me that our Lord’s gift of radical absolution on the Cross was the only thing capable of repairing the brokenness in me and around me. Jesus was the God-Man, who came to take away the sins of the world (Jn 1:29), and all that was graceful in the West flowed from this one truth. Yet his agonized call from the Cross echoed in every soul, not just the Western. Indeed, Christianity was the precondition of true universality and true brotherhood. But for the Son’s sacrifice, men remained alienated from the true Father (Jn 14:6), and therefore from each other.
Yet the mansion of “mere Christianity”—faith in Jesus as the only Son of God—had many rooms, as C. S. Lewis had written in his little book of that title. Which room, which communion, was I supposed to pick? Be careful, Lewis warned, not to choose a room for superficial reasons. Rather ask: “Are these doctrines true? Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me toward this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular doorkeeper?”
My romance for Catholicism persisted, and I owed my whole Christian mentality to Benedict XVI and his Jesus of Nazareth. Even so, I stood for a time in the doorway of evangelicalism and admired that room. Then I turned away, walked through the door marked “Rome”, and never looked back. My decision turned precisely on the question of liturgy, which Lewis had dismissed as a superficial matter. In the Roman room, I found worship that conformed fully with the truth of Christ’s identity. I rediscovered the Mass.
* * * * *
My flirtation with evangelicalism had begun before that fateful trip to Istanbul. Soon after I moved to the United Kingdom, in 2014, I came across a British activist, about my age, who advocated for persecuted Christians in the Middle East. At a gathering of dull Tory types in a rooftop bar in Covent Garden, Miles Windsor stood out for his wry, wicked sense of humor and movie-star looks; he was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt. In between wisecracks, he spoke fearlessly about his evangelical faith among people who were, at best, indifferent to faith.
That metaphysical indifference, so pervasive in England and the rest of western Europe, I now found positively revolting. I had come far from that boyhood dream of secularity. Human beings were created for more, and needed more, than endless consumer choice and kaleidoscopic lifestyles. But for many of my well-educated, well-to-do friends in London and New York, lifestyle-ism—clean eating, mindfulness, banana treatments—was all they had. Out of these lifestyles, some more lascivious than others, they had fashioned idols. So much for secularity.
Miles’ faith was an oasis in this barren spiritual landscape. We hit it off right away, not least because he had a tattoo on his arm that read, in Persian, “Free Farshid.” Farshid Fathi was a born-again pastor imprisoned in Tehran for the “crime” of evangelizing and possessing Persian-language Bibles. Miles had dedicated himself to rescuing Fathi, and the Iranian pastor’s name was etched on his skin as a daily reminder of the price that Christians in the Middle East pay for fidelity to the Nazarene. Now here was a true heir to William Wilberforce.
He became my go-to source on the persecuted Church in the Middle East. Thanks to Miles, a letter from Fathi to his followers, written during Christmas 2014 and smuggled out of prison, made its way into the pages of the Wall Street Journal. “Although the beauty of Christmas. . . cannot be found in this prison,” the letter read, “with the ears of faith I can hear the everlasting and beautiful truth that ‘the Virgin will conceive and give birth to a Son, and they will call him Immanuel.’ ” Those words stayed with me long after the editorials were forgotten.
Soon the journalist-source relationship developed into a friendship—my first genuine Christian friendship. It was at Miles’ suggestion that I began a regimen of daily Scripture reading. It was to him that I first intoned the words “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior.” He kept inviting me to Sunday services at his church at Wimbledon, no matter how many lame excuses I made. When, a couple of years later, I returned from Istanbul with that burning vision of Sheol-on-earth, my first thought was to ask Miles and his Anglican vicar about a Baptism.
But I didn’t go through with it. I figured I would first attend a few more Anglican services—to inspect the room, per C. S. Lewis—before taking the plunge. My wife and I were living in West London at the time, and I gathered from Miles’ vicar that the nearest “sound” Anglican church—meaning evangelical and conservative-ish—was Holy Trinity Brompton, or HTB, as it was popularly known.
Located in tony Knightsbridge, roughly equidistant from Harrods department store—that playground of wealthy Russian emigres and Gulf Arabs—and the Victoria and Albert Museum, HTB was the most influential evangelical institution in Britain. The Anglican communion’s cultural and theological fault lines ran right through the Regency church, which, with its elaborate stained-glass windows and vaulting arches, played host to charismatic worship that included JumboTrons, rock bands, and funky lighting.
The first HTB service I attended kicked off with a rendition of “Our God Is a Great Big God”, a praise song that compared Almighty God with a skyscraper (“He’s higher!”), a submarine (“He’s deeper!”), and the universe (“He’s wider!”). Kids and adults alike raised and swayed their arms at the skyscraper bit, and they held their noses, shook their bottoms, and dove “underwater” at the submarine bit. The rest of the musical numbers were less childish but equally saccharine.
The pastors, fresh-faced men and women who all appeared to have walked out of a J. Crew catalogue, peppered their sermons with biblical citations, and there was no denying their faithful enthusiasm. None of the sermons was memorable, however, and if one were to boil away the personal anecdotes and other extraneous bits, all of them could be distilled into the following: We have been saved. How blessed we are for that! So continue to develop a personal relationship with Jesus. Amen.
That was it. The sermons touched on weighty questions—salvation, the centrality of Scripture, how to relate to our Lord—but the touch was all too light. The uplift was real enough, and I remember walking out of that first service, and several subsequent ones, with a gladness in my heart that would color the rest of my Sunday. But the joy would dissipate come Monday, and I was left with an emptiness. There was something wrong.
Evangelical Protestantism, for all its Spirit-infused hand raising and arm swaying, struck me as profoundly abstract. Under the evangelical dispensation, the only point of contact, so to speak, between the Christian soul and the divine order was Scripture and preaching based on Scripture. A “personal relationship” built on words alone, even divinely inspired words, was incomplete. Our Lord and his disciples preached, yes, but they also did other things, supernatural things, and these were missing altogether at HTB.
Then, too, the preaching itself was weak sauce. There was a copy-and-paste quality to it: a little bit of Daniel here, an allusion to Revelation there, some Matthew over here, and so on, all too often in service of a palliative or self-affirming message. There was nothing like the systematic biblical vision that I had found in Benedict, who, for example, could illuminate the true meaning of the Beatitudes (as our Lord’s revelation of himself as the “new Torah”), all while parrying blows from Nietzsche, Marx, and the like.
Of course, it wasn’t fair of me to compare young evangelical pastors with one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century. Yet I couldn’t help but detect the problem of authority in the Protestant orbit, which, I came to suspect, lay behind Protestantism’s theological shortcomings. At that point, mind you, I had yet to recognize the authority of the Catholic Church—though, as my weeping over Benedict’s photo showed, I was instinctively drawn to Catholic authority. But in early 2016, my attraction to Catholic authority was strong enough that I sensed the fragility and thinness of authority among Protestants.
That, in turn, raised an even more troubling concern, having to do with the nature of the church. If all that mattered was pursuing a personal relationship through Scripture, then why have a church at all? Why couldn’t each person go it alone? I posed this question to more than one Protestant in those days, and all offered some variation on the following: The church exists to strengthen fellowship among the faithful. We help each other grow in faith, and “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20).
That answer never satisfied me, yet I couldn’t articulate why until I encountered the Church.
And what about sin and salvation? It was the mystery of evil and the reality of the conscience that had compelled me to assent to the Christian faith in the first place. Afterward, I couldn’t square the “reformed” notion that I was already saved with my sin-racked conscience, which told me the opposite. Salvation by faith alone, which evangelicals trumpeted at every turn, ran counter to common sense and, taken to its logical terminus, led to predestination without free will. That didn’t seem right, either.
It was, finally, the cheesy, irreverent worship that most contributed to my turn away from evangelicalism. This was worship conformed to the tastes of bourgeois British (and American) families circa 2016. It reduced cosmic truth to a Top 40 sensibility, which I couldn’t abide. Still I continued to attend services at HTB, from time to time. These were good, earthy people. The Word of God was at the center of their lives. And Catholics didn’t exactly send me text messages asking: “Would you and your wife like to join us for Sunday service?” Evangelicals did.
* * * * *
One Sunday morning, as I was making my way home from the nine-thirty service at HTB, I spotted a sign posted at the entrance of the Catholic church next door, known as the Brompton Oratory. I had walked past the graying neo-baroque edifice countless times before, but this was the first I paid any attention to it. The sign advertised a “Solemn High Latin Mass” for Pentecost Sunday. The Mass was to start at eleven o’clock. I was just in time.
It was dark and refreshingly cool inside. Kneeling worshippers packed most of the pews—remarkable, given that the nave trumped even Saint Paul’s Cathedral for size. Much as I had done all those years earlier at the Capuchin monastery in Manhattan, I sat in one of the back pews. Only this time, I was dumbfounded by the beauty all around me. I have visited numerous Catholic churches in Europe since then, but the London Oratory is second to none for balancing classical grandeur and intimate Christian emotion.
My eyes were drawn down the nave to the sanctuary and high altar, as the architect no doubt intended. At the top, under a protective canopy, was an engraving of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, from which shone gilded rays of light. Just beneath was a painting of Saint Philip Neri, the great sixteenth-century Roman holy man and founder of the Oratorians, kneeling rapt before a vision of the Virgin carried by clouds and surrounded by angels and cherubim. Staging and surveying this scene, high above the clouds, were God the Father and the Paraclete dove.
Marble covered the whole apsidal space: onyx, scarlet, serpentine, red-and-yellow breccia and other kinds, all matched so harmoniously that none seemed out of place. The altar, made of white marble, stood out against this colorful medley. Six large candles topped it, with a golden crucifix in the middle, which in turn led down to the tabernacle. A little porthole window off to the right of the apse concentrated a jet of sunlight from the outside onto the crucifix and the tabernacle—the illumined nexus, where the Trinitarian glories above met the people below.
This was a holy place, set apart from the banality and corruption of human affairs. It was a place of right worship. Its beauty was the work of human hands yet transcendent in effect. Here, beauty paid an enduring homage to the theological precepts that inspired and preceded it. And if metalwork and masonry and painting directed my imagination to spiritual realities, was that not because Almighty God had blessed me with a receptive imagination in the first place?
The Mass itself reinforced and quickened this line of thinking. A bell rang. All stood. The choir chanted the Asperges me. Though I didn’t understand all of the Latin, my heart registered perfectly the thirst for God and his mercy in the psalmist’s words. The retinue of priests and deacons made their way down the aisle. I remember wishing that a drop of that holy water might reach me. It wasn’t to be, and this only heightened my thirst for the sacramental life that it symbolized. Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor. . .
Order. Continuity. Tradition and totality. Confidence. These were the watchwords my mind conjured for itself as I threw myself into the Mass. When the congregation knelt, I knelt. When the people crossed themselves, I followed suit, though more than once I did it with my left hand, which drew a sharp look from the rather haughty young man next to me. I didn’t mind. The Catholic Church was already making demands of me. I was called to conform myself to a body two millennia in continuous existence, not the other way around.
The world was unimaginable without the Catholic Church. Whereas if one day the earth swallowed up HTB or any of the other thousands of Protestant churches that pop up annually, it would be a great tragedy—but not a world-historical one. The institution that appeared fusty and antique was timeless and universal, a fortress against the ephemeral. The one with JumboTrons and rock ‘n’ roll was small and parochial, a pure product of its age. These differences had to mean something.
A middle-aged priest delivered a homily on the Holy Spirit in the Church. How seamlessly and intelligently he wove the day’s readings together with his reflections on the Church and the world in our time! Again, the word that crossed my mind was confidence: The Catholic Church didn’t need to bend herself to the vacuous fads of 2016. She taught and offered the same thing she had from the beginning. She was the same thing. And what was that? God, in a word. God in his Word—and in corporeal form.
Lewis had been wrong to write off “style of worship” as a secondary matter in Mere Christianity. As with beauty and imagination, the order and symbolism of public prayer were bound up with truth. The Mass gave full expression to the truths and mysteries of Christianity. The Cross was there, but so was our Lord’s crucified body, with the pierced side, the bloodied hands, the scourged and welted back, the thorns cutting into the forehead. His sacrifice was present. And so was the Virgin, who had given him flesh from her own flesh, nursed him from her bosom, and accompanied him to the last. She was our link to the Incarnation—how could we leave her out of worship?
I savored the Mass of the Faithful, and when the people lined up at the altar rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament, I positively envied them (I knew enough to know that non-Catholics are barred from taking Communion). It was nearly unbearable to recall that I had spent a third or more of a lifetime worshipping idols—the idol of “history”, the idol of “progress”, and above all the idol of self—when the true God was this gentle, this self-giving. Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum die verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.
The Mass lasted an hour and twenty minutes. I was sorry when it was over. Before exiting, I walked over to the Sacred Heart chapel at the back of the church and knelt at the prie-dieu facing a statue of our Lord. This was an utterly spontaneous act of obeisance, unmarred by hesitation. I had found God in his Church; indeed, the two were coterminous. But what was I supposed to say to him? I had yet to memorize the necessary prayers. The words that came to my mind were: Forgive me. Cleanse me. I must have repeated them thirty or forty times before I got up and left.
Forgive me. Cleanse me. Forgive me. Cleanse me.
The following Monday, on my way to work at London Bridge, I got off at the South Kensington stop on the Underground and raced on foot to the Oratory House. An old priest opened the door halfway when I knocked. He was short, dressed in an elegant black cassock with the signature Oratorian collars sticking out at the neck. His metal-rimmed glasses and protruding ears accentuated his bookish, wizened expression.
“Yes, how may I help you?” he asked in a strikingly posh English accent.
“I wish. . .” My voice was shaking. “I wish to become a Roman Catholic.”
The priest didn’t miss a beat: “Very well. I shall instruct you.”
* * * * *
So began my period of instruction with Father R. C. J. We met each Sunday afternoon beginning in June 2016. He asked very few questions, and there was very little room for discussion. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. This was catechesis, not a dialogue. We didn’t need to play icebreaker games or make colorful posters or whatnot. And what, really, did I have to say to the Church that she needed to hear? Nothing. At our first meeting, he did inquire about my background and why I wished to become a Catholic.
All I could muster was something about “the majesty, er, magisterium”.
Father saved me from myself: “Right, the majestic magisterium, let’s say.” Then he proceeded to teach for about an hour. “We begin with Saint Thomas Aquinas. Order in nature and natural theology. . .”
* * * * *
Father R. and the Oratory epitomized an English Catholicism, which, precisely because it had suffered half a millennium of repression, ostracism, mockery, and finally indifference, was all the more rigorous and vital than the soupy and fast-secularizing Anglicanism that encircled it. This was the pungent Catholic culture that had formed such converts as John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, and Ronald Knox, among others, and a whole constellation of literary stars, including G. K. Chesterton, Robert Hugh Benson, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene.
My catechist was himself a convert and a spiritual son of one of the greats, Monsignor A. N. Gilbey (1901—1998), that eccentric icon of twentieth-century English traditionalism. Heir to the Gilbey gin fortune, the monsignor won fame for converting numerous young men at Cambridge while serving as the university’s Catholic chaplain. He also waged a valiant campaign to stop the chaplaincy, Fisher House, from going co-ed; the doors were opened to women in 1956 anyway.
He retired that year. The liturgical changes that accompanied Vatican II the following decade came as another blow. He withdrew from public preaching and spent his last years at the Travellers Club on Pall Mall, where he was allowed to maintain a chapel in his room. His private Masses attracted the Catholic literati, and every few years the Spectator would dispatch a scribe to profile the cleric seemingly teleported to our age from Victorian times. Gilbey played the part with aplomb: “I don’t believe one man one vote is a sort of moral law!” “There you go again with this absurd idea that Christianity says all men are equal. It says nothing of the sort!”
Gilbey was also a man of deep faith and a Catholic thinker in his own right. As Father R. told it, Gilbey’s whole mission in life was, quite simply, to put others on the path to heaven. “Dear boy, dear boy,” Father would quote his mentor, “the best is yet to come!” To that end, Gilbey had agreed to have his commentary on the old “penny” Catechism, which had won so many young men for the Church at Cambridge, recorded and transcribed. The 1986 book that came about as a result made the best sellers list, to the monsignor’s own surprise.
It was this book, We Believe, that formed the basis of my instruction. It presented Catholic dogma with tremendous clarity, without subtracting one iota from its richness. Gilbey’s synthesis provided a theological grounding to the sweet, docile feelings about the Church, which I had nursed for a decade. More important, Gilbey showed how eminently reasonable Catholicism was—such that, once my course was finished, I couldn’t fathom how others called themselves Christian without submitting to Rome’s light yoke.
All of those teachings of the Church, which posed as stumbling blocks to her critics, were, in fact, sensible, biblically sound, part of a cohesive whole, whose elements fit together with logical perfection. This realization I owed, above all, to Father R. and to his legendary mentor.
Start with the authority of the Catholic Church. To believe in God, it sufficed to rely on natural reason alone, as I had done. But to go further with him, as it were, it was necessary to believe divine revelation on the authority of the Revealer. And there was nothing wrong with accepting things on authority. As Gilbey put it, “We ought not to make heavy weather about doing in our relationship with Almighty God what we do daily in our dealings with other people”—that is, to accept all sorts of propositions solely on authority.
And the whole of revelation turned on a single proposition: namely, that the Catholic Church was Christ’s supreme revelation. Assent to Jesus Christ thus meant assent to the Church he founded and the powers he granted her, chiefly to forgive sins (Jn 20:23; Mt 16:19) and to teach all nations (Mt 28:19). Scripture and Tradition confirmed all this, yet the Church didn’t need to appeal to these things for her authority. Before Scripture or Tradition existed, the Catholic Church was there at the Cross and the Resurrection.
Another stumbling block: the development of doctrine. Purgatory. The Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. Papal infallibility. Weren’t these Romish distortions of an “original” Christianity? “No!” thundered Gilbey. While the Church occasionally adopted new vocabulary and concepts to expound her teachings, the truth of Christ’s revelation remained unchanged. The monsignor went on to offer decisive proof from Scripture and Tradition for each of these doctrines, yet he never conceded that Rome was required to proffer such proof. Again, it was enough that the Church was “Christ in corporate form”.
Still another: the centrality of the Blessed Virgin. Far from a Roman eccentricity, devotion to Mary was the “touchstone of orthodoxy”. Without Mary, Christianity risked losing the truth about Christ’s own identity—the union of two natures, divine and human, in one person—and drifting toward Gnosticism of various kinds. On this point, and on love of Mary more generally, I required very little persuasion. That I even had a shot at eternal salvation, it seemed to me, was made possible by the free consent of a Jewish Virgin of the Galilee.
Finally, the biggest stumbling block of all: the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Here, Gilbey marshaled an abundance of data in favor of the Catholic teaching about the Blessed Sacrament and the supernatural action at the heart of the Mass.
There was, of course, the Bread of Life discourse in Saint John’s Gospel. Our Lord, when confronted with his followers’ doubts about the Eucharist, doubled down: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53). He insisted that he was speaking literally, whereas elsewhere he was quick to clarify that he was speaking figuratively (cf. Jn 3:1-5). So much of Jesus’ public ministry, moreover, involved nourishing his followers with food and drink, acts that prefigured the Eucharist and revealed the link between the Real Presence and the Incarnation. Then there was the evidence from history. To wit, when early Christians worshipped, they had the Mass and the Eucharist. Bible study groups, these gatherings were not.
In the end, however, it wasn’t reading that brought me to faith in the Real Presence but the Mass. Observing the reverence with which the Oratorians celebrated the sacrifice, and the awe with which the people received the Victim, did far more to stoke my appetite for our Lord’s Eucharistic presence than any theological discourse. Mass after Mass, I watched as others took Communion, and all I wished to do was to lie face down on the ground before the Sacrament in abject adoration. There was no better proof of his presence than this desire. And if the Real Presence was true, then whatever else Rome taught had to be obeyed. In the end, then, I became Catholic because I concluded that Catholicism was Christianity in full, while other forms of Christianity were digressions from this fullness.
* * * * *
My period of instruction would prove among the most grace filled of my life. At the outset, I ordered a vintage prie-dieu and had it installed in a corner of my room, under a reproduction of Velazquez’s Christ Crucified. This setup became the focal point of my nascent and ecstatic spirituality. Nothing made me happier than the time I spent kneeling before that sublime image of the bloodied and dying Jesus. This, even though the substance of my contemplation was sorrowful. Constant joy-in-sorrow, another Catholic paradox.
I also developed something like a plan of life, which involved morning prayers followed by reading Scripture and studying a portion of the 1992 Catechism. I learned to say the Angelus from Father R., and the prayer came to frame my day, culminating in the six o’clock Angelus that preceded the weekday evening Mass at the Oratory. If he had imparted nothing else—and he taught me a great deal more—I would remain forever indebted to Father R. for inculcating in me this habit of “retreating to the hermitage within” three times a day at the Angelus.
Spiritual reading filled the in-between-work hours. In addition to We Believe, Father R. lent me a copy of Mon-signor Knox’ The Creed in Slow Motion. Published in 1949, the book gathered a series of lectures on the Apostles’ Creed, which Knox had delivered to a group of Catholic schoolgirls taking shelter in the countryside during the Nazi bombing of London. Under those conditions, Knox had called on the girls to live lives of “gracious fanaticism”—the pithiest definition of saintliness I ever came across.
There were many other books, but the ones that proved most formative included Death on a Friday Afternoon, Richard John Neuhaus’ meditation on the Seven Last Words of Christ; and the Apologia of Newman. The latter wasn’t particularly enjoyable, as far as spiritual autobiographies go, yet, like We Believe, it was one of those books that lent order and coherence to feelings and intuitions I had long entertained, and I was grateful to be able to say, after Newman, “Aha! So I’m far from first to have felt this feeling or thought this thought!”
Thus, Newman on the pivotal role of imagination in Catholicism: “[Rome] alone. . . has given free scope to the feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness, and other feelings which may be especially called Catholic.” Or Newman on the conscience as proof for God and the Catholic faith, which he, like Gilbey, identified as almost one and the same thing: “I am a Catholic by virtue of believing in a God; and if I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it is impossible to believe in my own existence (and of the fact I am sure) without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience.”
But no book I read in those days surpassed The Confessions of Saint Augustine. How I had gone thirty-one years without having read The Confessions, I couldn’t tell you. Had I read it earlier in life, the Bishop of Hippo would have saved me a lot of trouble and misery. I had stumbled through most of life up to that point, drunk on the erroneous notion that what is new is best, while The Confessions was the greatest testament, after the book of Proverbs, to the truth that nothing fundamental changes in the affairs of men.
Including error. All false doctrines, Augustine said, seek to negate man’s responsibility for sin. The astrologers whom he glommed onto in his youth tried to “exculpate man, ‘flesh and blood’ (Mt 16:16; 1 Cor 15:50), that proud putrefaction, and to blame Him who created and ordained the sky and the stars.” Couldn’t the same have been said for our latter-day astrologers, who cast the blame for sin on economics (Marxism), on “repression” (liberalism), on the unconscious (psychoanalysis), on Dead White Males (identity politics), on language itself (structuralism and post-structuralism), and so on?
This fourth-century North African seeker had waded through the same river of error as I had! In the end he had concluded that “there is no rest where you seek it. Seek what you seek but it is not where you seek it.” That sentence could have served as the epitaph on my gravestone, had I died before knocking on the door marked “Rome”. I owed him something more—and could have depended on him for more—than a few pages of notes in my reading journal. When Father R. told me to think about a patron saint, I didn’t hesitate to respond: “Augustine.”
* * * * *
Father R. never ceased to remind me—gently, subtly—that the sum of Catholic knowledge was infinite, and whatever I knew or thought I knew amounted to a miniscule share of the whole. After six months of instruction, however, he determined that I was well formed enough to be received into the Church (prior to that, when I pressed him about a date for my Baptism, he would say only, “When you’re ready”). On December 19, 2016, I was to be baptized and confirmed. I would also take my First Communion and have the archdiocese convalidate my civil marriage. Four Sacraments in a single day.
“When that water is poured,” he said at our last meeting before the big day, “you become truly initiated into the life of Christ—into Trinitarian life. Say to yourself, ‘I live no longer as I but Christ lives in me.’ ”
“And afterward?” I asked.
“The best thing I can do for you after I baptize you is to shoot you.”
“Straight to heaven, eh?”
“Yes, well. . .” Short of dying right after Baptism, the best course was to attend daily Mass, make frequent use of the Sacrament of Confession, and live by our Lady’s admonitions at Fatima: Love. Pray. Suffer. Repent. The journalist and the peasant girl alike were called to do the same things. Only, one of the two was luckier than the other, for it required her far less intellectual striving to accept these teachings.
* * * * *
Thick clouds smothered London in the days leading up to my Baptism. My body felt heavier than usual, as if pressed by the urban smog. The night before, I dreamt that I was in a strange urban complex—a dreary sort of transport hub-cum-shopping mall on the outskirts of a strange city. Someone directed me to a private locker room hidden in a subterranean corner of this complex. Inside was a glass tank in the shape of a cube, filled with pristine water. Just as I began to inspect the tank, a drop of blood fell into the clear liquid, and the single red particle instantly spread through the whole volume, turning the water a bright crimson like the sky at dusk. . .
I woke up drenched in sweat. The rest of the day had a similarly phantasmagorical quality. Then with a dash of water Father R. broke my fever. You’ll pass, the smuggler from that house on the Cape of Olives had said. Yes, but my deliverance would come by other waters—waters mingled with blood most precious.
Benedictus Sanguis eius pretiosissimus.
END