When I applied to be a campus missionary with FOCUS, I did not particularly expect that they would accept me; I imagined the typical campus missionary as zealous and gregarious and thought of myself as cerebral and introverted. I figured that, even if I were not the right fit for them, the application and interview process might help me learn something about myself. I remember praying several times for the courage to be truthful instead of giving the interviewers the answers I thought they would want to hear; I thought that striving for honesty would make me more open to receiving whatever lessons God wanted me to learn from the interview process.
As I had guessed, I was not the right fit for FOCUS, but instead of emerging from the experience with greater self-knowledge, I found myself wracked with self-doubt. I had been persuaded that, not only did I not have the right personality to be a campus minister, but I lacked the kind of personal relationship with God that was a fundamental prerequisite for any kind of Christian life.
My final interviewer was the one who put this suggestion in my head. He thought that my responses in the previous stages of the interview process—including my personal testimony and answers to questions about my background and faith life—did not seem to indicate that my thoughts and actions stemmed from a personal encounter and relationship with Christ, a concept which he explained with a series of impressive-sounding quotes from Scripture and elsewhere. I could not be a campus missionary, leading college students into a loving personal relationship with Jesus, if I myself did not have that kind of relationship: as he put it, I could not give what I did not have.
After this conversation, I joined the other interviewees in the chapel, where we had time for personal prayer and reflection. When I arrived in the chapel, the daylight was beginning to fade; by the time we left the chapel for dinner, night had fallen. My thoughts followed a similar trajectory.What were my reasons for going to Mass, or studying and defending the Church’s teachings? As far as I could tell, I hadn’t been acting out of a fear of Hell or desire for Heaven, but if I wasn’t acting out of a genuine love of God, either, then my motives must have been vain, selfish, and worldly. I may have wanted to think that I was serving God, but I must have been acting out of a self-righteous desire to do the right thing, or the inability to seriously contemplate any worldview other than the Catholic one, or a lazy refusal to abandon familiar surroundings and religious practices, or perhaps in order to surround myself with the sort of wonderful people I’d met in Notre Dame’s Catholic subculture—and in order to fit in, I fooled them as well as myself into thinking I was a good Catholic, when really I lacked the sine qua non of the Christian life.
Before I knew it, I had dismissed as vanity every attempt I had ever made to follow God’s will and concluded that any subsequent effort I could make would be equally vain. The only thing that could make my efforts meaningful was an encounter with Christ, something I could not provide for myself—and something which did not seem to be forthcoming on God’s end, either.
Some people come to know God through a single moment, a profound encounter with the person of Christ that is a wellspring for their faith for the rest of their lives. It is a gift that gives them both motivation and direction. It is a gift that I thought I needed.
I don’t know how many times in the next few months I tried to open my heart to God, but to no apparent effect. The thought would leap from the back of my mind— “is it finally going to happen?”—and derail my attempt at prayer.
I tried to keep going in my daily life as I had before the interview, but my confidence and motivation slowly diminished. I thought that further discerning or realizing my vocation was dependent on developing a relationship with God. The longer I waited, the harder it became to find joy or meaning in activities I had previously found fulfilling, particularly writing and attending daily Mass.
That summer, I discussed my interview experience with a few close friends. They managed to persuade me that the interviewer was both theologically and morally wrong to question my status before God in that way, and that I did not actually need the particular kind of divine encounter and conversion experience that the interviewer had in mind—yet my prayer life still did not return to normal, and in some dark corner of my psyche, an insidious doubt remained and festered, and it has emerged periodically to haunt me.
To give just one example: At a parish town hall meeting about what we wanted from a new pastor, I heard a number of fellow parishioners talking about continuing existing programs, or getting young people back in church, or getting the word out about the church, or various issues related to management and maintenance. Nearly every comment seemed oriented more toward sustaining the institution, or, at best, Catholicism as a tradition, rather than serving and being accountable to Christ.
I itched to stand up and point out that pattern, but I was afraid that I would not be able to give voice to my instinct that the institutional focus was insufficient without giving some sort of validation to the faulty view of relationship-with-God that the interviewer had imposed on me almost two years prior. I decided it was wiser to stay silent, but afterwards, I still wasn’t sure whether my thoughts about my fellow parishioners made me a hypocrite.
This past summer, two and a half years after the interview weekend, I received the closest thing to an answer to my doubts, the closest thing to consolation that I expect to receive in this life. It was an experience of God’s presence of an intensity that I had not felt since before the interview. The chief effect of this experience was the restoration of my confidence that God’s grace was at work in my life. This, in turn, gave me an odd sense of gratitude for everything I had endured as a result of the interview.
The sense that God had been with me throughout my period of doubt and struggle did not change the fact that I had suffered, but it did give meaning to the first few months of suffering and the following two years of doubts. God allowed me to suffer these doubts, but, through God's grace, I was protected from deeper doubts about either God or his Church. Moreover, God continued to work through me even as I doubted, and could turn even my doubts into tools by which I might serve the Kingdom. Carrying this burden has made me more capable of understanding—and hopefully making lighter—the burdens others carry.
This includes understanding, if only to a limited extent, why people who have suffered spiritual trauma sometimes have difficulty coming back to Church. Despite telling myself over and over again not to hold a grudge against FOCUS as a whole for the words of one member, or even a grudge against the interviewer himself, I still don’t know how I feel about that organization, and that was the primary reason I did not attend a conference they were hosting in my home city that I had no reason to doubt would be excellent. But even setting FOCUS aside, I felt uneasy even this past fall when I heard a homily that stressed the importance of a relationship with Jesus.
I suspect that, regardless of the status of my relationship with God, I will continue to have a strained relationship with that particular pastoral approach. The language of personal encounter and relationship—the language used by FOCUS and other evangelical-influenced circles within Catholicism—is still foreign and unnatural to me, and I suspect that many who embrace it are not sufficiently aware or wary of its shortcomings.
I do not tell my story simply to offer it as a case study about the potential pitfalls of integrating elements of evangelical spirituality into Catholic pastoral practice, but I think my story does serve that purpose. If sharing my story in this way helps to temper and nuance this increasingly common pastoral approach, it is just one more way in which my suffering can be made to serve a good purpose.
The kind of personal encounter and relationship which the interviewer so prized is a gift—but it is not a gift that God gives to everyone just for the asking. Some of us may, in the end, have to be content with forming our consciences according to the Church’s teachings and trusting that we are receiving God’s grace through the Sacraments.
When we open ourselves to God’s grace, we will not always recognize how or when He enters into our lives and work, and recognizing it in the same way evangelicals do ought not be a prerequisite for considering oneself a faithful Catholic or a follower of Christ.
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