The Soul Is Not Just Some Metaphysical Idea

There is a saying that if you want to make God laugh - then tell him your plans. The converse is also true. If God wants to make you laugh he will tell you his plans for you. On April 4, 1999 at the Easter Vigil I was received into the Catholic Church. Just a couple years before that if I were to be prophetically told that I would rejoice on entering the Church or if I was told that tears would stream down my eyes as I went to my first confession - I would have told them they were greatly mistaken. I was at the apogee of my conservatism based on Randian Positivism. To me radical selfishness was the highest virtue. The heights of individualism and being a self-made man were my highest ideals. The natural virtues helped to modify this idealistic positivism towards how I related with others, but it was not enough. My nose had long achieved orbit as at looked down at those poor superstitious mortals who still believed in hunter-gatherer myths such as God. During the formulative years of my life I grew up in Portland, Oregon in an atmosphere where religion was not part of my life. Religion was a private thing that was never talked about. I knew my neighborhood friends went to church with their parents and they never talked about their church or about any religious questions. I also knew that our family was considered odd because of our lack of church attendance. My father to this day says that he is an agnostic or a “retired Christian.” My mother who passed away last year entered the Catholic Church in my High Schools years. The topic of religion was so private in my house that I didn't even know that my mother had converted from Methodism to the Catholic Church until many years later.

C.S. Lewis had said, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." Without knowing it I was very careful of my reading. Growing up I enjoyed reading and Science Fiction was my genre of choice. I prided myself on choosing what was called hard SF such as Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement. I read little outside of SF except general magazines on science. I also enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories. The character appealed to me since he seemed so in control and used the abilities of his mind and science to solve crimes. I would attempt to act like Mr. Holmes by being acutely aware of my surroundings. When the original Star Trek series started playing in reruns I strongly identified with Mr. Spock. Plots where Mr. Spock was shown to have emotional feelings and when he acted more human annoyed me. If I had known the word at that time I would have called myself a stoic. Reason without interfering emotions was what I wanted.

My first brush with religion was going with my mother to a progressive Catholic Church. I was a teenager and to please her I went to Mass. She had recently finished RCIA and had come into the Church. The music used during the Mass was very modern and included selections such as the Byrd’s "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and "Day by Day" from Godspell. I enjoyed singing and didn’t mind these songs. My mother knew the woman who headed the singing group and I ended up auditioning and then singing with them. I enjoyed the irony of being an atheist and singing in the church. One evening I went to the home of the priest for a class on the Church. The priest gave an overview of the Bible and how the miracles didn’t really happen, but that they could be explained by other means. I remember thinking that as an atheist I already didn’t believe in miracles. Why should I become a Catholic to not believe in miracles? I also heard the word “Catholicism” used for the first time. This word somehow seemed very ominous and stuck with me.

During this yearlong period I never received any information about what the Catholic Church taught. The homilies were full of social justice and not much else. I was going to Communion not knowing what I was receiving. I might have laughed if I were told what Catholics said the Eucharist was, though it would have been nice to be told the truth. My parents ended up divorcing and I stopped going to Mass. I did not think that my parents divorce would have any effect on me. My mother sought the divorce and I encouraged my father to just go ahead. That it was no problem to me. During this time I never connected my moral decline and my failing grades with what was happening at home. My parents divorce was in no way bitter or acrimonious, but just the split up and changes affected me without my realizing it.

During my finals years of High School I enrolled in an electronics class. I enjoyed learning electronics theory and bread boarding components and started to think about a career doing this. I ended up joining the Navy under the Advanced Electronics Field program. When I was asked what religion I wanted noted in my service record, I proudly said atheist. While going to a Navy electronics school I was invited by one of the instructors to come to his house for dinner. It turned out that he was a Baptist trying to bring people to the faith. We all talked in his living room and they said some things that were attractive to me because at that point I was like a typical sailor living in party mode. I tried to join in the conversation and the only philosophical idea that I could think of saying was quoting a lyric from Led Zeppelin’s Highway to Heaven, “Yes there are two paths you can go by but in the long run. There's still time to change the road you're on.” This is a good indication of my total lack of any spiritual depth at that point in time and I smile at this memory now. The night ended in a full immersion baptism and some literature. I never saw him or the other people outside of class again and there was no follow-up. My conversion must have lasted all of 24 hours. It was definitely a case of the seed planted in hard rocky ground.

While being stationed overseas I got married in the Philippines. My wife is a Catholic and we were married in a Catholic Church. This church was somewhat of a marriage mill and there was no preparation for marriage given The only other times during the next decade and a half that I had entered a church was for the baptisms of my two children. I felt very ill at ease during the Baptism preparation and felt a total fraud for going along with this while being an atheist. For many years to come I gave no thought to the idea of God or religion other than to disparage it. My wife continued in her private devotions with some prayer books she brought with her and by praying the Rosary. I tried to talk my wife out of what I thought to be superstitions, but she wisely ignored me on this subject.

When I had left home and joined the Navy my views were closely aligned with what is modern liberalism. That the government needs to do all it can to help people and to make their lives better. Traveling around the world and having a family my views on what was important in life were changing. In the early nineties I started listening to talk radio and it was on the G. Gordon Liddy show that I heard him state the five proofs of God as detailed by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. I was quite surprised that such rational sounding ideas existed. I also started to observe that many people who I respected did believe in God and those who called themselves non-religious, I did not agree with on many issues.

Maybe I subconsciously saw my atheism as slipping because I started to actively work to shore up my atheistic faith. I started reading books on atheism. One book I read recommended the works of Ayn Rand. I joyfully read Atlas shrugged and I thought it contained the answers I needed to be able to remain both conservative and an atheist. At the height of my new found fervor something happened that would change my life. I use to ride my bike to and from work. One morning as I was coming to the end of a block I saw a car coming directly towards me from the right. The man in the car was turning on the main road and did not notice me. I calculated that there was no way that I could avoid getting hit. In those seconds my whole life did not come before my eyes, but only the sure thought that I was going to be killed. The car hit me dead on and I went up onto the hood and was then knocked into the street. My first reaction was surprise, surprise that I was alive. Many people stopped and a crowd came to my assistance and to determine my condition. The driver of the car sped away unnoticed by those helping me.

I escaped with relatively minor injuries and some stitches. This was also an end to my atheism. Facing death I found that I did not really believe that if I had been killed that my existence would have winked out of the universe. The soul was not just some metaphysical idea. I wish that my conversion had been as sudden as St. Paul falling off his horse and my new thoughts only slowly percolated in my mind and just brought me to a general theism. I believed there was a God and I had no idea with what I should do about that information. I generally knew that I should be going to a church. It would be difficult to find someone as ignorant about Christianity as I was. I knew there were different churches and I had no idea what might be the difference between a Protestant, Catholic or a Mormon Church.

My love of singing was also connected with my love of Christmas Carols. At one time during the Christmas season you could turn on most radio stations and hear these carols. Increasingly it was more difficult to find these songs played. I ended up listening to the local Protestant radio stations to hear them. I also started to listen to the messages they had between the songs. My previous atheism and stoicism had not prepared me for all the mistakes I had made in life and now I was ready to admit that I was a sinner and that I was in need of a redeemer. When Christmas ended I still continued to listen to their broadcasts and to start to learn about who Jesus was. I read a large number of books from prominent Protestants with a smattering of books from Catholics. I also started to try to read the Bible and I made the mistake most beginner make by just trying to read from Genesis to Revelations. I also had a very pagan view towards religion still. When reading the Bible I thought that something supernatural would occur to prove that it was true and that God existed. Since I was reading the Bible using only my own frame of reference I also reinvented many heresies as I went along. One of the items I noticed while listening to Protestant radio is that often the person speaking one hour would contradict what someone else said earlier. Despite my previous experience with the Catholic Church I started to do some deeper reading on Catholicism.

I had just retired from the Navy and my family moved to Florida. I found a Catholic bookstore and bought a Catechism and some other books. Reading the Catechism I was greatly excited by what I found within. I saw that what the church taught was consistent with what I had observed in life and it was presented as a coherent whole. I had a residual Sola Scriptura attitude that I had absorbed from society. I understood via the media was that any serious Christian thought must be in the Bible. I was concerned that part of what I read I did not also see directly in the Bible. Fortunately we had moved to an area that had a Catholic radio stations and also had EWTN on cable. The questions asked and the answers given on Catholic Answers was an important part of my intellectual conversion. Being in the military it was easy for me to come to understand that the Church needs a hierarchy and a magisterium to proclaim the truth. The military has written instructions for just about everything, yet we constantly had to interpret for others what they meant. Sometimes we would have to query a higher command to ensure that our interpretation was correct. I saw that there had to be a living Church to protect doctrines and to interpret and to teach them without error. As times passed there had to way to address new moral questions as they occurred. Just using Bible study it would be quite difficult to answer questions such as In Vitro fertilization and cloning with any authority.

The founding fathers of the United States understood this problem when they wrote the Constitution. They knew that the Constitution could not interpret itself and they set up the Supreme Court to do this. This system breaks down if a Supreme Court makes an interpretation inconsistent with the founders intent. With original sin no human organization can keep from falling into error. It is only through the Holy Spirit guiding the Church are we assured that the Church is not teaching error. As St. Augustine said “I would not believe the Gospels, if it were not for the Church.” This was the very Rosetta Stone that helped me to first believe in the authority of the Church and to accept all that it teaches. Instead of looking at an issue like contraception and wondering if what the Church taught was true, I now had the attitude that I accepted this doctrine as true and that I needed to learn why it was true. I have come to greatly appreciate the great and glorious intellectual treasure of what the Church has taught through the centuries. The intellectual underpinnings of our faith are something that we can never exhaust and at times we even can come to a deeper understanding of those teachings.

With this understanding I was ready to enter the Church. Since the Easter celebration was close, I had to wait and attend the next session of RCIA. My wife and I also started to attend daily Mass. My yearning for the Eucharist was increasing and having to stay back while others received Communion was difficult. Finally the day arrived and I was received into the Church and confirmed. After receiving Communion I realized that both figuratively and literally that I had spent forty years in the wilderness and had now entered the Promised Land. I also knew that just as Israelites still faced many battles upon entering the Promised Land, that I would also face spiritual battles in the years to come. Writing a conversion story is difficult since it has a beginning and middle, but not truly an end. Our conversion stories truly do not end till our death and hopefully we hear “Good and faithful servant … enter into the joy of your master.' To go from the desert of atheism to knowing and loving God through his Church is a joy that words can’t express.

Jeffrey Miller was received into the Church in 1999. A retired Navy chief, he is a simulation engineer and develops courseware for the military. He and his wife, Socorro, have two adult children. Miller writes from Jacksonville, Florida.  He maintains the blog The Curt Jester www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester

This conversion story originally appeared in This Rock Magazine Oct 2004 http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2004/0410dr.asp