Journeys Home (15 page)

When they got back, Bob went in and quit his job at Amoco. He
was a laboratory technician and had been with the company for
more than twenty-one years. Not too long after that, Johanna quit
her job at Tulsa University. God was calling them to complete
obedience and dependence upon Him.

During this time, Bob met a nun who showed him how to make rosaries.
Bob decided to make two rosaries: one to thank Mary for leading
him to Jesus and one to thank Jesus for saving his soul. The rest
is history.

All of Bob's rosaries are lovingly handmade. He sees each bead
as a prayer sent out by Mary to convert and bring souls to Jesus.
I believe that Joetta's and my conversion are the direct result
of those prayers.

After our meeting with Bob and Johanna, I was emotionally shaken.
As we drove away, neither of us said a word. It was as if we had
experienced an epiphany. I can't explain it. I felt as if I had
been in the presence of Jesus. Not wanting to go right home, I
pulled into a fast-food restaurant to get something to drink.
As we sat there looking at each other, tears began to stream down
our faces. What was happening to us? What was God asking of us?

Our lives were literally being pushed toward the Catholic Church.
Regan had introduced us to the owners of the local Catholic bookstore,
so we decided to go there for more information. Lee and Anita
lovingly welcomed us and pointed us to exactly what we needed.

When we figured our income tax at the end of that year, we discovered
that we had spent over $5,000 on books, cassettes, videos, and
other materials in search of spiritual truths! We couldn't get
enough. We were in Lee's store three and four times a day.

"We're here for our Catholic fix," we'd say. Lee and Anita would
just laugh and point us to another book, cassette, or video. It
was like an addiction that we couldn't get satisfied. One question
just led to another and another. It was a wonderful experience.

We began going to bed later and waking up earlier, trying to jam
as much reading into the day as possible. We decided to maximize
our time. I began taking Joetta to work and picking her up so
that we could read aloud coming and going.

I would pick her up for lunch, put a couple of lawn chairs and
TV trays in the trunk, and drive to a park so that we could read
without interruptions. We took turns: One would eat while the
other would read aloud. We did everything together. God was graciously
speaking to us together, drawing us at the same pace deeper into
Himself.

We read the
Catechism of the Catholic Church
from cover to cover.
The
Catechism
is the greatest systematic theological work we have
ever read. Answers to long-sought-after questions were coming
like torrential showers.

I remember one Saturday morning in particular. We both woke up
about four o'clock in the morning. We sat up in bed, each with
a Bible in one hand and a
Catechism
in the other.

I would say, "Joetta, listen to this. This is fantastic. This
just brings everything into focus!"

Before I would finish, Joetta would interrupt and say, "Larry,
wait, wait. Listen to this!" She would then read from a different
section of the
Catechism.

We would read supporting Scripture verses, go to the writings
of the early Church Fathers, and then check a commentary. Before
we knew it, it was one o'clock in the afternoon!

We were like sponges. We began to see in a whole new light issues
such as the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the role
of Mary in the Church, prayers to the saints, Scripture and Tradition
as authoritative vs.
sola scriptura,
papal authority, purgatory,
and salvation as a process vs. salvation as a completed work.
It was like finding all the lost pieces in a huge theological
puzzle. The full picture was becoming clear.

The Lord was taking us down two paths simultaneously, one intellectual
and the other emotional. We had been praying the rosary and parking
ourselves on Bob and Johanna's sofa, asking question after question
about Catholic doctrine, tradition, and culture. We asked God
to reveal to us somehow if He was drawing us to the Catholic Church,
because none of this made any sense to us.

We had spent all of our lives in Protestant churches and were
quite content in our ministry. We desperately needed to know about
the Church to which God was calling us, so three short weeks into
our conversion, I prayed this prayer: "Father, if you are drawing
us into the Catholic Church, I want a sign, and I want it big."

Several days later on our way home from a short trip to Dallas,
we witnessed the largest, most vivid sunset either of us had ever
seen. It went from horizon to horizon, and we thought we were
going to drive right into it -- an indescribable array of colors:
orange, red, and pink. It was magnificent, so much so that our
young grandson, who was sleeping in the backseat, sat up and said,
"Grandpa, Grandpa, do you see that? Isn't it beautiful?" As brilliant
as it was, we could look right at it.

As the sun went down, we put in a cassette tape by Dr. Scott Hahn
and continued toward Oklahoma City. As I looked into the night
sky, I prayed again silently, "O God, if you're drawing us into
the Catholic Church, give us a sign, and please make it big!"

At the same time, unknown to me, Joetta was staring out the passenger
window, silently praying, "Blessed Mother, if you're real, we
have to know beyond a doubt." Suddenly, I heard Joetta gasp and
say, "Oh, my, Larry, Larry, look!"

As I looked to the right, I saw what looked like a chain of stars
falling in slow motion at a downward angle from right to left.
Just before the stars reached the horizon, they shot straight
up and then fell back toward the earth again, falling right in
the center of the highway. Usually a falling star shoots downward
and moves so quickly you don't have time to tell anyone about
it.

We were speechless, because we both saw it! Finally Joetta broke
the silence, saying, "You did see that, didn't you?" We were both
visibly shaken.

I put in a cassette by Catholic singer Dana in which she sings
through the rosary, and for the next hour and thirty minutes,
we prayed the rosary with her. We finished just as we reached
the exit road going toward our parsonage. As we turned under the
freeway and went up over a little hill, there, sitting on the
road in front of us, was the most beautiful, enormous, vivid quarter-moon
we had ever seen.

Like the sunset, it seemed literally to sit in the middle of the
road, and it extended as high into the sky as we had seen the
sun. For two and a half miles, we watched in total silence. As
we turned into our driveway, the moon disappeared.

"Joetta," I asked, "what does all of this remind you of?"

"Revelation, chapter 12," she said. "'A great and wondrous sign
appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon
under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.'"

At that moment, we knew not only that the Holy Spirit was bringing
us to the Catholic Church, but that Mary was leading the way.

Two months later, Joetta and I knelt in a small chapel on the
University of Tulsa campus and prayed the prayer of Consecration
to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our love for her is without bounds.
I had been afraid that she would somehow take away from my love
for Jesus, but what I found was that my love for Him has deepened
beyond measure. Truly, our cup runs over!

On September 12, 1997, I surrendered my ordination papers to Bishop
Bruce Blake of the United Methodist Church. In doing so, I laid
down thirty years of Protestant ministry to become a Catholic.
To many of my colleagues, this seemed a horrible mistake, but
to Joetta and me, it was "coming home."

In January 1998, we made a pilgrimage to Rome to symbolize our
desire to place ourselves under the authority of Pope John Paul
II and the Catholic Church. In March, we made a pilgrimage to
a Marian site in Eastern Europe to thank the Blessed Mother for
bringing us into the Church. And finally on Easter Vigil, with
great anticipation, Joetta and I were received into full communion
with the Catholic Church.

This was the culmination of a twenty-three-month, life-transforming
odyssey. Thank you, Mary, for loving us home.

Larry Lewis passed away in January 2004. He had a Master of Divinity
degree from Phillips Theological Seminary and had been a doctoral
candidate at Oral Roberts University, where his doctoral research
was on Catholic apologetics. Joetta currently lives in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. They have three married daughters and five grandchildren.

former United Methodist minister

EARLY YEARS AND SEMINARY

EMERGING QUESTIONS

UNITY IN STRUCTURE AND FAITH

BECOMING CATHOLIC

For nine years, I served the Lord Jesus Christ as a United Methodist
pastor in New Jersey. For five of those years, I had no thought
of being anything else. I had a growing congregation, I was happy
in my denomination and pleased with my prospects, and I was satisfied.

I believed that denominations were not only inevitable but good.
Since Christians would always disagree about their beliefs and
practices, having different denominations kept them from fighting.
I didn't believe that visible or doctrinal unity was necessary
for the Church.

At the same time, I insisted strongly on my own beliefs, which
were defined largely by Wesleyan orthodoxy. I believed strongly
that churches needed to teach doctrinal truth (which I still believe).
The Christian faith was what it was, and the big things were not
up for grabs.

I had been a lifelong Protestant, but I didn't grow up with a
strongly defined religious identity. Until I was seven, my parents
were active Methodists, but when we moved to Schenectady, New
York, my mother (a nurse) worked every weekend and my father was
never again involved with any church. I think the infighting common
to Protestant congregations gave him a distaste for church life.

Even so, my brothers and I were sent to Sunday school at the nearest
church, Calvary Orthodox Presbyterian. There I received an excellent
grounding in the Bible and a Christian faith that I never lost
(although my practice of it was inconsistent until in college
I met a woman named Pat, who was to become my wife).

From my days at Princeton Theological Seminary, I believed in
the authority of the early Church to speak definitively on the
content of the Christian faith. I had no doubt that the Councils
of Nicaea and Chalcedon, for instance, spoke with the authority
of the Holy Spirit. What I had not thought about much was what
happened to that authority in the centuries since.

I suppose I had the idea that the authority stayed in the Catholic
Church (having nowhere else to go) until the Reformation and then
made a lateral move to the Protestants. Nor was I concerned that
the bishops at Nicaea who insisted on the divinity of Christ also
insisted on His bodily presence in the Eucharist. The apostolic
faith is all of a piece, but I did not know that yet.

Another important experience at seminary was reading Blessed John
Henry Newman's
Apologia Pro Vita Sua,
his story of how he converted
from the Anglican to the Catholic faith by searching for the "Catholic
tradition" in the Church of England. I had never thought much
about tradition and authority. I took it for granted that different
churches have different beliefs and that it was just a matter
of personal preference as to which church one joined.

Newman, however, described a Church that commanded assent, whose
beliefs and visible form were both grounded in the teaching of
the Apostles. I longed for such a Church. I was transfixed and,
as Newman discovered that the Catholic tradition was found in
the Catholic Church, I couldn't find any flaws in his argument.
I wondered whether I ought to become Catholic.

Pat's response to this was firm: "I don't want to hear that! You
came here to become a Protestant minister. I want to have children,
and I don't want any more changes!"

At that point, I wasn't prepared to pursue the issue myself, either.
The matter was dropped -- not resolved, but put aside -- though
I took a rather "high church" approach to Methodism.

After my graduation and I was into my pastorate, I began to have
questions about the basis of my denomination. John Wesley intended
Methodism to be a spiritual renewal movement within the Church
of England, not a separate denomination. He had an Anglican view
of the Church, sacraments, and ordination (though he was not always
consistent).

His successors, however, lacked that view, and though they kept
many of the externals, there was no unified perspective with which
to replace Wesley's view. The result was a denomination with a
somewhat sacramental appearance but little sacramental theology,
with strong central authority and no doctrinal authority, with
an ecumenical emphasis (at least with other liberal Protestant
denominations) but suspicion of any attempt to define what Christians
must believe.

For years, Pat had felt something missing in her relationships
with the congregations we'd been part of without knowing what
she wanted. She thought it came from wanting children, and then
the isolation of being a new mother with my being gone so much
as a pastor. This issue came to a head in 1992 and 1993, when
tensions with some in the congregation left her feeling totally
cut off from the church and wishing desperately that she could
belong to some other church.

I didn't want to consider it. "You can't do that!" I said. "I'm
the minister!" It was not a helpful response, but then it's hard
to cope with the fact that the minister's job is tied to his wife's
spiritual community.