How I Became Catholic Part Two: The True

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth” - C.S. Lewis

Some more recalcitrant atheists say that Christianity is mere wish fulfillment. Bronze-age peasants must have made up heaven and a long-haired hunky savior to ward off their fears of rotting in their graves, they claim. I, a former agnostic, am here to report that I had wish fulfillment of the opposite sort: I wished the whole Christian story wasn’t true.

In line with that wish, I chose to forget about the Catholic Church. Summer came and with it, my first real boyfriend, Thomas. Thomas was pivotal in my journey towards the faith, for reasons that will become clear. It was definitely not because he was Catholic — we were both agnostics, though he flirted with paganism on occasion. The important thing was that Thomas was a lapsed Catholic, and the first one (lapsed or otherwise) I had ever met.¹

The relationship was doomed from the start; I even had the presence of mind to note that fact in my journal. Even so, I learned a lot about myself during our relationship. I gradually learned how to stand up for my beliefs through our biweekly tiffs about politics. I gleaned that while I was amenable to tolerating a diversity of opinions about social issues, he was not. To him, a nonreligious liberal, I was a heretic.

In the early stages of our relationship, when we were tiptoeing around politics, we discussed death. I told him that I was quite congruent with taking a dirt nap and never waking up — what would I know anyway? In actuality, I was more concerned that if I woke up at my Final Judgment, it would prove that I happened to be on the wrong side of a really important bet. Hell would actually exist and I would probably go there, in part due to my sinful behavior with Thomas. Not a happy thought!

In my sophomore year, I was knee deep in psychology classes.² During that time, I still felt haunted by some sort of deity, despite my birth control-induced fog. I had good friends and a moderately healthy social life, yet I still chose to argue with the Mormon missionaries on the quadrangle, and marvel at the doomsday preachers that would stop by our campus once a semester. That was about as close as I got to true religion though — my mom had ceased her well-meaning overtures amidst my railing at her for “shoving Christianity down my throat.”

This was a common sight on my campus.

However, I did get closer to philosophy.³ In my wrestling with God, I had come to believe that if there was a supreme being out there — an unlikely story — he was probably a disinterested one. I conjured up a fitting metaphor of an absent-minded watchmaker, with Earth as one of his many timepieces. He likely wound our world up six billion years ago and left us to rot. A distant God suited me just fine, and perfectly aligned with my perception of the other authority figures in my life.

In the fall of 2019, my junior year, I finally took my first philosophy class — Contemporary Moral Issues. It was taught by a C.S. Lewis expert and metaphysician by the name of Dr. Garcia. It is difficult to overstate the effect that this professor and his classes had on me. In fact, just hanging around the philosophy building on campus where he taught inspired all sorts of serendipity.

One day, I had just emerged from a philosophy seminar, and a random student approached me and struck up a conversation. At the end of our chat, he recommended a classic treatise from Aristotle: the Nicomachean Ethics. By this time, I was already knee deep in a few other books, searching for an answer to my metaphysical questions, so I added the Aristotle book to the bottom of my growing stack.

My AI-generated dream where Aristotle talks metaphysics with Lao Tzi

The book I was reading at that time was the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzi. As far as Eastern philosophies go, Taoism seemed like the only one that held any promise for me. I got about three-quarters of the way through the short read before I put it aside in frustration. “Certainly, the Eternal Way is more fleshed out than this, right?” I thought. While I took what I could from Lao Tzi, his philosophy seemed far more apt for a Socrates-type sage living out in the woods. Lao was not in the business of telling me how I should live in the here and now, and I was nowhere closer to becoming one with the Way after reading his book.

After Taoism, I knew I had to turn West. Buddhism and Hinduism held no appeal, mostly because I still could not shake the brute historical fact from my head that Jesus of Nazareth was real. Unfortunately for me, there were only three religions that had anything substantive to say about him — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and all of them had a lot (too much) to say about morality. So I put the decision on hold while I absorbed my lessons from Dr. Garcia.

Twice a week, we discussed the key moral disputes of our times: cultural relativism, veganism and speciesism, and the ethics of self-driving cars, to name a few. Throughout the course, each student had to give a presentation in front of the class on some ethical topic and face critique of their arguments. Dr. Garcia was always charitable in these often tense moments, only asking questions in an attempt to encourage us to either shore up our reasoning or change it.

I remember one particular day when a female student got up and used her tight five to argue for the merits of cultural relativism. I also remember the male student who claimed that nihilism and materialism were the only reasonable philosophies to believe. Both of these speeches garnered religious indignation from me. “How could it be logically coherent to argue that chattel slavery may be right for one culture but wrong for another?” I thought. “And if nihilism is true, why not just kill yourself then?”

Thankfully, the class gave me the words and schemas to take my heightened emotional reactions and steer them to more reasonable conclusions. It helped me to see that I did believe in a “big t” Truth, what C.S. Lewis affectionately calls the Tao in The Abolition of Man. Accordingly, my nihilism was slowly dissipating, as the whole idea sounded so silly when I heard it articulated out loud. Of course, there had to be universal moral truths. If there were none, we could not even argue coherently about them!

Though I was thrilled by the class, some of my more theological questions were left unanswered. To clear things up, I visited Dr. Garcia in office hours. I knew he was a Christian of some sort, so I told him about my main hang-ups with the Abrahamic religions: 1) the Problem of Evil or “Why do bad things happen to good people?” and 2) Divine Hiddenness or “If God wanted me to follow Him, wouldn’t He make it more obvious?” 

After a long discussion, I left Dr. Garcia’s office with a lot to think about and three new books: God and the Philosophers, Philosophers Without Gods, and Imagine Heaven. The first two were books containing short biographical vignettes from religious philosophers and atheist ones, respectively. I skimmed both of them, but Imagine Heaven, a book chronicling near death experiences (NDEs), was the one that really captured my attention.

In my own words, “the book made it hard to dispute that there is something more.” Whatever you may think about NDEs and their validity, there is a surprising level of consistency in reports about the afterlife. Common reports from NDErs include their souls floating above their body, a lightning-fast review of their life events, and the overwhelming sense of feeling loved. Some of them even see Jesus, regardless of whether or not they knew of him before they died.

What AI thinks the Final Judgement could look like. Not bad.

Upon returning the books to Dr. Garcia in the spring of 2020, I began taking his C.S. Lewis class. We read Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, and many of Lewis’ letters, speeches, and biographies. Mere Christianity was my favorite because it was an apologetic text that even I, a baby philosopher, could grasp. This class was also more explicitly theological; we discussed a lot of “isms:” “fideism,” “ietsism,” “supernaturalism,” “deism,” “theism,” and “monotheism.”

As any true psychologist-in-training would, I tried to self-diagnose myself along this spectrum of belief. Was I a follower of ietsism — one of those “spiritual, but not religious” types? Certainly not, as even I was not keen on undertaking the level of wishful thinking necessary for that belief.⁴ Still, I was not ready to take the monotheistic plunge. I told myself that I had to exhaust all of my options first. Thankfully, another class was enabling me to do just that, and at Mach speed.

That spring, I had the dubious privilege of having a socialist professor. He taught my science fiction literature course and, similar to my C.S. Lewis class, we only read books by one author — Ursula K. Le Guin — and her influences. To my great psychological pain, I had to read snippets of Ayn Rand, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and other modern and postmodern philosophers.

Oh, how I disagreed with these philosophers. In my February 2020 notes, I say as much: “I disagree quite strongly with him [Nietszche] and his idea that humans ascribe meaning onto things and that nothing has inherent value.” The rest of the postmoderns believed much of the same, so I dismissed them after cursory review. However, I was grateful for my newfound understanding of the philosophies that most Westerners, without their knowledge, are clinging to.

My nihilistic materialism was well and truly dead at this point, and with its burial came the steady unraveling of my relationship with my materialist boyfriend. This unraveling was accelerated by the sudden COVID-19 shutdown in March. By mid-April, I hadn’t seen Thomas for weeks, as we vehemently disagreed over what level of contact was safe according to the Science and the Experts.

With this “social distancing to stop the spread” came clarity. Suddenly, I realized that I wanted to get married and have children someday.⁵ Moreover, I wanted to raise those children in the church, whatever that might mean. By the end of April, I had further resolved to be honest about my desires, even though it hurt. By June, I had to be honest with myself and break it off with Thomas, a man I saw no future with.

I wish I could say the breakup was painfully sad, but in actuality, I was just angry. Angry at myself for wasting a year and a half of my life, and angry at him for his unjust treatment of me. After a few days, my wrath had cooled and Thomas and I interacted one last time to debrief. We were both part of the same friend group, so we had some tricky waters to navigate.

It was June 15th, 2020. We talked. I knew with complete certainty and peace that it was over. To send off the relationship, I drank with reckless abandon that night. With similar abandon, my entire friend group played board games, also drank way too much, and stayed up very late, raising our glasses to a plane-free night sky.

That same night, I became dimly aware of another person in our squad who I had written off as a possible partner — my Polish Catholic ex-boyfriend from high school that I had dated for all of three months. He was being awfully friendly and sitting awfully close, and I couldn't tell if it was due to the alcohol or genuine feeling. I would soon find out.

1. I had actually met many other Catholics before Thomas, but none of them ever discussed their faith.

2. I am sure the Enemy was pleased by this development, as there are few fields more godless than the field of psychology.

3. As an aside, the only other run-in I had with philosophy that year was a kitschy “Which philosopher are you” quiz that I took, in which I got the infamous existentialist and philanderer Jean-Paul Sartre. Yikes.

4. See Chapter Four of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity

5. I also had detoxed from birth control pills by this point, so take from that what you will.