About the author: Deborah Gyapong’s journalism career included 17 years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where she spent 12 years as a television producer in news and current affairs. For 15 years, she covered national affairs and the Catholic Church for a network of Catholic newspapers across Canada. She retired in 2019.
Her novel The Defilers won the Best New Canadian Author Award in 2005 from The Word Guild. It was published in 2006. She is the past president of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, an organization that promotes Anglican and English Catholic patrimony within the Catholic Church. She is an active member of Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a parish of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.
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I grew up in the Boston area during the 1950s, when most Americans went to church on Sundays. Chrismated as an infant by a Russian Orthodox priest, I was not brought up Orthodox. My parents were not believers, so we only attended Russian Orthodox services occasionally—for weddings, funerals, and the odd special service such as Easter.
My parents sent me to a variety of Protestant Sunday schools so I would be able to understand various biblical allusions in literature. They wanted me to know about Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel and the Sermon on the Mount because it was part of what it meant in those days to be educated.
My dad used to refer to himself as a “mercenary Episcopalian” because he got paid to sing in some of the top church choirs in the Boston area. I would sometimes accompany him to the Anglo-Catholic Church of the Advent but the long wait in the pews through rehearsal and the service was boring for a little girl.
My mom had been traumatized as a child by Orthodox priests and leaders in the White Russian exile community in pre-World War II Paris. She recalled being reprimanded harshly for drawing a Nativity scene on a blackboard. “How dare you write an Icon!” someone said to her. She felt more allegiance to the Unitarian Church because the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee had rescued her and her sister in 1941 and hundreds of other hunted children, Jewish and stateless like my mother, from the Nazis by bringing them to the United States. The Unitarians were able to bring my maternal grandparents to America a year later.
In high school, I began attending Unitarian services and participating in a youth group. Unitarians don’t believe in the Trinity or any creed. One minister I met used to like talking about ESP. By the time I went to college in the late 1960s, I was ripe for the pernicious ideas of the time including radical feminism and its rejection of traditional social mores.
Oddly though, I was drawn to religion in college and I would have majored in it had learning Greek, Hebrew or Latin not been a requirement. Reading Christian writers such as Thomas a Kempis or The Cloud of Unknowing resonated with something spiritual alive in me from my baptism. I also enjoyed studying Eastern Religions though, and I would have described myself then as a seeker.
After graduation with a degree in sociology, I had to settle for a secretarial job in a stock brokerage firm, a job I resented terribly but it paid the bills.
Unhappy at work and in my relationships with men, I was veering into New Age spirituality, and forms of divination like the I Ching, Astrology, and dabbling in a bit of magic.
By this time I believed, like so many of my Boomer cohort, that life was meaningless, absurd. I harbored a lot of anger, blame and resentment about the oppression of women and prejudice against the black race. Needless to say, these beliefs contributed to ongoing depression and an inner feeling of deadness. My friends and I would search for parties on the weekend in order to smoke dope together and hang out. We had no real moral structure for our relationships since we had rejected what was conventional. But that led to lots of emotional risk-taking, psychological and spiritual damage, hurt and jealousy.
When I was 23 years old, I had a profound experience on a psychedelic drug. I was told it was mescaline. The man I was with—who I later discovered was a con artist—asked me how I felt about getting married, about having a family. I wanted very much to give him an honest answer, even though I was hallucinating and finding it hard to talk. I examined myself to find an honest answer. I had mused about getting my tubes tied so as to never bring children into this terrible world and I had ruled out marriage like the fox in the Aesop Fable ruled out the sour grapes. I realized these were lies. I searched deeper and saw lie after lie that I believed propped up by layers and layers of resentment and blame.
I kept searching for an honest answer and encountered a Presence and a Love so profound, so real, so much more real than any of the lies and fears that made up my sense of reality. I began to weep and felt like my tears were washing over my head. It was perhaps one of the most profound experiences of deep contrition and repentance I have ever experienced.
Because of my immersion in the New Age, I did not have a language for what had happened, but it was clear to me that life did have meaning and at the heart of Reality was a Presence of overwhelming love and goodness. At the time the words of the twenty-third Psalm: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (KJV) seemed alive with meaning. I felt lifted out of the fear and anxiety that had nearly crippled me emotionally.
The problem was that I still had the old friends and the old habits that pulled me back into my self-destructive lifestyle. Six months after the first drug experience, I was going on rounds with a drug dealer and snorting cocaine with him at various stops. He told me, “Oh by the way, that was mescaline you just did.” I thought, “great, I’ll have another wonderful experience like the last time.”
He left me alone in his apartment in a dangerous section of Boston. The basement apartment had been partially gutted, with piles of plaster and laths in piles. The bedroom had a bare mattress and a black and white TV on a stand. At first, I felt fine being alone, expecting a good trip like the last one.
I began to feel like I was surrounded by demonic spirits trying to take me over. I tried turning on the TV and a man dressed like the devil to announce the late-night movie was glaring at me with the most hate-filled, malevolent eyes. Then he seemed to leap out of the TV at me. I shut off the TV, shaking with terror.
Terrified, I tried praying things I remembered from Sunday school, such as the Lord’s Prayer. I paced back and forth by the piles of plaster declaring “I want to live.” I feared I would lose my mind and go running off into the night and whatever was oozing up in ghostly shapes would take me over.
Everything I turned to for comfort failed. My prayers pinged off the ceiling. I tried cleaning up the marijuana seeds and stems covering a stack of newspapers by the bare mattress in the bedroom, thinking cleaning up might bring order out of chaos. Underneath the newspapers, (the drug dealer read the New York Times, oddly enough) I found a book entitled “Hey God!” by Frank Foglio. It was about the adventures an Italian Mama had with the Holy Spirit—a book I found out later had been hastily written as part of the 1970s charismatic renewal. Somebody had been trying to evangelize the drug dealer!
I found that reading the book was very difficult. The evil in the room swelled and pulsated around me. The pages kept turning colors. It was hard to read, as if I could only read one or two words at a time, like they were closed captions appearing on a screen. Amidst stories such as Mama “multiplying” the spaghetti by praying over it when unexpected guests showed up for dinner, Foglio laid out the Gospel—do you acknowledge you are a sinner? Do you accept Jesus as your personal Savior?
In desperation I said Yes! to everything! I accept Jesus as my Savior! I will surrender my life to Him! Get me out of here! The room still seemed to swirl and swell with demonic energy. I clung to the book and kept reading until I came to a passage from Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.”
This seemed like a command to stop bargaining and stop struggling. To obey and be still. To stop trying to save myself and to rest and trust. It was extremely difficult to be still but I pressed in. God’s presence filled the room and the demonic turmoil ceased. His presence was sterner this time, as if God the Father was saying to me, “Look at the mess you got yourself into this time.”
I continued reading about how all of heaven rejoices when one sinner repents and I could feel heaven rejoicing. The sense of being repentant and rescued filled me with overwhelming relief and joy. When the drug dealer showed up to drive me home the next morning, I felt like I could go knocking on doors to tell people about Jesus, the way Mama did in the book.
My life made a 180 turn then. I quit any experimentation with drugs. I even quit smoking cigarettes. However, when you are at minus 500 the pilgrimage had some dark places and days yet ahead.
This began my lonely pilgrim stage where I was earnestly seeking to know God and considered myself a Christian, but I was “spiritual and not religious” and had a “personal relationship with Jesus” but didn’t feel the need for any church to tell me what to believe. It was me and Jesus and He would help me intuit things and no one was going to be able to tell me differently.
At that time, I had come across a spiritual exercise of silent contemplation that helped me enter into God’s presence and listen to Him, and experienced a great deal of repentance and unpeeling of the resentments and unforgiveness that bogged me down. It also helped me to rise above and observe how my negative thinking was harming me. Often just observing the negativity in the present moment in God’s presence without judging it was enough to have it dissolve. But without a solid faith formation and the guidance of true religion, I still wandered about, dabbling in Christian Science and Swedenborgianism among other things.
During this time, I met a man who showed up at the Swedenborg Library in Boston where I was working. He was smelling of alcohol and over lunch in a Chinese greasy spoon restaurant he said to me, “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you.” He meant that he foresaw we would marry. I discovered broken glass in my food and had to spit it out.
He had a serious drinking problem. I had no experience of alcoholism. I thought since I had made my 180 turn, I could help him make one too. He was handsome and came from similar educational background and so on, though from a far more dysfunctional family. He was a binge drinker so he could have periods of sobriety, which tricked me in my illusion that I could help him change.
He had inherited a small amount of money and was looking for cheap land in Nova Scotia because he was a Vietnam War draft dodger. We were both inclining towards being preppers and living a bit off the grid. We moved to Canada in 1975 and eventually bought a small rundown farm near Bear River near the Fundy Coast. He was sober for about 18 months, but seriously fell off the wagon during my second pregnancy. The suffering during this time—seeing the man I loved committing slow suicide and eventually behaving towards us in ways that no self-respecting person could endure—forced me to my knees in prayer. It was unendurable otherwise.
I would sometimes put my nearly two-year-old son in day care and go to the little Anglican church across the street and pray for a couple of hours like the importunate woman banging on the judge’s door, not leaving until Jesus granted me His peace and consolation. I had no choice but to be importunate because the pain, the anger and anguish were unbearable. Thankfully, my experience of God’s love on that first drug trip helped me know He was real, that He loved me, that He was there if I could push past the emotional turmoil and outward circumstances to touch the hem of His garment. During this time, God revealed how faithful He is. Despite my world falling apart around me, with our financial and emotional security in jeopardy, I had many times of great joy and peace in the Lord and a secure sense of His faithfulness.
The relationship became untenable. Eventually, my husband left for the United States. I now had two little boys in diapers to raise on a dilapidated farm. I sold real estate for a year, often taking the boys with me because I could not afford a babysitter. Then God’s providence brought me to my first journalism job and the beginning of a career that took me from print to radio to television. I spent 17 years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 12 years of that time as a television producer in news and current affairs.
I eventually married again to the man the Church recognizes as my true husband. He raised my boys. Home life was happy. We moved to Ottawa. My career was taking off. But oddly, as well as everything was going, there was something missing. I had often had more inner joy during my time of great suffering than I did during this time of domestic peace and happiness.
A neighbor suggested I try Kanata Baptist Church. The first thing I said to the pastor when I met him was something like this: “I’m a heretic and a maverick, and have never been able to sign on the dotted line of any church I’ve gone to.”
“Maybe this church is big enough for you,” said Pastor Doug Ward. I will be forever thankful for his welcome and the good teaching and fellowship this seeker-friendly church gave me. It exposed to me to good but gentle teaching and fellowship with mature, bible-believing Christians. As a few years went by, I found my heresies were no longer so appealing. I was no longer clutching them or feeling a need to defend them as part of my identity.
I also benefited from the teachings of a charismatic pastor named Penn Clark who taught a Winter Bible School on “Cultivating your Gifts and Calling” that went on for about 10 weeks every Saturday in Kanata. Penn taught about headship and authority, about hierarchy in ways that prepared me eventually for becoming Catholic.
A major turning point was a conference called “Stomping out the Darkness” put on by Neil Anderson’s Freedom in Christ ministries. Anderson’s Book, The Bondage Breaker was a bestseller at that time in Evangelical circles.
Part of the conference involved going through a series of prayers renouncing various occult activities, dabbling in false religions, unforgiveness, sexual sins—a comprehensive list of things to confess, renounce and then ask for God’s forgiveness and blessing. I had resisted this kind of renouncing activity previously because I thought that some of the things I had learned in say Christian Science or even New Age were true and I didn’t want to renounce anything that was true. I told myself I could renounce them and God would preserve anything that was true.
The change in me after doing those prayers was profound. I had had to fight a lot against negative mental chatter and the prayer observation exercise helped a great deal with overcoming it for a time but it could still be a problem if I was not guarding against it. Now the chatter was gone.
The prayers and God’s grace had apparently closed doorways I had inadvertently opened in my dabbling in the occult and in entertaining false beliefs. When I looked back at some of the things I had thought were true I could see they were laced with poison. A veil had been lifted. Needless to say, I got rid of a lot of books!
Neil Anderson’s teachings stressed having a firm statement of belief—basically the Nicene Creed in Protestant language—to ensure one maintained one’s freedom in Christ. I had previously sought to understand before I believed and there were some things I knew beyond doubt to be true, such as God’s amazing love, but so much else I didn’t understand or know. Now I took on St. Anselm’s motto “Credo ut intelligam.” I believe in order that I may understand, and what a difference that has made in helping me walk more confidently in the Spirit.
I interviewed Neil Anderson during my time as a journalist, when I was either already Catholic or close to being Catholic. I was able to thank him for his teachings. He told me he was reading Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth.
Meanwhile, I was being drawn more towards tradition and liturgy. My favorite Bible translation has always been the King James Version and I loved the language of the Book of Common Prayer. I would occasionally go to an Anglican church and I loved the kneeling and reverence during the service.
Around 1999 or 2000, I discovered the little dollhouse Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (ABVM) in Ottawa, a part of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, that had broken away from the Anglican Communion of Canterbury in the late 1970s over the ordination of women. Obviously, my previous radical feminism by then was a relic of the past and the idea of an all- male priesthood was fine with me.
I was about 50 when I encountered ABVM and was among the youngest attendees. Its tiny, eccentric congregation seemed dominated by women much older and some of them quite crotchety. But the liturgy!!! The bell would ring. The priests and the bishop would process in and begin their ballet of reverence and genuflection towards the Blessed Sacrament.
This tiny place with red indoor-outdoor carpeting and gray linoleum tiles was a cathedral and Bishop Robert Mercer, a monk of Irish extraction who grew up in Rhodesia and had been Anglican Bishop of Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, was our bishop. He had left the Anglican Communion over the ordination of women and came to frozen Canada to lead us.
Bishop Mercer prayed the Mass with such recollection in that beautiful Book of Common Prayer poetic sacral language that it was as if I experienced heaven coming down to earth or us being lifted to heaven. The liturgy and his faith and that of Fr. Carl Reid and Fr. Kipling Cooper communicated intuitively so much about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Faith is imparted by so much more than words on a page.
I was told that the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada was part of the Traditional Anglican Communion and that it had been in informal talks with Rome about coming into the Communion of the Catholic Church. I was told about women’s ordination: “You can’t change a sacrament in a revealed religion by democracy. What are you going to change next, marriage?” It all made sense and seemed deeply biblical.
Thus, my pilgrimage shifted from the life raft of Mere Christianity represented by Kanata Baptist and its sincere simple evangelical faith to albeit a much tinier boat that had its compass set sailing towards the Barque of Peter with the discarded treasures of catholic tradition secure in its hold, treasures the Canterbury Communion had been throwing overboard.
I had left the CBC in 2000 around the time I began attending ABVM. I worked briefly in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition under Stockwell Day in communications. The Liberals attacked Day for being an Evangelical Christian and the mainstream media jumped aboard. A cover of Mclean’s Magazine had a picture of Day with the Caption “How Scary!” across it. It was a disturbing immersion into the lies and fear-mongering that dominate our political discourse and have only become worse.
It was intensely stressful as Day was also experiencing an internal mutiny. Coming to Mass and having the bell ring and the priests take over worship was such a relief.
Thus began my long catechesis and preparation for becoming Catholic.
When Stephen Harper became leader of the newly merged Canadian Alliance Party, he fired me and several other social conservatives that Stockwell Day had hired. I soon returned to journalism, working as the national correspondent for a network of Roman Catholic papers across the country called Canadian Catholic News. I covered national politics, Supreme Court decisions—there were some doozies over the years on marriage, on euthanasia, on transgender identity—and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Writing about the church was also a great opportunity for catechesis and I had the privilege of meeting a number of holy, inspiring prelates. I managed to make several trips to Rome and got to meet both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, each for brief encounters in a receiving line. I was still an Anglican Catholic when I met Pope Benedict and told him I brought him greetings from Bishop Peter Wilkinson who had succeeded Bishop Mercer upon his retirement. Wilkinson had had a private correspondence with then Cardinal Ratzinger for several years during the 1990s. The pope’s face lit up with a big smile, “Send him my greetings!” he said. This was in July 2009. Little did I know that Anglicanorum coetibus, the document providing for personal ordinariates for Anglicans wishing to become Catholic while retaining elements of their patrimony, was probably in the works at that time.
I happened to be at the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Annual Plenary when news came in October 2009 that Pope Benedict would be making a provision for Anglicans to become Catholic. I thought my heart would burst with joy at the news.
Anglicanorum coetibus came out officially in November 2009. After the joy subsided from the initial publication, the sailing to the Barque of Peter became choppy and difficult. It seemed that our tiny little group of traditional Anglicans was viewed by many in the Catholic hierarchy with contempt, as schismatics, likely to scare away any “real Anglicans” the document was meant to attract.
There was also a lot of uncertainty about how everything would come about and whether any of our priests would be allowed to become Catholic priests.
We faced internal difficulties as well. Several of our communities across Canada either underwent painful splits or left to join other Anglican bodies. ABVM experienced the loss of about one third of its members. Many perhaps assumed that entering the Catholic Church was way off in the future or likely to never happen. When it was now imminent, they balked. Strange anti-Catholic sentiments bubbled up in some people. Others faced irregular marriage situations they did not want examined or judged by the Church.
I personally underwent a difficult time which I now think in retrospect was a form of spiritual warfare. It was as if I had strange glasses on that magnified every flaw, every sinful shortcoming of people in the Catholic Church to the extent that it obscured the beauty of the faith. Many of us struggled a bit with the Marian dogmas, myself included. I was only getting to know Mary at that time and I forget what the particular faith impasse was that I had reached. I think it had to do with whether this really was Christ’s Church since all I was seeing was her massive flaws. I asked her to send me a sign. Well, she did. Three of them.
Bishop Wilkinson was leading our tiny flock from Victoria, B.C. We had hoped we would be received more corporately but the Church insisted on individual reception and even our undergoing RCIA!!!!. There had been some haggling and difficulty with all this and a feeling among us that we were not respected or desired. It felt as if we were being told, “So, you want to become Catholic? How high can we raise the bar for you to jump over.”
Bishop Wilkinson visited the then Bishop of Victoria, Bishop Richard Gagnon, who said to him, “Why don’t you just come in!” So, Bishop Wilkinson decided everyone would come in around Easter.
For our Anglican Catholic Church scattered across Canada and experiencing splits and turmoil, it was like a flock of birds murmurating and experiencing a bit of confusion when suddenly a lead bird tips and the whole flock tips simultaneously.
Across the country, each little community decided to follow the bishop’s lead. No more negotiations or attempts at conditions. Here we come! As soon as the decision was made, even though I still had marriage issues yet to be fully straightened out, all the sense of spiritual warfare and conflict lifted. I looked forward with joy to coming home, confident everything would fall into place.
And our decision to come in unconditionally made the Catholic bishops aware they had to now take us seriously.
Archbishop Prendergast received our community of about 40 people (some of them shut-ins whom he visited individually) on April 15, 2012, Divine Mercy Sunday. He brought the most beautiful gold vestments from his cathedral for the Mass at St. Patrick’s Basilica. About 700 Catholics were there to welcome us. A glorious day.
While for us lay people, the joy of becoming Catholic was palpable, our priests faced massive uncertainty for well over a year or more. They had to operate as laymen, even though our Anglican Catholic beliefs about the indelible nature of the priesthood were the same. It was agonizing for them. The archbishop had given us a mentor priest in Fr. Francis Donnelly of the Companions of the Cross who celebrated our liturgy with reverence.
Eventually our priests, all married, received their rescripts from Rome and we had the joy of attending their ordinations first as Catholic deacons, then as priests.
But that was not all. Eventually, under Pope Francis, our Divine Worship: The Missal was approved. It provided us with appendices and options that enabled us to worship very similarly to how we had as Anglo-Catholics with many of the same prayers in the beautiful sacral English of the Book of Common Prayer.
While at times the journey looked impossible and those at our destination unwelcoming, those impressions proved to be illusions. God has been most generous and welcoming to us in His Church and as Pope Benedict wrote in Anglicanorum coetibus:
“Without excluding liturgical celebrations according to the Roman Rite, the Ordinariate has the faculty to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and the other Sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours and other liturgical celebrations according to the liturgical books proper to the Anglican tradition, which have been approved by the Holy See, so as to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared.”
We remain small and fragile in Canada as the Deanery of St. John the Baptist of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter based in Houston, Texas. Our five communities: Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria, B.C. are supporting the formation of two seminarians in Houston.
As for me, I am no longer a lonely pilgrim or seeker. I feel like Goldilocks who has found the right table, the right chair, the right bowl and the right bed but there are no bears to worry about. It’s good to be home.
About the author: Deborah Gyapong’s journalism career included 17 years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where she spent 12 years as a television producer in news and current affairs. For 15 years, she covered national affairs and the Catholic Church for a network of Catholic newspapers across Canada. She retired in 2019.
Her novel The Defilers won the Best New Canadian Author Award in 2005 from The Word Guild. It was published in 2006. She is the past president of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, an organization that promotes Anglican and English Catholic patrimony within the Catholic Church. She is an active member of Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a parish of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.
I grew up in the Boston area during the 1950s, when most Americans went to church on Sundays. Chrismated as an infant by a Russian Orthodox priest, I was not brought up Orthodox. My parents were not believers, so we only attended Russian Orthodox services occasionally—for weddings, funerals, and the odd special service such as Easter.
My parents sent me to a variety of Protestant Sunday schools so I would be able to understand various biblical allusions in literature. They wanted me to know about Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel and the Sermon on the Mount because it was part of what it meant in those days to be educated.
My dad used to refer to himself as a “mercenary Episcopalian” because he got paid to sing in some of the top church choirs in the Boston area. I would sometimes accompany him to the Anglo-Catholic Church of the Advent but the long wait in the pews through rehearsal and the service was boring for a little girl.
My mom had been traumatized as a child by Orthodox priests and leaders in the White Russian exile community in pre-World War II Paris. She recalled being reprimanded harshly for drawing a Nativity scene on a blackboard. “How dare you write an Icon!” someone said to her. She felt more allegiance to the Unitarian Church because the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee had rescued her and her sister in 1941 and hundreds of other hunted children, Jewish and stateless like my mother, from the Nazis by bringing them to the United States. The Unitarians were able to bring my maternal grandparents to America a year later.
In high school, I began attending Unitarian services and participating in a youth group. Unitarians don’t believe in the Trinity or any creed. One minister I met used to like talking about ESP. By the time I went to college in the late 1960s, I was ripe for the pernicious ideas of the time including radical feminism and its rejection of traditional social mores.
Oddly though, I was drawn to religion in college and I would have majored in it had learning Greek, Hebrew or Latin not been a requirement. Reading Christian writers such as Thomas a Kempis or The Cloud of Unknowing resonated with something spiritual alive in me from my baptism. I also enjoyed studying Eastern Religions though, and I would have described myself then as a seeker.
After graduation with a degree in sociology, I had to settle for a secretarial job in a stock brokerage firm, a job I resented terribly but it paid the bills.
Unhappy at work and in my relationships with men, I was veering into New Age spirituality, and forms of divination like the I Ching, Astrology, and dabbling in a bit of magic.
By this time I believed, like so many of my Boomer cohort, that life was meaningless, absurd. I harbored a lot of anger, blame and resentment about the oppression of women and prejudice against the black race. Needless to say, these beliefs contributed to ongoing depression and an inner feeling of deadness. My friends and I would search for parties on the weekend in order to smoke dope together and hang out. We had no real moral structure for our relationships since we had rejected what was conventional. But that led to lots of emotional risk-taking, psychological and spiritual damage, hurt and jealousy.
When I was 23 years old, I had a profound experience on a psychedelic drug. I was told it was mescaline. The man I was with—who I later discovered was a con artist—asked me how I felt about getting married, about having a family. I wanted very much to give him an honest answer, even though I was hallucinating and finding it hard to talk. I examined myself to find an honest answer. I had mused about getting my tubes tied so as to never bring children into this terrible world and I had ruled out marriage like the fox in the Aesop Fable ruled out the sour grapes. I realized these were lies. I searched deeper and saw lie after lie that I believed propped up by layers and layers of resentment and blame.
I kept searching for an honest answer and encountered a Presence and a Love so profound, so real, so much more real than any of the lies and fears that made up my sense of reality. I began to weep and felt like my tears were washing over my head. It was perhaps one of the most profound experiences of deep contrition and repentance I have ever experienced.
Because of my immersion in the New Age, I did not have a language for what had happened, but it was clear to me that life did have meaning and at the heart of Reality was a Presence of overwhelming love and goodness. At the time the words of the twenty-third Psalm: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (KJV) seemed alive with meaning. I felt lifted out of the fear and anxiety that had nearly crippled me emotionally.
The problem was that I still had the old friends and the old habits that pulled me back into my self-destructive lifestyle. Six months after the first drug experience, I was going on rounds with a drug dealer and snorting cocaine with him at various stops. He told me, “Oh by the way, that was mescaline you just did.” I thought, “great, I’ll have another wonderful experience like the last time.”
He left me alone in his apartment in a dangerous section of Boston. The basement apartment had been partially gutted, with piles of plaster and laths in piles. The bedroom had a bare mattress and a black and white TV on a stand. At first, I felt fine being alone, expecting a good trip like the last one.
I began to feel like I was surrounded by demonic spirits trying to take me over. I tried turning on the TV and a man dressed like the devil to announce the late-night movie was glaring at me with the most hate-filled, malevolent eyes. Then he seemed to leap out of the TV at me. I shut off the TV, shaking with terror.
Terrified, I tried praying things I remembered from Sunday school, such as the Lord’s Prayer. I paced back and forth by the piles of plaster declaring “I want to live.” I feared I would lose my mind and go running off into the night and whatever was oozing up in ghostly shapes would take me over.
Everything I turned to for comfort failed. My prayers pinged off the ceiling. I tried cleaning up the marijuana seeds and stems covering a stack of newspapers by the bare mattress in the bedroom, thinking cleaning up might bring order out of chaos. Underneath the newspapers, (the drug dealer read the New York Times, oddly enough) I found a book entitled “Hey God!” by Frank Foglio. It was about the adventures an Italian Mama had with the Holy Spirit—a book I found out later had been hastily written as part of the 1970s charismatic renewal. Somebody had been trying to evangelize the drug dealer!
I found that reading the book was very difficult. The evil in the room swelled and pulsated around me. The pages kept turning colors. It was hard to read, as if I could only read one or two words at a time, like they were closed captions appearing on a screen. Amidst stories such as Mama “multiplying” the spaghetti by praying over it when unexpected guests showed up for dinner, Foglio laid out the Gospel—do you acknowledge you are a sinner? Do you accept Jesus as your personal Savior?
In desperation I said Yes! to everything! I accept Jesus as my Savior! I will surrender my life to Him! Get me out of here! The room still seemed to swirl and swell with demonic energy. I clung to the book and kept reading until I came to a passage from Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.”
This seemed like a command to stop bargaining and stop struggling. To obey and be still. To stop trying to save myself and to rest and trust. It was extremely difficult to be still but I pressed in. God’s presence filled the room and the demonic turmoil ceased. His presence was sterner this time, as if God the Father was saying to me, “Look at the mess you got yourself into this time.”
I continued reading about how all of heaven rejoices when one sinner repents and I could feel heaven rejoicing. The sense of being repentant and rescued filled me with overwhelming relief and joy. When the drug dealer showed up to drive me home the next morning, I felt like I could go knocking on doors to tell people about Jesus, the way Mama did in the book.
My life made a 180 turn then. I quit any experimentation with drugs. I even quit smoking cigarettes. However, when you are at minus 500 the pilgrimage had some dark places and days yet ahead.
This began my lonely pilgrim stage where I was earnestly seeking to know God and considered myself a Christian, but I was “spiritual and not religious” and had a “personal relationship with Jesus” but didn’t feel the need for any church to tell me what to believe. It was me and Jesus and He would help me intuit things and no one was going to be able to tell me differently.
At that time, I had come across a spiritual exercise of silent contemplation that helped me enter into God’s presence and listen to Him, and experienced a great deal of repentance and unpeeling of the resentments and unforgiveness that bogged me down. It also helped me to rise above and observe how my negative thinking was harming me. Often just observing the negativity in the present moment in God’s presence without judging it was enough to have it dissolve. But without a solid faith formation and the guidance of true religion, I still wandered about, dabbling in Christian Science and Swedenborgianism among other things.
During this time, I met a man who showed up at the Swedenborg Library in Boston where I was working. He was smelling of alcohol and over lunch in a Chinese greasy spoon restaurant he said to me, “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you.” He meant that he foresaw we would marry. I discovered broken glass in my food and had to spit it out.
He had a serious drinking problem. I had no experience of alcoholism. I thought since I had made my 180 turn, I could help him make one too. He was handsome and came from similar educational background and so on, though from a far more dysfunctional family. He was a binge drinker so he could have periods of sobriety, which tricked me in my illusion that I could help him change.
He had inherited a small amount of money and was looking for cheap land in Nova Scotia because he was a Vietnam War draft dodger. We were both inclining towards being preppers and living a bit off the grid. We moved to Canada in 1975 and eventually bought a small rundown farm near Bear River near the Fundy Coast. He was sober for about 18 months, but seriously fell off the wagon during my second pregnancy. The suffering during this time—seeing the man I loved committing slow suicide and eventually behaving towards us in ways that no self-respecting person could endure—forced me to my knees in prayer. It was unendurable otherwise.
I would sometimes put my nearly two-year-old son in day care and go to the little Anglican church across the street and pray for a couple of hours like the importunate woman banging on the judge’s door, not leaving until Jesus granted me His peace and consolation. I had no choice but to be importunate because the pain, the anger and anguish were unbearable. Thankfully, my experience of God’s love on that first drug trip helped me know He was real, that He loved me, that He was there if I could push past the emotional turmoil and outward circumstances to touch the hem of His garment. During this time, God revealed how faithful He is. Despite my world falling apart around me, with our financial and emotional security in jeopardy, I had many times of great joy and peace in the Lord and a secure sense of His faithfulness.
The relationship became untenable. Eventually, my husband left for the United States. I now had two little boys in diapers to raise on a dilapidated farm. I sold real estate for a year, often taking the boys with me because I could not afford a babysitter. Then God’s providence brought me to my first journalism job and the beginning of a career that took me from print to radio to television. I spent 17 years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 12 years of that time as a television producer in news and current affairs.
I eventually married again to the man the Church recognizes as my true husband. He raised my boys. Home life was happy. We moved to Ottawa. My career was taking off. But oddly, as well as everything was going, there was something missing. I had often had more inner joy during my time of great suffering than I did during this time of domestic peace and happiness.
A neighbor suggested I try Kanata Baptist Church. The first thing I said to the pastor when I met him was something like this: “I’m a heretic and a maverick, and have never been able to sign on the dotted line of any church I’ve gone to.”
“Maybe this church is big enough for you,” said Pastor Doug Ward. I will be forever thankful for his welcome and the good teaching and fellowship this seeker-friendly church gave me. It exposed to me to good but gentle teaching and fellowship with mature, bible-believing Christians. As a few years went by, I found my heresies were no longer so appealing. I was no longer clutching them or feeling a need to defend them as part of my identity.
I also benefited from the teachings of a charismatic pastor named Penn Clark who taught a Winter Bible School on “Cultivating your Gifts and Calling” that went on for about 10 weeks every Saturday in Kanata. Penn taught about headship and authority, about hierarchy in ways that prepared me eventually for becoming Catholic.
A major turning point was a conference called “Stomping out the Darkness” put on by Neil Anderson’s Freedom in Christ ministries. Anderson’s Book, The Bondage Breaker was a bestseller at that time in Evangelical circles.
Part of the conference involved going through a series of prayers renouncing various occult activities, dabbling in false religions, unforgiveness, sexual sins—a comprehensive list of things to confess, renounce and then ask for God’s forgiveness and blessing. I had resisted this kind of renouncing activity previously because I thought that some of the things I had learned in say Christian Science or even New Age were true and I didn’t want to renounce anything that was true. I told myself I could renounce them and God would preserve anything that was true.
The change in me after doing those prayers was profound. I had had to fight a lot against negative mental chatter and the prayer observation exercise helped a great deal with overcoming it for a time but it could still be a problem if I was not guarding against it. Now the chatter was gone.
The prayers and God’s grace had apparently closed doorways I had inadvertently opened in my dabbling in the occult and in entertaining false beliefs. When I looked back at some of the things I had thought were true I could see they were laced with poison. A veil had been lifted. Needless to say, I got rid of a lot of books!
Neil Anderson’s teachings stressed having a firm statement of belief—basically the Nicene Creed in Protestant language—to ensure one maintained one’s freedom in Christ. I had previously sought to understand before I believed and there were some things I knew beyond doubt to be true, such as God’s amazing love, but so much else I didn’t understand or know. Now I took on St. Anselm’s motto “Credo ut intelligam.” I believe in order that I may understand, and what a difference that has made in helping me walk more confidently in the Spirit.
I interviewed Neil Anderson during my time as a journalist, when I was either already Catholic or close to being Catholic. I was able to thank him for his teachings. He told me he was reading Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth.
Meanwhile, I was being drawn more towards tradition and liturgy. My favorite Bible translation has always been the King James Version and I loved the language of the Book of Common Prayer. I would occasionally go to an Anglican church and I loved the kneeling and reverence during the service.
Around 1999 or 2000, I discovered the little dollhouse Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (ABVM) in Ottawa, a part of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, that had broken away from the Anglican Communion of Canterbury in the late 1970s over the ordination of women. Obviously, my previous radical feminism by then was a relic of the past and the idea of an all- male priesthood was fine with me.
I was about 50 when I encountered ABVM and was among the youngest attendees. Its tiny, eccentric congregation seemed dominated by women much older and some of them quite crotchety. But the liturgy!!! The bell would ring. The priests and the bishop would process in and begin their ballet of reverence and genuflection towards the Blessed Sacrament.
This tiny place with red indoor-outdoor carpeting and gray linoleum tiles was a cathedral and Bishop Robert Mercer, a monk of Irish extraction who grew up in Rhodesia and had been Anglican Bishop of Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, was our bishop. He had left the Anglican Communion over the ordination of women and came to frozen Canada to lead us.
Bishop Mercer prayed the Mass with such recollection in that beautiful Book of Common Prayer poetic sacral language that it was as if I experienced heaven coming down to earth or us being lifted to heaven. The liturgy and his faith and that of Fr. Carl Reid and Fr. Kipling Cooper communicated intuitively so much about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Faith is imparted by so much more than words on a page.
I was told that the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada was part of the Traditional Anglican Communion and that it had been in informal talks with Rome about coming into the Communion of the Catholic Church. I was told about women’s ordination: “You can’t change a sacrament in a revealed religion by democracy. What are you going to change next, marriage?” It all made sense and seemed deeply biblical.
Thus, my pilgrimage shifted from the life raft of Mere Christianity represented by Kanata Baptist and its sincere simple evangelical faith to albeit a much tinier boat that had its compass set sailing towards the Barque of Peter with the discarded treasures of catholic tradition secure in its hold, treasures the Canterbury Communion had been throwing overboard.
I had left the CBC in 2000 around the time I began attending ABVM. I worked briefly in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition under Stockwell Day in communications. The Liberals attacked Day for being an Evangelical Christian and the mainstream media jumped aboard. A cover of Mclean’s Magazine had a picture of Day with the Caption “How Scary!” across it. It was a disturbing immersion into the lies and fear-mongering that dominate our political discourse and have only become worse.
It was intensely stressful as Day was also experiencing an internal mutiny. Coming to Mass and having the bell ring and the priests take over worship was such a relief.
Thus began my long catechesis and preparation for becoming Catholic.
When Stephen Harper became leader of the newly merged Canadian Alliance Party, he fired me and several other social conservatives that Stockwell Day had hired. I soon returned to journalism, working as the national correspondent for a network of Roman Catholic papers across the country called Canadian Catholic News. I covered national politics, Supreme Court decisions—there were some doozies over the years on marriage, on euthanasia, on transgender identity—and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Writing about the church was also a great opportunity for catechesis and I had the privilege of meeting a number of holy, inspiring prelates. I managed to make several trips to Rome and got to meet both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, each for brief encounters in a receiving line. I was still an Anglican Catholic when I met Pope Benedict and told him I brought him greetings from Bishop Peter Wilkinson who had succeeded Bishop Mercer upon his retirement. Wilkinson had had a private correspondence with then Cardinal Ratzinger for several years during the 1990s. The pope’s face lit up with a big smile, “Send him my greetings!” he said. This was in July 2009. Little did I know that Anglicanorum coetibus, the document providing for personal ordinariates for Anglicans wishing to become Catholic while retaining elements of their patrimony, was probably in the works at that time.
I happened to be at the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Annual Plenary when news came in October 2009 that Pope Benedict would be making a provision for Anglicans to become Catholic. I thought my heart would burst with joy at the news.
Anglicanorum coetibus came out officially in November 2009. After the joy subsided from the initial publication, the sailing to the Barque of Peter became choppy and difficult. It seemed that our tiny little group of traditional Anglicans was viewed by many in the Catholic hierarchy with contempt, as schismatics, likely to scare away any “real Anglicans” the document was meant to attract.
There was also a lot of uncertainty about how everything would come about and whether any of our priests would be allowed to become Catholic priests.
We faced internal difficulties as well. Several of our communities across Canada either underwent painful splits or left to join other Anglican bodies. ABVM experienced the loss of about one third of its members. Many perhaps assumed that entering the Catholic Church was way off in the future or likely to never happen. When it was now imminent, they balked. Strange anti-Catholic sentiments bubbled up in some people. Others faced irregular marriage situations they did not want examined or judged by the Church.
I personally underwent a difficult time which I now think in retrospect was a form of spiritual warfare. It was as if I had strange glasses on that magnified every flaw, every sinful shortcoming of people in the Catholic Church to the extent that it obscured the beauty of the faith. Many of us struggled a bit with the Marian dogmas, myself included. I was only getting to know Mary at that time and I forget what the particular faith impasse was that I had reached. I think it had to do with whether this really was Christ’s Church since all I was seeing was her massive flaws. I asked her to send me a sign. Well, she did. Three of them.
Bishop Wilkinson was leading our tiny flock from Victoria, B.C. We had hoped we would be received more corporately but the Church insisted on individual reception and even our undergoing RCIA!!!!. There had been some haggling and difficulty with all this and a feeling among us that we were not respected or desired. It felt as if we were being told, “So, you want to become Catholic? How high can we raise the bar for you to jump over.”
Bishop Wilkinson visited the then Bishop of Victoria, Bishop Richard Gagnon, who said to him, “Why don’t you just come in!” So, Bishop Wilkinson decided everyone would come in around Easter.
For our Anglican Catholic Church scattered across Canada and experiencing splits and turmoil, it was like a flock of birds murmurating and experiencing a bit of confusion when suddenly a lead bird tips and the whole flock tips simultaneously.
Across the country, each little community decided to follow the bishop’s lead. No more negotiations or attempts at conditions. Here we come! As soon as the decision was made, even though I still had marriage issues yet to be fully straightened out, all the sense of spiritual warfare and conflict lifted. I looked forward with joy to coming home, confident everything would fall into place.
And our decision to come in unconditionally made the Catholic bishops aware they had to now take us seriously.
Archbishop Prendergast received our community of about 40 people (some of them shut-ins whom he visited individually) on April 15, 2012, Divine Mercy Sunday. He brought the most beautiful gold vestments from his cathedral for the Mass at St. Patrick’s Basilica. About 700 Catholics were there to welcome us. A glorious day.
While for us lay people, the joy of becoming Catholic was palpable, our priests faced massive uncertainty for well over a year or more. They had to operate as laymen, even though our Anglican Catholic beliefs about the indelible nature of the priesthood were the same. It was agonizing for them. The archbishop had given us a mentor priest in Fr. Francis Donnelly of the Companions of the Cross who celebrated our liturgy with reverence.
Eventually our priests, all married, received their rescripts from Rome and we had the joy of attending their ordinations first as Catholic deacons, then as priests.
But that was not all. Eventually, under Pope Francis, our Divine Worship: The Missal was approved. It provided us with appendices and options that enabled us to worship very similarly to how we had as Anglo-Catholics with many of the same prayers in the beautiful sacral English of the Book of Common Prayer.
While at times the journey looked impossible and those at our destination unwelcoming, those impressions proved to be illusions. God has been most generous and welcoming to us in His Church and as Pope Benedict wrote in Anglicanorum coetibus:
“Without excluding liturgical celebrations according to the Roman Rite, the Ordinariate has the faculty to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and the other Sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours and other liturgical celebrations according to the liturgical books proper to the Anglican tradition, which have been approved by the Holy See, so as to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared.”
We remain small and fragile in Canada as the Deanery of St. John the Baptist of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter based in Houston, Texas. Our five communities: Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria, B.C. are supporting the formation of two seminarians in Houston.
As for me, I am no longer a lonely pilgrim or seeker. I feel like Goldilocks who has found the right table, the right chair, the right bowl and the right bed but there are no bears to worry about. It’s good to be home.
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