Journey Home 2011-09-26 Former Evangelical - Marcus Grodi with Brandon Vogt

good evening and welcome to the journey home my name is Marcus Grodi your host for this program our guest tonight is I think a very special guest for this particular media that we're using to bring to you the stories of convert to the church it's kind of a irony because our guest tonight is Brandon fought former evangelical he is an author of a book the church in the new media and so here we're using the new media to bring to you the story about a man who wrote a book about the new media I mean just goes on and on and on the use of the media to bring to you these new stories and of course that's what he W TN is very committed to an even cutting edge as you know when you go to you WT n calm you can see all the ways in which EWTN has recognized the value of using the gift of the media to get the message out we see the Vatican using the media to get the gospel to the world we also recognize that the enemy can also use the media so part of the discussion is how do we make sure we use the media for the way in which our Lord intended it to help people grow in virtue to help people grow in relationship with our Lord Jesus and his church well that's what the journey home is about and our guest tonight is here to share his own journey but we'll talk later about his own work with the new media in fact the media is changing so quickly that's what I want to talk about a little bit tonight as Brandon shares his journey Brandon welcome oh thanks to the journey home thank you it's great to have you here you and I share a little bit of background because we're both engineers and training right yes yes always in training that's our background that shapes some of the ways we think probably the ways we view humor too but anyway it's great to have you on the program and later in the program we'll talk about your book the church and the new media but before we get there we want to hear about your journey and as I generally do on the program I ask you to step way back to give the audience a bit of a snapshot of your early spiritual journey sure first 18 years of my life I was raised in a Presbyterian Church and I still thank God to this day that my mom dragged me and my sister to church every Sunday we were obligated without question to go to Sunday school every morning we were heavily involved with the youth group and all sorts of different activities but despite that it never really took hold a lot similarly to a lot of other young people I never I never really encountered a rigorous God who made any sorts of demands on my life I never encountered a God who ravished me with love or overwhelmed me with His goodness or beauty I always tell people that in my adolescence God really was in the words of CS Lewis our grandfather who art in heaven this kind of senile mythical happy old man who mainly just existed to make me comfortable and to please me and that I didn't mean to jump in there but it but I wanted to interrupt us a little bit in use you mentioned Presbyterian that's a wide swath and I'm wondering because of your being brought up in the Presbyterian environment not really catching it mm-hmm right is that because the particular Presbyterian branch that you were in was of the more nominal branch or was it a southern more conservative branch we were in the Presbyterian Church USA and I wouldn't fault my church er for it not catching on I think it was more an aspect of my adolescence more anything else in my own completely agnosticism towards God but I still understood the basics of who God was I understood that he loved me I understood who Jesus was and what he did he died for us even though I wasn't quite sure what that meant or how it applied to my life or how it affected my comings and goings but I knew that God was transcendent and existent and he was above us for better or worse but like I said it never really meant anything which is not uncommon yeah for adolescents because you're when you think about what Jesus does in the cross for us that's talking about to certain extent what's going to happen when we die sure that's that's a long way I when you're looking it's like okay that you know that's all these issues are seemingly are well off unless you get awakened to the reality and imminence of that but still it's way up there right and I had a small instance that kind of turned the way that I saw God my junior year of high school I met this unbelievable attractive wonderful gracious kind woman named Kathleen and she was born and raised in a Catholic Church now I had no experience no background in fact I probably couldn't tell you one person I had met that was ever Catholic and so we kind of hit it off and we started dating and throughout our dating process in high school I invited her to come to church with me which she did and she felt at least comfortable going to a Presbyterian Church but at time she invited me to go to Mass with her and this was a really strange odd experience for someone who had been through the Presbyterian liturgy for his whole entire life one of the strangest things I remember asking over and over again was are they gonna have communion again this this time this week because in my tradition it wasn't something that was central or persistent and I always felt uncomfortable about not receiving and so I felt I thought the whole thing strange and I never looked really any further into it did you have an anti-catholic I didn't have I didn't have an anti-catholic but mainly an ambivalence toward the whole thing there wasn't there wasn't any there wasn't strong caricatures of Catholicism that were forced on me though I had heard through the grapevine about all the strange things these Catholics were doing but then we decided together to go to Florida State University which is in Tallahassee Florida and the panhandle there and we went there she majored in elementary education and like you mentioned I had a very strong mathematical scientific background and so I actually started off majoring in physics and I later changed it to mechanical engineering but when I went there I I knew that I had some sort of obligation both to my mom and to my girlfriend and to this strange detached God that I should at least probably still go to church even though I really didn't have an interest and I really wasn't thrilled about the idea I figured out at least appease all three of them by doing it and so I kind of played what I call religious roulette which meant that on my first week of college I essentially rolled out of the bed in my dorm room and determined to go to the church that was closest to my dorm so I wouldn't have to walk that far and so about 50 foot down the street 50 feet down the street I encountered this massive huge grey stone building it looked like a bomb shelter and in fact that was its nickname around the campus people called it the bomb shelter and it was the the worship building of the Methodist campus ministry on campus now I didn't know anything about Methodism I didn't know how it differed from Presbyterianism nor from Catholicism but it was the closest one to my dorm which gave it a big mark in my book and so for the first couple years of college I started going there now I figured that all I was obligated to do was put in my one hour a week and so I showed up I didn't talk to anybody I sat by myself I tried not to participate too much and then I went home I went back to my dorm and so again it was kind of this continuing pattern of not really grasping or embracing faith it was something I kind of tolerated more than engaged but after a while people that were a part of this ministry kept coming up to me and inviting me out to lunch or inviting me to their Bible study or inviting me to their group and it was a very welcoming warm community and really it took about two years which which is seems long but eventually my excuses wore down every week I would tell them oh I have homework oh you know I got something that's not this going on and eventually I relented and decided one day that I would go to lunch with one of these guys and so I did and found him to be a surprisingly normal wonderful intelligent person and we struck up a good friendship went to lunch a few more times and then that led to him inviting me to come to his Bible study so I joined this small group of men maybe maybe about 7 or 10 men who would meet once a week here and you have to remember that in my previous 18 years I really had no personal experience reading the Bible it was definitely not something I would have chosen to do over almost any other activity the only Bible I had heard was the stories proclaimed from the pulpit or the ones passed down through cartoonish messages in Vacation Bible School and so it's a really a whole new world that I was exploring with these guys and they still amaze me hope that you had kept going for two years it misses me tail you know that as a more of a duty yeah you still had done that I mean I didn't do that but it's me but can I ask during this whole time your girlfriend is she practicing her Catholic faith she was she was Kathleen was born and raised in the church baptized in the church and went to Catholic school and so she already she always had a stronger grasp on her faith than I did but she kind of went through her own spiritual resurgence through the Catholic Student Union up at Florida State but going back to what you said I think I think there was a there's more forces at play that we're drawing me into this then I recognized at the time one of the when I reflect back on this particular point of my life I think of the 10th Psalm where it describes God as a lion lying in wait and I had kind of pictured God to be this domesticated unclogged safe cat who you know would just be around to comfort me and who I could come to whenever I needed something but now looking back I recognized that this kind of ferocious untamed dangerous lion was all the time luring me toward him and so bringing me to this Bible study I think was one of the prime prime moves that he made to draw me into his life so it was here that I discovered the Bible I became infatuated with it I became particularly enthralled by these shocking surprising teaches of Jesus I think I was presented a much more watered down safer domesticated version of who Jesus was and what he taught instead of kind of this explosive life-changing message that had a profound impact on me and so when I see when I saw the ways that Jesus treated the oppressed and the marginalized around him when I when I saw him and his relationship with the father it evokes like this profound interest in me thinking that I want more of that I want more of that and so I began to read the Bible on my own which was a huge move for me I had to go out and buy a Bible I didn't bring one with me too College and then even more I learned from these guys the basics of prayer of how to how to worship how to adore God how to thank God how to pray prayers of intercession for others they really opened up this whole new world of communing with God my only experience with prayer before that was pretty much just rote prayer or a prayer you said out of obligation but these men seem to have a peculiar intimate closeness with God that I really hungered for and yearned for after seeing them experience they also taught me how to worship I had never really participated in a sincere act of worship I came to realize but it was through these Sunday services and the Wednesday Bible studies that I really encountered this unbelievably beautiful majestic God who I could just throw myself at in unabashed adoration and so all of these elements were kind of the first hinge that started leading me deeper in my faith but there are my junior year there was a there was a couple other peculiar things that turned my relationship with God one of them was that as I began diving more into the Bible and prayer I also started reading a number of other evangelical books I was I was and still am a huge bibliophile so I loved to read and so I just ate up every Christian book I could find and a number of the books I was reading had this certain bend toward a rising movement in the evangelical world towards social justice and so there was there was this rising concern that we need if we claim to be followers of Jesus to love those whom he loved to love the poor and the oppressed and the marginalized as I wanted to do that I mean I couldn't think of one poor person I knew or you know anybody in dire straits that I could relate to but I knew I needed to I knew I couldn't just lock myself up in the in the bubble of suburban middle-class college life and so I set out to try and begin building an intentional relationship with somebody that was in a situation like that there's a lake in downtown Tallahassee called Lake Ella and it's kind of the the predominant Lake a lot of kids go there to study I've gone there to study quite often and there's a there's a sidewalk that circles the periphery of the lake and on one side of the sidewalk in the interior yours is the lake and the kind of where all the kids play and the students study on the outside on the other side of the sidewalk there's just there's a cluster of four or five picnic tables the tables are always occupied by homeless men and women and there's kind of an invisible delineation between the two areas that people hardly ever cross and so one day kind of after this whole conversion process in this small group I felt compelled for some strange reason to go over there sit down and strike up a conversation with one of these guys and so we did and I found it again surprisingly disarming he was kind he was funny we cracked jokes we ribbed each other I asked them to share with me a little bit of his background and his story and I did too and we kind of begin eerily a little friendship one of the last people I would ever expect to become friends with and so I asked him if I could come back a few days later and hang out with them again and he said sure so sure enough a few days later I came this time with a couple of 50 cent McDonald's hamburgers with me and we shared a meal together we had another talk soon enough a handful of my friends from this Methodist campus ministry started coming along with me and we started having these weekly gatherings with about 10 or 20 homeless men and women and then a lot of us college students where we would just come together and talk about everything that's going on in our lives and it was really my first experience of one of the most significant sections of Scripture in my life which is the latter part of Matthew 25 when Jesus says when you feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty and clothe the naked you do it to me and during this whole process of conversion I was really hungry for a physical tangible way to connect with Jesus I look back on it now as a Catholic and realize kind of the the infant longings for the Eucharist where I could encounter him physically but I still had that physical longing then and I found it and encountering and hanging out with some of my poorer friends they really put flesh on a lot of the difficult to understand passages of Scripture for instance in the Beatitudes when Jesus says blessed are the poor and blessed are the poor in spirit I had no idea what that meant until I started hanging out with some people who really were pull and who are really poor in spirit and they exude this spiritual confidence and contentment regardless of the fact that they had no job they were struggling with addictions or dysfunctions and we're digging through the trash for the next meal and so I was kind of the second thing during my junior year that had a huge huge effect on me because it kind of brought together the spiritual conversion I was going through with the physical charitable acts of love that Jesus also calls us to the third and kind of most interesting part of my junior year was at Florida State every year they have this big celebration called res week which is short for resurrection week and it's a it's a Protestant ecumenical gathering during the week before Easter during Holy Week every year where all the Protestant campus ministries come for a time of sustained prayer and fasting and worship kind of moving us into the mindset of of Holy Week it was there that I really felt for the first time that I had encountered the third person of the Blessed Trinity it was there that I first felt this fire deep within me burning kind of felt like I became a blaze for my love for God and again an experience almost indescribable and ineffable but I felt I felt a renewed resurgence in my love for God and so those that was purely a Protestant gathering yeah completely Protestant wasn't looking did not involve the Catholic community right at that point at this point it wasn't even on my radar even with your girlfriend stolen even yeah and we had been continued dating and had a wonderful wonderful relationship throughout those first three years so then the Catholic partners never it did it didn't click yet yeah so during that summer I got more and more involved in this Methodist campus ministry I got asked to be on a pretty prestigious leadership position I was preparing the Bible study curriculum for dozens of ministries and I was even teaching the Bible surprising to me at different retreats and different gatherings I had preached a sermon during Sunday morning for a couple times and so everything just steamrolled really quickly to the point where at the beginning of my senior year I was seriously considering the ability of going to seminary a protestant seminary I felt like very drawn and called to the ministry of teaching and preaching I felt not only comfortable but I enjoyed spread spreading and explaining the message in the way of Jesus and so I had started talking to my girlfriend about the possibility of doing that now at this time we were both seniors and so the topic of marriage began to drift toward the horizon and we had been dating for such a long time own were deeply in love and so we both assumed we would get married that wasn't really the question the question was only do get married what are we going to do about this whole mixed religion thing would it be okay if we went to two different churches would it be okay if we went to both would it what church would we raise our children into and so these were the questions as I think they often are that kind of drove my exploration into Catholicism for I thought as much as I love and respect my my fiance I at least owe it to her to explore this Catholicism that I know nothing at all about but I didn't know where to begin I had no idea I figured as a bibliophile I would at least start reading and so I started looking at some books and a lot of it was really grating on me coming from a predominantly Protestant background and so I turned to my pastor his name is Vance Raines and I still love him and count him as one of my deepest mentors today and I told him my kind of predicament I told them that I think I'm gonna at least explore Catholicism you know but at the same time I'm a leader here in this Methodist campus ministry and how do you feel how would you feel about that and your also has some leanings towards the mission yes so precisely precisely and in his graciousness and I think it was a great testament to his own character he said go for it I'm all for it I encouraged you to explore in fact he said I know the exact person you need to talk to and I said well who is that and he said you need to meet with brother Jason now I had no familiarity at all with religious orders and so when he said brother Jason I'm thinking he's talking about slang like oh you know my bro bro Jason over there something like that no idea is talking about a devout religious other and so I said you know okay I'm not quite sure what that means or how'd I get in contact with them I saw I'll give you his contact information so I went and I called Kathleen and I I told her you know what my pastor had said and she said oh yeah you need to meet with brother Jason he would be the perfect person for you to talk to about Catholicism I said Wow well if both of you say that then maybe I should and so I did the Catholic Student Union at Florida State University is run by a group of religious brothers part of the Brotherhood of Hope order and their specific charism is campus ministry and they're based at a number of campus ministries up and down the East Coast and brother Jason was one of the newer brothers at the time and I set up an appointment we met for the first time and it was probably the clearest instance I think of God's providence in my life because here's what I discovered 10 years before I was at Florida State brother Jason was a student at Florida State University more so he entered as a Methodist more so he joined the FSU Wesley Foundation the same ministry that I had been a part of and for his first three years he was highly involved and he even held the exact same leadership position that I did he was preparing the Bible curriculum and he was teaching and he too was thinking about possibly doing full time ministry after graduating but then through a strange set of circumstances and one of his friends he decided to begin exploring other traditions just to see what else was out there and so he came across this peculiar Catholic tradition which of course graded against his Protestant sensibilities yet nevertheless his senior year entered our CIA went through the process and entered the church and just two years later became a religious brother and so the other the other surprising fact was that if that wasn't enough of a coincidence of of an evidence of God's Provident hand leading me to him he was also a physics major and so he also had the same analytical intellectual way of looking at matters of faith I'm almost surprised that your leader recommended him did he know his background he did because they you know I'm saying it's like I mean he's almost setting you up he knows the the connections there I mean it's really interesting yes is that open to them yes and I I'm thankful to this day for that I don't think I'd be right here where I was if it wasn't for his graciousness and his openness well but my pastor and my girlfriend were both right there was no one better I could have talked to than him because he understood my my particular struggles the things that I would have most trouble with and so we spent many many weeks talking and wrestling and struggling through a lot of these issues he put up with a bunch of my ignorant questions about Catholicism very graciously and he encouraged me to read a lot of spiritual literature a lot of apologetics but one of the things I think he best did for me was to take it beyond the intellect and he encouraged me to as I'm exploring Catholicism to also explore experientially so he invited me to go on the Catholic Student Union retreat which I had been on a few retreats in the Protestant world and it was pretty familiar and kind of knew what to expect but this one was much different so you thought you knew it I thought I didn't expect to talk about the Bible I thought we'd pray and we'd worship but they did this strange thing where they took this piece of bread and they put it in this Sun type of device and paraded it around the room while people bowed and cried and we're excited and I was altogether unprepared for what I later discovered to be Eucharistic Adoration nevertheless it still had a profound impact on me at the time I was exploring the doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist and was slowly if not untruly becoming convinced in it and so I recognized that if this is true if this is really Jesus then this is the proper thing to do and so I wasn't so much alarmed at how people were responding to it as much as I was trying to figure out whether the whole thing was true or not he also encouraged me brother Jason to begin attending Mass and I did I took him up on it and started going to daily Mass almost every day even as a Protestant who couldn't receive the Eucharist and spiritually it was extremely beneficial for it really engendered strong humility in that I had to sit there day after day becoming convinced that the Lord I had so hungered after physically intangibly the Lord I was looking for in the faces of the poor was staring at me and everybody else could go up and hold him and become one with him yet I couldn't yet I had to wait and so even in the midst of that I fought through the whole year of going to daily Mass without ever being able to receive the Eucharist at the same time I was exploring a lot on my own to paraphrase CS Lewis one of my favorite writers he said he says an atheist can't be too careful what he reads and I think I would have said a Protestant can't be too careful what he reads for in fact his own writings Lewis led me deep deep into the arms of the Catholic Church I kind of count CS Lewis as my Catholic Moses for even though he didn't enter the Promised Land of the Catholic Church himself he led me to her to her gates it was from him that I really understood that there's more to just the Bible there's a Bible but also a tradition that needs to properly interpret it and safeguard it it's from him that I learned that faith can at once be intellectual and rigorous and beautiful and exciting and wondrous and magical he also led me to GK Chesterton who whose roller coaster I rode up and down the books and his and his anthology it was from him that I embraced the idea that maybe all these Catholic teachings that I don't understand maybe they might be true if only because so many people down through time have believed them Chester didn't talked about the democracy extended-through-time saying that for a topic like the Eucharist if the majority of people down through time have believed it maybe that's a sign that it might be true I also started reading a number of different saints and they each had a profound impact on me mother Teresa in particular but also Saint Therese of Lisieux and Teresa of ávila at the same time interestingly enough back at my FSU Wesley Foundation there was kind of a resurgence in classical spirituality and by that I mean you would constantly hear book recommendation of Chesterton and Agustin and Merton and Teresa of ávila things that I would say what's up with all these people and why do we keep why do you guys keep calling them st. Teresa or you know Blessed Mother Teresa what's up with that and so I thought it's strange that I looked into each of these authors and they all shared a similar Catholic background meanwhile over there too we were celebrating practices like linton fasting or we were bringing back lexi o Divina and contemplative prayer all of these gems of the Catholic spiritual tradition and so throughout my senior year I had to think what's up with all of these practices and authors and saints sharing the same background there must be something to it as you say it almost sounds like the very leader who would encourage you to see brother Jason that he himself was being drawn in the same direction if he's recommending these kinds of reading materials to the wider group of oh sure he had some very strong Catholic leanings and I think it's wonderful that he was open to embrace that yeah let me pause there Brandon and we'll come back just a little bit we'll continue with your story as well as talk about your work within the medium all right scene Ben welcome back to the journey home our guest tonight is Brandon Vaught and you're at that stage in your junior senior year of school and your eventual wife to be she just happier than anything that you're coming in this direction is she still kind of hands-off though in your journey she is that's a good way to explain it um she didn't want my possible entrance into the Catholic Church to be something I did primarily for her merely to appease her merely to make her happy and so she was cautiously optimistic I would say she prayed for me a lot I prayed for her a lot but she wanted to pray for God to lead me wherever he led me I didn't want to put any pressure on me and so she kind of let me do my own exploration which I did thanks to brother Jason and being getting involved a little bit with the Catholic Student Union over there there was a couple other things my senior year that helped push the the locomotive along I was blessed to be able to attend a weekend symposium on the theology of the body on all of these kind of moral ethical theological topics that I had never given great consideration to on the human body on the dignity of the human person on sexuality on theological imagery of the body and human sexuality it really helped I think nip in the bud a lot of issues that are often troubling to converts later on in life for the beauty of the Catholic Church's understanding of sexuality was one of the first things that drew me into the church through hearing these talks one of the other things that I started to dabble in during my senior year was the church's rich body of Catholic social teaching I had mentioned before that I had developed this strong interest in social justice and it was really a grassroots type of a thing I hadn't put much philosophical thought into what it means to live it isn't even normal amongst all evangelicals sure your social idea often is just evangelization salvation of the soul and often jumping over the needs of the right of the poor right and what I loved about Catholic social teaching was that they a aptly bridged both of the gaps they saw the need for physical compassion and care but they also understood the spirituality behind it and so I started to dabble in some of the writings of Pope John Paul the second Paul the six leo xiii especially and saw this brilliant gym of of wisdom on how to create a just and compassionate society and so everywhere I looked whether it was in sexuality whether it was in social justice whether it was in the spiritual writings of the great mystics everywhere I looked I was drawn in but it was really the Eucharist I came back come back to that again I started to become convinced of the reality of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist particularly through different Catholic books I was reading on the interpretation of the latter parts of John six which was quite crucial for me and once I became convinced that Jesus bodily in body and soul blood body and blood soul and divinity was at the center of the Catholic Church everything else fell like dominoes because I had to believe that if this was really Jesus in the center of the church I wouldn't want to be anywhere else and so believing in the Eucharist about midway through my senior year was really the crux the hinge that everything else turned on and I decided at that point to enter into RCIA and so I started a little bit late though I had a bit of formative background through my meetings with brother Jason and whatnot and so I went through the RCIA process now I had I had entered initially with the understanding I told everybody this doesn't mean I'm entering the church I'm just still continuing my exploration and they say okay okay sure sure some of my friends would you know rib and joke me but I eventually did the day before my fiance's birthday was Easter Vigil 2008 and kind of the day before was Easter Vigil yes her birthday was not Easter that's right that's right and so what she still counts as the greatest gift God has ever given her for her birthday I entered the church at Easter but there's more to the story than that kind of in a great show of beautiful ecumenical solidarity at this Easter Vigil I'm waiting outside as as all the cat and catechumens are too light the great Easter candle when up this hill the the Catholic Church and tell AHA C's on it on a hill has great symbolic meaning of course but strolling up the hill was my Methodist campus pastor who is coming to support me as I entered the church but it wasn't alone he brought with him about twenty or thirty of my closest methodist friends who I had been with for the past three or four years and developed just some deep community and relationships that will continue on forever and they all came and packed two or three pews most of them never having even set foot ever in a Catholic Church never have experienced the mass but they all came and were a part of this massive Easter celebration and cheered me on as I was confirmed by the bishop and it was then when I received the Eucharist for the very first time I still count it as the most profound spiritual experience I've ever had it's the only time in any corporate worship experience where I've broke down in tears I was blown away by the reality that the Jesus I had chased for the past few years who had sought in so many ways spiritually emotionally physically was here and all of that fullness and was inside of me and it was an overwhelming culmination of my entire journey up into that point it's interesting to note too that since I left FSU my conversion helped in a small way to act as a catalyst in an ecumenical relationship between the Methodist campus ministry and the Catholic Student Union now I believe up into this day for the last four years or so once a semester they have a big night we're both ministries come together for a night of prayer and worship and study and a lot of that bloomed out of my own interactions and relationships with both sides and so God seems to be doing something even even more than my own personal conversion there so after after I entered the church we had a whirlwind of experiences my wife and I got married we grant I graduated about a week or two later after Easter we moved back down to Orlando into a new apartment well we got married we had our first child within 10 months and I got a new job I'm going to a new parish and a tradition that I'm completely fairly unfamiliar with and so all of all these changes happening so quickly in my life but after a period of time I encountered a couple of close friends who took me a little bit further down the journey I kind of picture my journey up to this point as alice and lewis carroll's great fantasy stories walking up to the rabbit hole and I think entering the church at Easter Vigil was me putting my foot in but since then I've gone way way down to this kind of crazy whimsical world that is the Catholic faith one of the friends I met was Burt Ghazi it was a popular author and a fellow Saint lover and he went to my parish and he found me and we struck up a good friendship and he introduced to me this whole world of saints who I had only experimented a little envelope earlier oh yeah yes and so for instance I discovered even more of the wisdom and wit and whim of GK Chesterton I discovered Saint Josemaria Escriva and the ordinary spirituality he taught I'm fairly young I just turned 25 and so the whole last year I was 24 and Bert help me find two saints who both died when they were 24 st. Teresa bless you and blessed pier Giorgio for sáááty who I'd dwelled with for the whole last year and who taught me numerable lessons on how to live the spiritual life in the midst of the ordinary world I mentioned Lewis kind of baptized my theological imagination but junior Tolkien I discovered him and his Lord of the Rings and he kind of christened it a Catholic up and down the rest of the literature I found so many examples and brilliant brilliant people I read benedict xvi and Pope John Paul the second who gave me a philosophical way of looking at the world and showed me that faith and reason aren't enemies but friends there were so many other examples that I was overwhelmed and realized that you know what this church that I had fallen into seemed to double as a saint factory it popped them out by the hundreds and so it only brought my conversion deeper that I was so enthralled to be a part of this church and that I was convinced that I had finally found the home at last the last thing I wanted to mention was that in the beginning I said how my earliest conception of God was as a domesticated untamed lion quoting quoting the ten psalm saying that God was like a lion lying in wait by the end however at particularly at the climax of entering the church at the Easter Vigil one of the verses I've constantly reflected on in light of my journey is in the 10th chapter of Revelation where God is described as the Lion of Judah who lets out this monstrous roar and I felt that God after chasing me up and down up and down the years has finally got what he was looking for he steered me in the direction and he held back when he needed to held back and he moved forward when he needed to move forward but now he's caught me and now I see him not as a as a safe innocent comfortable lion but as as one who is demanding in a good way who wants to claw away everything that is counter to who he created me to be I found a God now who who fights for me on the sake of goodness and is engaged in this epic struggle between goodness and evil and I find a God who is willing to give his life for the sake of his love for me and so it's all kind of culminated in this beautiful picture that reflecting back I see how God has been working throughout the past years to bring me to where I am now a lot of people who recognize CS Lewis as as you said you know Moses chanting leading you to the promised land with it recognized as they come through the journey that he was on the one hand one that brought you up to the doorstep but also recognized the shortcomings of a mere Christianity in fact the elusiveness of a mere Christianity as you look at your Presbyterian your Methodist Catholic the different backgrounds and recognizing the beauty in the necessity of a tradition yes that you can trust especially near the Eucharist I mean there there's it's not necessarily a part of what many called marecus G&E but then you discover no that is the center what Christianity is yeah and I found a reflecting back I always align myself with the rest of many other converts from Protestantism to Catholicism who don't really reject or throw off much of what they gained from their Protestant tradition so for instance my Protestant community was the first one that introduced me to Jesus and for that I'm eternally grateful and they're the first ones who brought me into the depths of the scriptures and taught me how to pray showed me how to worship and taught me what real community looked like and so I don't see kind of Catholicism as a replacement of the mere Christianity of Methodism but instead see it as a fulfillment much as I'm sure the early Christians saw this Christian way as a fulfillment of Judaism and not merely as a replacement that's it precisely the way that I relate to my former tradition I still have so many friends back in my from my old Methodist campus ministry and I still am so eternally grateful for all the things that I've learned from them and still embrace those in this tradition well it fits well with the goal of the journey home program for all these years is that it's not a statement against those who are not in full union with the church it's a it's a beckoning but they would experience the beauty and the fullness of the church that Christ established in as apostles if the fullness not just a part of right or mere but the whole thing and the beauty of the whole thing because it fits together as a unit yeah it's not just more things right it's a more fullness in the completion of it we have an email Kevin from Ohio he said I read your book the church and new media and really enjoyed it what made you want to write the book so he repeats a question that that was on my mind because you're an engineer right is that what I am doing after yes afterwards and with your awakening of faith but you you felt drawn to write this church in new media I'm eight wonder whether whether Bert put the bug in your ear he'd think about it look in my ear yeah he sure did it's interesting I'm like like he mentioned I'm a full-time engineer I work in the white-collar world and so I'm your tip run-of-the-mill schlub Catholic and so what am i what does a guy like me doing writing a book like this I've been asked that question many times even back to my Protestant days I was blogging and so a blog is kind of a website with regularly updated entries but the intriguing part about it is that it introduces a two-way conversation because people can comment critique respond to the different things you say and so I had personal experience with blogging for quite some time and saw the power in it but there were three things that converged to giving me the idea to write this book after became Catholic I mentioned I was exploring the social teachings of the church I also explored what the church had to say about media and social communications and again saw a treasure chest of wisdom that was mostly untapped I hadn't heard much popularizing of it and so one of the things I wanted to do is explain the rich body of wisdom the church has to offer and while in the papal encyclicals they don't talk about Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or text messaging they give general philosophical principles that can be applied to any medium and so my first goal was to share what the church has to say about these tools a couple of the things I realized though where that as a church as a whole mostly the institutional arm we're pretty sweeping pretty slow to adopt a lot of these tools I think compared to most Protestant communities the Catholic Church is a good two to three years behind the new media wave EWTN you mention is doing a lot of great things I think they're a great example and compared to the secular world however they're a good half decade behind where this communication revolution is moving and so I wanted to kind of give the church a gentle kick in the pants to get us going and to get us on these tools where most of the unreached population is Pope Benedict the sixteenth has regularly described the Internet as the digital continent a continent full of an unchurched population that needs to be reached and interacted with and so that's what I wanted to do the third thing was that there was a number of individual Catholics and small groups ministries organizations who are already doing this we're already doing great things and so I wanted to find those people to work with them to produce a book that could help those who are reticent and scared to jump into this new digital continent and and give them some tips and guidance on how to get started all right well I got a question for you because when I think about the proclamation of the gospel and for many of the converts they look back and recognize that the draw to the Catholic Church is that we have an authority there is an established tradition so that if I want to understand the meaning of baptism it's not merely the many opinions out there that there is a deposit of faith that the church is protected and when I think about the new media there's good and there's a danger and as I'd like your opinion seventy years ago when people were writing opinions you could write to your friend in a letter but that idea didn't disseminate very well the only people that disseminated were those that got jobs writing for a journal right or a newspaper you might have the opinion column in the newspaper but other than that you had to be accepted by a structure dependent on the philosophy of a particular magazine and so the number of opinions out there was always to a certain extent control who could publish for a magazine which publisher would publish a book but the idea of an individual dis deciding I'm going to get my opinion out there for the world to hear was very difficult today we're at the other extreme anyone on any given day can start their own blog can put out their own opinion and without answerable to anyone how do you make sure that when you're listening to a blog you know that you're listening to what's true okay question it's something we deal with that length in here we we take a pretty hesitant neutral view towards new media the term I like to use is Prudential engagement to recognize that new media is not the best solution to every single problem and there are some pretty strong inherent flaws and one of them we mentioned is the one you just mentioned new media particularly the Internet creates an egalitarian world where everybody's opinion is equally valid so if you a bishop who starts a blog his voice is just as loud as the 12th the twelve-year-old who starts her own blog down the street so how do you know we offer a few different solutions in the book one of them that's been tossed around for a few years on all different levels of the institutional church is to maybe come up with some sort of system of having a digital imprimatur to say what's Catholic and what's not Catholic I think that's unfeasible to do on a great scale because things change so quickly I could see it happening where a particular person or a website was granted a seal of approval that you can trust this as an authoritative Catholic source but I can't see somebody sitting down and doing that for every blog post it's tough because every morning your writing is log your it's going to get up and post it before you've had a chance to run it by a committee right I think that's the hard yeah so here's what I would recommend and it's what we say in the book yeah it's a losing battle to try to do this first thing that we just said and so what the church needs to do is recognize that the only way to make sure that people won't be deceived by teachings that are offered in the name of the church but are really counter to her claims is to train her faithful and digital literacy to do that I would suggest the same exact thing the church did 20 years ago 50 years ago and a hundred years ago and that's familiarized the Catholic faithful with how to measure truth claims against the Catechism against good authentic spiritual literature it's something even more valid today when there's so many vying and dueling claims and so I don't think it sounds like a pretty broad answer but I think that's the only way the church can they can't control and institutionalize the spread of the Catholic message they instead need to prepare the faithful to understand what's real and what's not and you mentioned a key which I've not long ago in the EWTN family celebration emphasized and that's it is the Catechism I really believe our Holy Father John Paul the second and Benedict xvi recognized on the one hand with the almost limitless exponential growth of the media and the potential for the enemy the devil of polluting this idea that still people needed a touchstone right that they could go to and it's it's not enough to be able to like get all the pill the encyclicals online and I you know Catholic Encyclopedia and all that because it's endless but with the Catechism we Lisa have a place to start to make sure that if I read your blog and you said something goofy I can go to the Catechism which is online right beauty of that I can check right not just the Bible right because the Bible might somebody might interpret a scripture but I addict ISM is to me that beginning point for us today it doesn't replace the papal encyclicals the conciliar documents but it brings them together into one place where I can check what's being written in your block let's check another email Chad from Colorado I work for my local Catholic parish and I'm always looking for ways to minister to people where they are with so many media options like Facebook Twitter and blogs I'm curious how they might be of help in reaching those in the local community with the faith great question when you look at the statistics they're absolutely mind-boggling the most recent one said that on Facebook around the world there are 750 million users that's like one in nine people on this entire planet use Facebook on YouTube and this was absolutely shocking to me every minute there's 48 hours of new video that's uploaded to YouTube that people are watching and commenting on and dialoguing about and on Twitter they have 300 million tweets which are Twitter messages every single day and so what that says is that the large majority at least of our American culture is here this is their native habitat now this new media realm or the digital content as Pope Benedict says and so whether you're talking about people within the church or beyond the church if you want to reach people most effectively and most easily quickly and cheaply this is the way to do it and so to chat I would say first think about just taking a small step you don't have to immediately jump into Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and start trying to reach everybody using those tools just pick one set up a Facebook group or a Facebook page start posting different quotes from pay encyclicals may be linked to the catechism or a good Catholic article maybe recommend some good spiritual literature in all these small ways you can kind of drop the Catholic message into the flow of conversation that's already going on by millions of people around the world yeah got an email from Isabel from Reno my husband and I are new converts and are just discovering the depths of Catholic spirituality with so many great spiritual books to choose from we are a bit overwhelmed and don't know where to start any thoughts I mean her question was difficult 50 years ago but today it's won't balloon uh yeah where do you begin yeah I mentioned before I'm a huge bibliophile and I love to read and so I'm always looking for the next best recommendation or the next best source for books and a couple different places I've turned one there's a number of reputed Catholic sites trusted Catholic sites that you can turn to for book recommendations EWTN and then the coming home network have some good recommendations but also there's a couple of different priests one of them is father John McCluskey who has come up with what he calls the Catholic lifetime reading plan and I've turned to that time and again especially to learn the basics of the Catholic faith because in this plan he kind of introduces and proposes books from all the genres of the rich Catholic tradition so from literature to poetry it's a philosophy to theology from apologetics to the basics of the faith and so I would turn to any one of those sources and then always keep in mind that any book you read look in the bibliography for the books they recommend and quote from and and that will launch you onto a whole entire journey of spiritual reading that's actually a fun way to go and when you find an author you really like who was it that fed that author right then you go there and who fed that author and then that's just that's a lifelong reading yeah and it's unlisted so we've got an email Chelsea from Minnesota I would like to become Catholic but there are still a few beliefs that I really can't quite get should I go ahead and become Catholic even though I don't understand all the Catholic Church teachings it's a good question because that's precisely the position I found myself in I did to mention it but people often asked me what was the most difficult part of becoming Catholic and for me it wasn't merry it wasn't the teachings on sexuality it wasn't the Saints it wasn't biblical interpretation for me the biggest problem was ultimately the problem that kept CS Lewis out of the church which was by agreeing to become Catholic you're agreeing not only to what the church has taught and to what the Church teaches but you're agreeing to whatever she teaches in the future how can I be sure that what she teaches in the future is true and more so even though I've studied the faith for close to a year I don't know everything she teaches now and so how can i in good conscience enter into this church that I'm not sure if I cross every T and dot every I I brought this problem to brother Jason my spiritual director during this and he was the one that really encouraged me echoing the words of John Paul the second echoing the words of Jesus saying do not be afraid do not be afraid of of the unknown of what's out there for there combo will come a point in everybody's life that's exploring the Catholic Church I'm convinced that after you explore doctrine by doctrine by teaching by teaching and become convinced of each one in line you get to a point where you think there's a pattern here there's there seems to be a pattern that everything I look at ends up being true and so just like GK Chesterton said the problem with explaining why I'm Catholic is that there's 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason that it's true and so even if you don't know all those 10,000 reasons if you can just keep finding them and not be afraid you'll eventually become comfortable in her truth all right Brenda thank you for your wisdom on that which you experienced yourself on your own journey into the church thank you very much again thank you for your book the church and new media church and new media which I'm sure is available through EWTN comm the religious catalogue so thank you for sharing your journey activating for your continued message on your blogs and your your witness on that couraging other bloggers to put their toes into the water and maybe be a voice for the truth of the church yep Thank You Brenda thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I'm praying they're Brandon's journey as an encouragement to you god bless you see you next week you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 36,445

Rating: 4.8487973 out of 5

Keywords: EWTN, Journey Home, Marcus Grodi, Brandon Vogt, former Evangelical, Catholic, JHT01329

Id: bSJvqe0AChY

Length: 55min 50sec (3350 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2011