Journey Home - 2018-02-19 - Matthew And Elisabeth Akers

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program here we are in this new year a couple months into it and we can rejoice because the point of the journey home program is to demonstrate that the holy spirit continues to be working the holy spirit continues to touch hearts and minds of men and women with the grace to awaken them to the beauty of Jesus Christ in His Church it continues the work goes on sometimes you look around you wonder and our culture where is it going but in the midst of that the Holy Spirit is alive and well and we see that happening and tonight's a proof of that our guests are Matt and Elizabeth Akers I don't always have a couple in the program but it's a joy to have both of them on their former Anglicans how about if I shave both it's great to have you here and I also feel kind of interesting because I got somebody here with a bigger beard so welcome to the journey home it's a great pleasure to have you here and I'm gonna get out of the way real quick but I'm not sure which of you flip the coin that would start first I think I'll start all right all right man okay well thank you again for having us here we're just honored to be on the program my journey started very early on I was raised in a very devoutly Christian home my father was a fundamentalist Bible believing minister and graduated from Bob Jones University well and I had there are many parts of my bringing I'm very thankful for and they know that I still AM grateful to him the way he raised me very strong respect for scripture very strong insistence on church attendance we were you know taught that prayer was very important never stole to this day I think I could say I have a very good grounding in Scripture because of my father's influence and I was gonna say sometimes we take this for granted but really that means that you were brought up looking at the world that the reality if it came from God yes yes very much so a lot of our decisions were based on what what did the Word of God say that was a common question in the home so I'm very thankful for that on the other hand there were some things that were maybe not not the best and in that very fundamentalist upbringing and you know one of them on my father had married my mom and and she passed away when I was one and a half years old so I had he had three teenagers and myself as an infant on his hands and so by that time my father had actually taken a job with a Christian publishing company and he was supplying pulpits and so when he was doing that we bounced around to a lot of different churches because he was supplying pulpits but the churches tended to be small and had a lot of elderly people in them and I never developed a network of people my own age and because again as fundamentalist we in some ways I'm glad we did but we pulled back from a lot of popular culture as well so I've never really had a network of young friends and people to support me now in the faith and so that that idea of the community of saints and faith and everything never really developed that and on the the other side of it I recognized pretty early on that questioning anything wasn't what's not good and I've always a reader I don't know that I would say I'm a deep thinker but I am a thinker and and I like to talk about ideas and discuss them and I recognized very early on that was that was considered a sign almost of unbelief or that you didn't have faith rebellion or rebellion yes and so those two things it really came to a head for me by the time I hit high school and I did repel against Christianity and they had a couple years there where I really didn't want anything to do with the faith and actually gotten cognitively to envision a world that God and there'd exist you got to that point pushing it over I think it was it was a lot on my side ignorant I didn't lies the arguments for Christianity again I had been raised with a very strong knowledge of the Bible but there wasn't a whole lot of relating that scriptural knowledge to anything else and so I picked up a book but during my senior year in high school I started to come back to the faith and I picked up I had read CS Lewis as a young boy Chronicles of Narnia and I started reading CS Lewis because there I began to see a Christianity that had roots and that had connections with the broader world and I still remember I picked up a copy of the nation's on the incarnation of the word and the only reason I did that I had no idea who Anthony sheis was but I picked it up because CS Lewis had written an introduction and it came up in the in those days in the card catalog and I said okay I'm going to read this and I read Lewis's introduction and I thought this sounds fascinating I had no knowledge of the Church Fathers I had no knowledge of a historic development of the faith the development of doctrine as new man would say I had no no idea of any of that and I read Athanasius and that just opened my mind to a christianity that was far beyond this age and that reached back thousands of years right and and and you know that it just really opened my eyes and so at that point I was I was going into the university and I decided on majoring in English and I was a huge fan of English literature and along with that and began reading some English theology obviously you know CS Lewis but I started reading Helen poets like John Donne and George Herbert and started reading a little bit more of their theological works and then going into the 19th century I was reading John Henry Newman is reading gerard manley hopkins letter to his father and about his conversion from Anglicanism to catholicism but at that point I was really focused more on Anglicanism because well it had both those historic connections I was looking for theologically historically but also then with my love of English literature it was a natural action and so my senior year and at the university I needed to make a decision here what was they going to do next and I had been going I should back up a little bit and say during college I found a church called the Reformed Episcopal Church and it was totally you know foreign to me again any type of church with a liturgy or anything but I went to this reformed Episcopal Church and they were one of the breakaway bodies from the Episcopal Church known as conservative but also very evangelical and as I got into the church I realized that they were using a kind of a revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer so it had the Elizabethan English in it they still use the King James Version that I was raised in and the fundamentalist church and so there was some natural connections there and it started developing more and more of a love for kind of classical anglicanism if you will but still very very low church and the evangelical side of things and during my senior year in college and decided to attend a smaller foreign Episcopal Seminary Krannert theological house named after Thomas Cranmer the English reformer and when I when I went there I wasn't sure if I was called to the ministry or not but I knew that I wanted the theological education because I did feel that I was lacking some of that from my from my upbringing on the historical side of things and I went to crammed her house and it was very interesting when I got there because there was a certainly formerly I guess or officially there was a low Church emphasis but a number of the students there were kind of more Catholic leaning and their anglicanism so high church and I I could sense that even though I didn't know a whole lot about that I could sense the division almost immediately and I remember just another brief story of where I was talking with one of the students and many of the students were a little older than I was it was a lot of menu and go into a career and then kind of come back and so they were older and wiser and he made a comment to me about the mother of God and I recoiled a little bit and he said maybe you should go read the Council of Ephesus says because it crammed her house a lot of the people there accepted kind of the first for ecumenical councils the the last three were a little shady for some but he said that's historic that's not some modern development or some you know Roman Catholic doctrine that's that's very ancient in the church's usage and so that was another I did it I went back and I looked at the Council of Ephesus and I said oh ho that is that is true and then began you know that was an instance where I started looking at some of my preconceived notions and I said you know I think that I've been misinformed and I really better learn a little bit before I make some of these judgments and so during my time at Krannert house then I continued to read and and God took liturgical caman prayer and and again also had this this kind of Anglican Catholic influence there our Anglican high church influence that made me much more open eventually - you know Catholicism and so on after my second year in a grander house or during my second year I decided that I would not go on for ordination but that I would get the academic degree which was a two-year program and so I completed that and I headed back to Ohio for I was it applied to graduate school out of New Jersey but I was going to spend the summer in Ohio and that is when I came back to Ohio and again I've been away for two years and I needed a summer job between the end of seminary and the beating of graduate school and so I was working at a job where I actually had to work Sunday mornings and I couldn't make the Reformed Episcopal Church but there was a church that I had been in Ohio also that was a much higher Church Anglican parish and actually the the rector at the reformed Episcopal Church said we'll just go there that it's it's you know they're there they're pretty Catholic leaning there but it's still okay its Anglican so go there and so I did and that is where I very much enjoyed the the theology and the liturgy Liturgy of the church but I also met a young woman named Elizabeth at that church so I think I'll hand off the baton to her for a moment and what'd he talk I don't mean to interrupt you - I hate to come between a husband and his wife I just want to comment that as you were describing that cracks me up because I've been reading in the background Ian's cars wonderful biography of Newman which is fantastic what you're talking about reminds me of the battle he was going through in the Oxford movement yes exactly I mean there you are Cranmer yeah almost 150 years later right same exact battles yes between a high church low church in the Anglican Church almost like you don't talk to those people over there to Catholic right and we actually had a course on the Oxford movement at Krannert house and it was interesting to watch students take both sides warned against so Matt and Elizabeth Akers are our guests today and so we're the other side well I grew up in Medina Ohio and was raised in a tiny little Anglican Church that Matt just referred to my parents were left behind by the Episcopal Church when it went haywire and so the best they could find in the area was this Anglican Catholic Church my father is a 1928 Book of Common Prayer Episcopalian he always will be as far as he's concerned he's very much historically Anglican in his family he's very tied into the Anglicanism that runs through American history Episcopalian actually that runs through American history so we were dyed-in-the-wool Anglicans but we had to go to this Anglican Catholic parish and our priests were far too high church for my parents and I can remember fiery homilies being delivered from the front of the church about regular Sunday Mass obligation and all of that at my father rolling his eyes and you know we went when we when we went and and my parents raised us with a very strong faith and a very strong conviction of the truth of Western Christendom there was no question about that but you know Sunday Mass obligation was not that's not an Episcopalian thing so I went to college I went to a evangelical High School where I was also very much encouraged in my faith I'm grateful for those six years of junior high and high school I then went to a college on the East Coast that did not encourage my faith and where I found myself very much seeking my Anglican roots and the first year I was able to have a car I found a traditional Episcopal Church as it was called wasn't terribly happy there for a lot of reasons and so ended up driving from Annapolis Maryland into DC well into Alexandria every Sunday to go there as many Sundays as I could to go to Mass at an Anglican Church there and was so happy to have returned to the the Anglican vessel and all of the things that I loved about it I I never really found myself questioning my faith there were times my faith was challenged with what I was reading I was at a great book school we were reading some very difficult works Spinoza and Nietzsche and Hegel and some some stuff that was really causing me to struggle but it was from the perspective of I know this is right how do I answer what I'm reading and so I'm sure that my college didn't appreciate my approach to what I was learning that was very much my approach oddly I did I did have cause to question one summer when I lived I basically bounced from basements to attics through college and law school and I would live in someone's basement and then I would go live in someone's attic and one basement that I was living in happened to belong to an Apostolic lady who was just sweet and wonderful and I went to church with her one Sunday and found myself saying uh-oh what if this is right and I sort of said that from us from a variety of perspectives but I came home and said to my dad you know we need to talk what if this is right and my dad kind of looked at me and we talked our way through it but again it was from a very historical perspective it was Anglicanism and the truth of Episcopalian ISM and you know it would never really the question is the Apostolic Church correct it was why is Anglicanism an answer to this you know in the Apostolic Church you're talking about is not a past life with the Capitol a no you know charismatic Pentecostal you know the it's it's a modern Protestant movement that's going back to Acts chapter two you know this is how we believe the church was back then yes both very charismatic worship but the issue is are they the direct descendants of the truth of it or not exactly and that's where my father stepped in and explained that historically speaking this could not be correct and I laid my fears so anyway I continued with my undergraduate and got a job at a small classical Christian School in Roanoke Virginia and to some extent my heart will always be in Roanoke Virginia I loved it there and it was beautiful the people were amazing the church was really set the school where I taught was really solid and I was going to a wonderful Anglican Church in town couldn't have been happier but then I got a call from my old Latin teacher at my of angelical Christian high school saying I'm retiring I'd really like you to come and take my place and it was so difficult to make that decision I didn't want to come back home not that I didn't love being with my parents but I just loved Roanoke's so much but I agreed to do it and I came home to the Akron area and started teaching at that school and just found myself wanting to be out and about again within the first two months and not ready to settle down to a teaching schedule and every nine months teaching the same thing so I sort of took under my wing a young lady who was struggling in her faith and and kind of needed a mentor and started taking her to church with me at my the Anglican Church I was raised in was back there again and what do you take her to church with me on Sundays and suddenly the school year was over I was ready to move up to Cleveland to take an internship and live in Little Italy and I was so excited about it and I went to church one Sunday and there was this guy there but I'd never seen before but I have to say he looked very similar to how he looks not only with longer hair she's been living as a bachelor all this time and was convinced he was going to be a bachelor forever he didn't have marriage on his agenda but I came back the next week well we went out for coffee several times on Sundays through that time and Ashley the young woman that I was taking to church with me it was commenting about how I was hopeless that I was never going to get married and it sounds like this time on those hallmark movie and you've never let a more time so she was making just shameless remarks and I had to go away for a couple of weeks I went to a conference and I did some other things with my summer and came back and suddenly this had turned into short hair contacts and a goatee I looked at him one Sunday and I said at our tiny Anglican Church and I said you're short and he laughed and he said he was and what I like to go get coffee again and I suddenly found myself having these fascinating conversations that brought together all of my undergraduate study we had been interested in the same things reading the same things I was reading a Gustin City of God in preparation for a program I was going to go do up in Canada at a tiny little college up there for me it was going to be postgraduate for a lot of the kids who were there it was it was sort of pre-college I was going for very different reasons I wanted to supplement my undergraduate education with a theological framework that I had not had an undergraduate and the next thing I know I'm having these amazing conversations with this gentleman who was able to walk me through all of these things because he'd read them and I was just ecstatic this was wonderful but we realized I was headed to Canada he was headed to New Jersey to start a doctoral program and I realized how very upset that made me and looking back my mom knew where we were headed but at the end of that summer after having told Ashley that in fact I was not hopeless and I'd begun dating this nice young man but she did not believe which she did not believe said something either about her I don't know I was headed to Canada he was headed to New Jersey and I was so very upset but I'd like Matt to talk about what we did in those years that he was at in New Jersey and I was in in Canada and then in law school in Northern Virginia where I only stayed for one year before I transferred back to Akron Ohio again before I'm gonna interrupt a couple again I'm not sure that the audience because of lack of experience like myself always appreciate the difference in the high/low Church Anglican Episcopalian that you both are talking about right right I mean we can get it what looks like on paper theology and all that but from an experiential standpoint often it's the language and the music so much more yes I like that take you know one way I would describe it just quickly I say isn't as an Anglican you could be 99% Baptist or you can be 99 cent Catholic there is so much in terms of you know even going into the churches what's front and center is it an altar well obviously then you're going more towards the Catholic side is it a pulpit you can have that where communion celebrated once a month if that and so it's just a wide spectrum there's a charismatic movement and an Anglicanism that we had mentioned that you had mentioned earlier so we were both I think maybe Elizabeth slightly less so but we were both moving definitely in that more Catholic perspective there on the unangan ISM and so on you know especially elizabeth is a wonderful vocalist and appreciates polyphony and and all of that and so musically she proved very much enjoyed some of the very you know intricate Anglican chants and whatnot which again that tends to push you more oh you're that you know yours on the Catholic side of Anglicanism so that's kind of what in brief what we're talking about you know the more anglo-catholic or high church people are tend to be very much into you know their liturgies would book be full of the smells and the bowels and all of that and the the more low church Anglicans would be more the preaching based service someone that a baptist or an evangelical would say well I can see something similarity in that would the higher Anglican be more inward the lower angle can more evangelistic I think that's fair overall yeah I mean that's probably true for the Catholics do ya the Anglican Catholic Church I attended when I was in college and driving out to Alexandria it was actually the Cathedral effectively the the bishop was there who was then the archbishop and they still did morning prayer one Sunday a month with no community service so they were fairly high church in that they had the bishop but they still had that very Protestant one Sunday month we do morning prayer I think that's probably the southern influence to the episcopate 1928 Book of Common Prayer I mean other Anglican parishes that actually the one that we we met in I mean they did Corpus Christi processions they did a confession rosary you know patients of the cross all of this yeah so it's a lot of Catholic stuff very much had already gotten over you know in terms of your journey in the long run the only thing I would say is you can take it or leave it as an Anglican Diocese opinion and you can ignore a lot of that you're not no one really encourages you to go to confession no one encourages you to pray the rosary it's available but you can be I wouldn't say you could be low Church at a high church parish but it's very whatever you want very individualistic in terms of its spirituality necessary not necessary not necessary and bothered longnecker at one time talking about Anglicans using the term the real presence of Christ they're the same words but we need if things and they can mean different things on that long span of an organism you know yes or you can dismiss them entirely I can't dismiss an entire talk about dismissing we're going to take a break right now okay and then we'll come back that way you'll know how much we got left in the program but it's been wonderful let's take a break Matt and Elizabeth Akers are our guests and we're going to take the break right now [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and her guests tonight are Matt and Lizabeth Akers all right was the baton over here all right so we met as we said over the summer and so this would have been 2002 just to kind of give us a date to anchor that on and Elizabeth was headed off to school in Canada I was headed off to school in New Jersey and it was very difficult we'd only known each other a couple of weeks couple months well over the summer had at that point and so he was really difficult but in thinking about how God works I think it was providential because we had such wonderful conversations long-distance over the phone and developed such a deep relationship because we didn't see each other for months at a time of course but we were able to talk and we talked a lot about our schoolwork because I was at Drew University out of New Jersey pursuing a degree in English literature but I continued the study in theology so every semester I was taking one course in theology or church history and while I was there I was in class actually with some of the scholars working on the ancient Christian commentary series so there was that emphasis on mystics there and so I was taking of course as unposted I see and father's Russian orthodoxy and Elizabeth and her program it was a lot of theology and so we were discussing the works which were you studying or teaching I was studying I was also teaching what happened at the time but okay what you reppin Canada yeah so we just had some wonderful conversations on now that we have four little ones at home I missed those conversations because never have uninterrupted conversations but but it really did help us form a very strong bond early on and so we did see each other a couple of times throughout the next year and then we came back together again to Ohio in the summer of 2003 got engaged and then we got married the summer of 2004 and so yeah most of that time though we'd actually been physically we'd been apart living in different areas but we got we got married and we settled back in Ohio and resumed attending the parish that we had met at this this small Anglican parish it was very high church and I started teaching Latin ironically that an evangelical school on the high school and we I was continuing working on my my doctoral studies and at a distance doing the the comprehensive exams and then started working on the dissertation and Elizabeth's in law school but it or it our church to begin to take more and more responsibility on it at church and more and more involved and really again it was it was small but as I started serving and becoming more involved and you probably know how that is and the small church is you continue to get more and more involved so we were becoming with with not trying to make ourselves and more important than we were but we were two of the youngest people in the church and also probably two of the more involved and so we continued in in that in that direction at st. Mary's and I was also again as I said I was teaching at an evangelical school and I began to see that more and more the theology that this this Anglicanism that again I think it's fair to say at least I was growing higher and higher in my anglicanism higher church and there were more discrepancies with the evangelical theology that I encountered to day basis at the school and so that was in many ways a good thing because it helped me sharpen my fav more and continue to read and I also saw some similarities some of the evangelicals were very interested in the Church Fathers which I continued to be interested in the fathers but then as we continued on then we had we began to believe we attended some of the Rockford summer schools that were these were several schools put on by the Rockford Institute and and chronicles magazine is affiliated with them but I'd started subscribing to the magazine and it's partly political a lot of cultural stuff but a lot of the people affiliated with a Roman Catholic some of them some of the more hot Church Anglican one or two high church Lutheran's but mostly Roman Catholic and I was fascinated by a lot of the articles in chronicles and then they talked about the summer school and so I believe Elizabeth as a present to me assigned us out for the summer school in the first year and this would have been 2008 I believe 2008 that we that we first attended this and the the the summer school was actually on the American West but the the lectures were fascinating throughout the day but the dinners in the evening talking with their a number of Catholic priests in attendance and we were talking with a number of the again just the scholars who were there were Catholic and so they were very intrigued by our high church Anglicanism but also you know encouraging us to really think about Catholicism and about what Elizabeth talked about the second summer school we attended because that one we began or I began to think much more seriously about their critiques of Anglicanism and much more about are we in the wrong place here in Anglicanism you never really thought about becoming Catholic well I thought we were Catholic to be quite frank Anglicans I thought well we have all the blessings of Catholicism with Lutheran's hydrogen alkanes in camp yes that's where we were and as we've drove home from that first summer school we talked about why we were right and then we had a baby we went through a very difficult time actually I will say my husband had bought me a book called the rosary handbook and I'd been learning to pray the rosary because I felt very called to do that I put aside this idea that there was something very lacking in my faith I had the father and the son but I had no mother and that was I began to feel that lack and so Matt taught me the rosary handbook our dear dear priest who married us and who was so instrumental in our faith and in our progress toward the more high church perspective blessed a rosary for me we were given a rosary actually by one of the ladies in the church who had for you audience other angle cuts pray we've been given a rosary by by a lady in the parish who was a former Roman Catholic nun and then left the convent left religious life and married and became an Anglican so anyway I started into this but I was still convinced that Catholicism was not you know Roman Catholicism was not in my future and then we went to the next summer school and had heard a hysterical exchange between a very sweet Presbyterian lady and a very wonderful Catholic professor in which she concluded well I guess I could be Catholic and he said well of course you could that's what Jesus wants it was so funny I thought it was funny and as we were driving home I realized my husband was serious he was looking at Catholicism I was I was gobsmacked I could not believe this was coming down the pike but as we talked about it more and more I saw that what was drawing him was the life question there was no answer to the life question within Anglicanism they were so wrapped up in pious opinion and they didn't have a Magisterium and so there were a lot of very crucial issues that were left up to the lady well and if I could just break in there and see with the 1930 Lambeth conference of the way from the you know that was when the the birth control issue came is that an annual or a biannual conference I forget what that was I'm not sure to tell you my point for the audience is this is the worldwide and you're gathering yes yeah the powering that can be Union all the other side right and they allowed that was I believe the first instance of them saying well birth control in some cases right by nineteen in the 1960s thirty years later you know the Episcopal Church and church is just it's wide open that well birth control for everybody you know we abortion okay and so you know I looked at the at the consistency because that always bowed to me I was always pro-life and my Baptist father wonderful you know pro-life man but I was never taught again any of the context of it and what about birth control and I couldn't really I could find very good explanation and Catholicism even if it's a hard teaching but it makes perfect sense right and it's logical it's consistent it's scriptural it's it's historical and everything else but if you look for the Bible alone you got a problem with with arguing yes and then in the Episcopal Church which eventually became more of a democratic decision at the annual gatherings it is a Bible law that's democratic we the trajectory is there yes right right and that's what you were seeing yes Jack Therese yeah and so that was one of the chief things I mean Catholic social teaching in general and you know I was reading and distributism at the time as well so Chesterton and Malachi saw this sounds really interesting and then I'm realizing well they actually drew that from Pope Leo the 13th they you know they didn't think this up wholesale that's a papal encyclical and so the Catholic social teaching I'm just looking interesting this is tremendous and when we--when came to the life issue to just that was very instrumental in saying okay this makes sense and and the best parts of anglicanism I guess I came to the conclusion are drawn not from the Anglican tradition but from the Catholic turn in the Roman Catholic tradition - we had had found ourselves in a very unhappy situation just before that our dear dear priest passed away and that was it was he was able to give our first child a blessing in utero but he passed away on a Friday she was born then on Tuesday and so that was very hard the church started to flounder without him because he was a very big presence in every way he was you know over six feet five inches tall and he was just a mountain and and his personality and then his kindness and he brought us along and that was very hard and we began to be I would say unhappy in our church Matt had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders he was ordained to the diaconate that summer and suddenly a whole lot of what seemed to me stuff that shouldn't be his responsibility suddenly was we were without a priest we were in the midst of then trying to find a priest and he was involved in all of that then he was made a deacon under that priest but it just became a very unhappy situation and we realized things were not as we wanted them to be but we had nowhere to go and that's what I think was causing Matt to ask these questions and what was causing me to say no I'm not ready because all I could see in my mind was how am I going to tell my father Catholic I can't tell my dad I I don't know what that will do to him and there was no question in my mind it wouldn't go well and that's where we were as we drove home from Rockford Illinois that summer yeah and it took you to help them so your dad for him to be really happy to hear the news either he was not know even just conceiving of the possibility yeah because that the fundamentalist background you know there's there's still the Reformation alai dia that you know you're not you're not even a Christian if you're Catholic so it's it's it was it was difficult even within Anglican is and there were a few things he could grasp at like the King James Version he was a 1611 King James Version only although it's interesting that the 1611 contains the so called apart but you know it I think to even is we were talking earlier about the spread with an Anglicanism we saw it even with the transfer from on this this priest who really did this Anglican priest who really influenced me who was very kind of small ste Catholic you know he would he made the statement to me one time he said anybody with a high Marian doctrine it is almost guaranteed that they have a high view of Christology he said if they don't have a high Marian doctrine I'm gonna suspect their Christology right away and so you can see he influenced me greatly in that direction the the new priest that came in was much more on the lower church spectrum and so kind of getting back to that issue of authority you know we had such a spread even in that church that began to get a little concerned about you know the fact that we've got sun-ok high church low church who has who's determining this is it the congregation is it just the priest who's who's making this determination of what we believe you know I was going to tell you a former guest on this program said that very thing about Mary and Chris dodo you know that was Graham Leonard the second guest the jury home he was the former bishop of london the angle condition london and that was what convinced one of the things that convinced him to be open to the catholic church because of that very issue recognizing the city of mary in crystal my father always used to refer to it if the great marion heresy so i knew where we were headed I could tell him I pray the rosary he would have been horrified at this point I was veiling during Mass but I saw it as a sign of obedience to to Christ and to my husband as the head of the church the head of the family the scriptural references absolutely I had no concept of real presence none and so we I was not okay with this necessarily but one thing I've learned about my husband is that he will look at a situation and he will study it from all aspects and he will thoroughly examine his own beliefs in light of what he has studied it's something that I admire very much about him and I've watched him do it politically and I've watched him do it in terms of even getting married you know he wasn't expecting to even be married right 18 years of my new car it was it took me remembering all of those things that I admired about him and all of the ways that he'd shown me in the past that he was not going to do something rash to remind myself that I could follow him I could trust him and that's I don't know how I did it because that's not my nature my parents will tell you how bullheaded I am but I trusted him and I watched as he continued this journey and as we did I'll be honest we faced losing a job because of it I was pregnant very shortly after second time with our second child that's very shortly after we started this journey of examination and you know what one of the things that brought me around was being involved in a in a Catholic mom's group they let me in even though I wasn't Catholic we didn't know what an Anglican Catholic was and I got into a Janet bigovich Bible study one of her women of Grace studies the full of grace and the thing that just struck me was that these studies were all about scripture tradition in church history and the Church Fathers studying the liturgy there was I don't remember any single question that said how do you feel about the scripture which is one of the things that bothered me most about the Protestant Studies I've been in there was no question of how I felt about it but there were a lot of questions about how does this affect your life how does learning this about this saint or this church doctrine or this church father how does this affect your life and I was suddenly coming around to what my husband had been very gently teaching me and and I remember during this whole time there was a I was again reading about distributism and there was a as looking on a website about distributism and there was an advertisement for st. Sebastian's church in Akron Ohio that a which is right down the street from us that a Hilaire Belloc impersonator was coming and going to yes speak as if he were Bell I can sue I called up the priest father Val and check when I did not know at this point but I said I'm not Catholic but I could I come to this talk and he kind of laughed and he said well anybody who knows who belicus is welcome to this talk and I'm impressed you know who he is and so I went to the talk and actually I believe a couple of us from our Anglican parish went over there because we were in a little book study and actually reading that like and at a very warm reception from from Father balanchuk and then again just in the Providence of things we started seeing father Balon check around town after that so it was at a Shakespeare play a couple weeks later and I I see him there and we're out to eat at a restaurant and we see him there and so we had a lot in common the two of us just in terms of our interest in literature and theology and whatnot so we started right way we connected you know just on a friendship level and so started talking with him more and more all the while on this we're feeling discontented at the you know at the Anglican Church and so father vanillin Chacon Saint Sebastian was big influence and and he at that time even I believe that was not too long after there been a closure of some churches in the the Cleveland diocese in which Saint Sebastian resides and there had been a a parish that had the Latin Mass at a tended to close down and st. Sebastian's recently had a you know extended an invitation to that community to say you can you can use st. Sebastian and so father Vallon check on talking with me said I think he might be interested in in Latin Mass which Witcher was of course and so then that all said are the new Latin we did yes yeah so and it all just was was fitting together and but is Elizabeth that said one huge issue here and and while I try to be faithful and try to trust in God I also unfortunately tend to be also I guess very practical and say well wait a minute I've got to do this myself and I had this job situation where is teaching at a school that had said you know there's a lot of good people there but if you do this you know you're not gonna be renewed the contract and so we had to make a decision right and one of the groups that I actually contacted that was the first time I make contact with the coming home network we both did because both were very you know concerned about this what do we do and I can't say enough about how helpful the coming home network was on in helping put together resume you know helping me just brainstorm about ideas and so that was on Christmas Eve I got a call we had already actually we'd started attending st. Sebastian's really left Archer at that plane and yes parents yeah we had to tell them we told them in a Bob Evans actually the night before those outside of Ohio yeah we waited till the last Saturday before our last Sunday and my father god bless em he tried he tried but his he just threw his hands up and walked away from the table and that was you know yeah which is to a certain extent we can understand because if you don't have a file folder in your mind for Catholicism if you don't have the data then it's hard to make the connection if you grow up that it was culturally different it's other yeah yeah and so we started actually attending the church so that would have been November of 2011 and you know but still had no answer on the job thing what was what was going to happen and I was do with a baby in February this was which number okay but you know again partly through the coming home networks help and Christmas Eve of 2011 I get a call from a from another place and say we want to extend this job you know opportunity to you and so January came and I was able to the transition of that job and February we came home to the to the Catholic Church so we were confirmed by a wonderful priest who actually says the Latin Mass at st. Sebastian regularly he confirmed us on February 4th and that night some dear dear friends who were with us for that confirmation drove up from Columbus for that confirmation we asked them to be our son's godparents and he was born the next Saturday so he waited a week so that I could receive the Eucharist before because we've gone without receiving from the time we'd left our parish on the first Sunday in Advent and February 4th though some might say well you know that you don't want to mess up family so when it just Anglican mm-hmm I mean when you look back or leaving now why Catholic you know and I think with my own father because you know we've we've talked a little bit without Elizabeth's father's reaction my my father's reaction was somewhat similar I told him he got up and left the room and came back maybe half an hour later and said what's the weather like outside and that was that was a never have talked really about that since but you know and so I think that he probably would not want to hear this but I think in many ways many of the things he taught me and instructed me in going back to that you know that that strong biblical foundation that strong reverence for church for prayer for looking at how you view the world to a Christian lens and that's what I'm living out now so I don't I don't see it necessarily I mean yes it's it's a break like you're saying on the the familial level in terms of well I don't like that but I I think I'm actually staying true it's a little bit I believe but we've mentioned Newman before on that I believe John Henry Newman he kind of talked about his evangelical Anglican upbringing and said well you know there's still a lot from that that I have today and so that's kind of my answer at least more at the theological level I guess that that I have absorbed those lessons I was taught and this is a continuation not a break there's a difficult statement by our Lord that does talk about sometimes dividing families at the point if it wasn't dividing families the point of it was truth and let me say there's no division with my father now we just don't talk about it but I will never say a bad word against him because he loves us and he loves his grandbabies and you know he's you know we have two more now and he's happy being grandpa but we just don't talk about that but we see both sets of grandparents weekly or my father in it but you're also Bulls saying you're here because of their faithfulness I want him most to understand I'm here because of the truth that you taught me and the fact that you taught me to examine and you taught me to to pray and be faithful and that's what I did and in answer to your question why Catholicism every Sunday when I walk into our traditional Latin Mass and I see my little girls and their veils in there you know I understand now why I'm doing that I understand Real Presence and I understand the fullness of the Holy Family I understand that I do have a mother and I understand it more fully in the Catholic Church than I ever did in the Anglican Church God was just getting me ready for that I look and you've seen those images of all of the Saints around the altar as the sacrifice of the mass is offered and I understand that now I see those Saints in day-to-day life and the sacramentalism of Catholicism has opened my eyes to see my faith daily in ways that I never did before and my children see it now they see the sacramentalism and they understand better than I ever did about the truth and that the issue of life and morality and all these other issues really opened up the eyes to those are awakened by grace to the damage of democratic theology yes yes when you're in the midst of the pressures of the world around us that's one of the things too about Catholicism as well I mean that you know attending the mass I see that meeting of heaven and earth I mean it draws us up out of the the mundane and from my background in a lot of Protestantism you know it was so focused on this world and it just it doesn't have the categories of saying hey we're actually inhabitants of another realm really and so to me that that time on Sunday and again I you know that our tradition is a Latin Mass and I can see that that mystery that sacredness there that other worldliness that this is an event that that can't be explained just in rational terms right this is something be on you know the it's extraordinary if you will but but then something that's been so critical to me and to try to teach the kids as well are children that there is there is more to this this life than just what you you see in front of you right and that we can enter into the divine realm yeah came to me this last year in a really powerful way having visited a non Catholic Church and the Catholic Church on the same Sunday and asked myself how would I describe is somebody what's different here what's this what's the essential difference here I mean we could make a long list but I came down to the differences the priest because that priest brings us Jesus hmm you know the other church you might be a great preacher right but here we have the the the body blood soul divinity of our Lord it's the difference between word little W and word W that's one of the things that we've talked with the kids about just in passing one day our daughter asked us and she said daddy why don't we cross ourselves when we go in front of a Protestant church because we have to cross ourselves and we go in front of them Catholic Church today I said I didn't mean anything really by this but I just said well honey Jesus isn't there Jesus this it's in the Catholic Church body blood soul and divinity and you know I think that that just illustrates some of the difference I mean we do believe and my own father would say yes he's not in my church not at all in the way you serve by faith and by grace and by all of that good but not the way not a deep way that we're talking about well and I've watched my children go to adoration and before we leave I'm gonna have trouble before we leave they say goodbye to Jesus hmm and I there's nothing like it I never had that experience growing up or that idea that Jesus was there in that sense and you know in the churches that I grew up in yeah thank you both thank you for joining us here on the journey home god bless you both that your family and your continued service and thank you for sharing your journey with this year and those of you watching thank you very much for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray that Matt and Elizabeth journey is an encouragement to you god bless you see you next week [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 15,169

Rating: 4.7810946 out of 5

Keywords: JHT, JHT01604

Id: lhUWl6m0cKM

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2018