Journey Home - 2019-03-25 - Steve Faulkner

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program once again we have this opportunity to sit relax and you know we listen to the stories of how the holy spirit has drawn someone closer to our Lord Jesus in the church but it's also time for us to kind of reflect ourselves as we hear a story and how is always worked in our life and or maybe needs to work more well that's what these stories are about our continual conversion of faith our guest tonight is Steve Faulkner a former nondenominational and I'm anxious to hear the whole story you better connected with the coming home network for a long time Steve I really appreciate that but it's first time I can think of that we've actually a chance to see face to face thank you and I'd like to say with another writer but I'm not worthy to be called a writer and you teach creative writing out that that's it's a love to be able to sit under you under your tutelage about writing I'd love to hear more about that maybe toward you know the program but let me get out of the way and invite you to take us on the journey if you would well my parents were missionaries in what is now called South Sudan they grew up in fundamentalist church my father did in Salina Kansas and my mother grew up on a dairy farm in Oklahoma and when they got together my mother was committed to being a missionary my father wanted to be a medical doctor and she persuaded him to go to the mission field so they ended up going to Moody Bible Institute of course Chicago and getting what preparation they had there and then it was the nearing the end of World War two and they were ready to go so they went across the Atlantic on two different ships for some reason they divided up the women and sent them on a Red Cross ship because there were German u-boats yeah my father joined a friend and they went across separately and ended up in Liberia in Africa and then made their way by train over to what is now South Sudan it would then it was called the anglo-egyptian Sudan and the British were in control and they spent 12 years there Wow and I was born nine years before they left the Sudan so my parents were really good people they they were concerned for the people there they ran a little medical clinic and then they taught the scriptures they went out to villages and had flannelgraph lessons out in the villages and this was a very primitive areas among the Dinka tribe which is now the dominant tribe in South Sudan and they troopers had to learn that language yes they did well my father learned you grew up there for nine years and I grew up speaking that language I you know it was just I remember going to boarding school when I was six years old which was in Ethiopia is about 1500 miles away and my friends would asked me will say something in Dinka and so I'd rattles something off and then they said what would you just say and they not have to stop and I'd have to translate it in my mind and that was a process that was difficult because I just grew up learning it as I would English so yes they learned Dinka my father learned Arabic - and the little church there began to grow the British were in control so they kept the intertribal warfare down and then after 12 years my father came down with a what turned out to be a viral ulcer and they didn't know how to cure that and so he moved us all back to the United States went to finished his schooling out at John Brown University in Siloam Springs Arkansas which is a kind of fundamentalist school and then got a job as a baptist minister in Manhattan Kansas where Kansas State University is so I spent the latter part of my childhood as part of the Baptist Church and when they went over was that were they Baptist when they went old yeah they they went to a Bible Church in Salina Kansas that's the way my father grew up so they were pretty close kin to the Salina Kansas that's good a history of its own right well my my grandfather was a bricklayer there that saw the one thing I know about Salina Kansas what I was like there was a lot about anti-slavery and a big back in Salina Kansas seems like that there's a pre Civil War history there in the back yeah there's what was called Bleeding Kansas which before the Civil War thee they'd passed some law that each territory could kind of choose its own route be either be pro-slavery or anti slavery and so John Brown was the famous anti-slavery proponent who shot some people and then went east to start a revolution so yeah he was in Kansas and yeah difficult times back then right back yeah so you I just can't imagine growing up in the Sudan and then coming back to the states of course I mean that what a what a childhood that was was a very strong faith filled it was and my father became a Baptist minister he was always very serious about his faith he wasn't a particularly good speaker which is a liability if you're a Baptist minister but he was really good to the people and they they recognized that and he was really good to us and so was my mother so I never really had any doubts about the faith I was raised in until I went to college and that's when you begin questioning things and I ended up going to Wheaton College so evangelical school evangelical culture environment right and I was content there I I had thought about possibly becoming a missionary myself old friends of my father from dinkle and when they managed to make it in the United States in some way would look my father up and so we still had that connection so I took anthropology at Wheaton College and was beginning to make those kind of plans you know I wasn't sure where I would go I thought I'd go back to Africa and then I just bumped into some other friends who were having a Bible study and this is even at the evangelical school like Wheaton College that doesn't always happen so we started meeting together and we noticed that some of us were Baptist some of us were Methodist some Presbyterian there were a couple of Mennonites so from all over the spectrum and we wanted to know well what are we supposed to do we didn't agree on things we didn't agree on what baptism was we didn't agree on what the Eucharist was so we decided to start well what do you do is a good evangelical you look in the Bible so we cleaned out one of our bedrooms move the bunks to another room so we could have our meetings in that in that room and then when the school year ended it was my sophomore year we said well we're not done our studies what are we gonna do we haven't really answered these questions so we one of us was from Detroit and had some connections there so we just all moved to Detroit that summer and to carry on and we rented a house from an Arab it's heavily Arabic in one part of Dearborn Michigan and we continued there was a kind of Jesus Movement going on at the time this is back in the hippy day we needed a car so we bought a milk truck that was painted all over with flowers and something it kind of worked we we we painted it dark green we weren't quite into that lifestyle but I remember we got a traffic ticket driving back from Ann Arbor Michigan because the old mill truck wouldn't go over 40 miles an hour so we actually got a ticket for going under the speed limit so anyway we continued our studies and because we had these issues that we wanted to answer we started with baptism so what he can find out about what they the early church believed about baptism so we started in the Old Testament and every word that had anything to do with water ablutions washings whatever we looked it up and read it I remember being particularly struck by the story of naman and coming from a Baptist background baptism was purely symbolic it's just an act of obedience and we looked at the story of naman and especially since it took place in the Jordan River where John the Baptist yet later baptized we thought you know this must be significant and there was a radical healing there it wasn't just some kind of symbolic act of obedience and then we went on of course read the Apostle Paul and the Gospels that say you know he who was believed and is baptized will be saved and so we you know had the discussion well can you get rid of the baptism and just have the faith thing because that's what we'd been taught but it says both so you know are we qualified to eliminate one of those you know we had all these discussions and we came to a kind of sacramental view of baptism and then it was the Eucharist and we found out that there were passages in the Bible that had never been preached on in our you know memory anyway and you know we we ran into a Christian minister of the Christian Church and he said well when Jesus says you know this is my body this is my blood it's the same as when he said I'm the door it doesn't mean he's an oak door you know or I am the light of the world you know it's a it's you have a spiritual interpretation to that but then of course we read John 6 and it kind of eliminated that option for us and so here we are in kind of in a difficult situation because we weren't attending any churches at all in Detroit we were just meeting together to pray and to read sing songs and those kind of things and now the Eucharist do we need a priest for that you know well we kept saying well we don't know what to do and all we can do is follow the light that we've been given and I was gonna pause I guess is default herb because I don't want it to to interrupt your flow but what's kind of neat about envisioning you guys this real commitment to do that you had to begin with some assumptions that were allowing you to beforehand right I mean one of which is you believe this book yes yeah so there you go I mean so there you're gathered you're around the book of the scriptures you believe that Christ was an assumption right yes yes in fact when I did have doubts about what we were doing my parents were worried you know off doing our own thing out there in Detroit I kept asking myself is this Christ centered is this drawing us somehow closer to Christ than we were before and every time I asked that question I said yes you know so this has got to be somehow the right track so I mean there you are in the scriptures and our Lord Jesus and then everything else is up for grabs in a way right because you were okay encryption I mean the baptism the Eucharist yeah and so we came to see that as as somehow sacramental we didn't quite know what to do we started doing the bread and wine thing you know and saying prayers but we realized that in some way it had to be not only the presence of Christ but the body and blood of Christ which is that radical opinion seemingly held only by Catholics and Orthodox and we were not even considering them that was but one thing we did consider is the unity of the church and I guess that was probably the the thing that took us to Detroit hmm here we are were a various from various sects and denominations and yet Christ prayed for the unity of the church so it must be possible you know it must be possible and we want to go that direction somehow so we came to some kind of a semi sacramental understanding of the Eucharist and then well how should the church operate who are the priests you know Baptist ministers Protestant ministers kind of take it one way is that is that proper and we assumed it was so we read through the book of the Acts and then I'm sure this has happened to many of your guests what then you know to leap to Roger Williams in the Revolutionary War is a large step and that's the first inkling I had of Church really was not even Luther but into the kind of American Baptist experience it's all I'd ever heard and so we recognized that that was just a gap that we could not we'll beep over so we began really in that first summer I think into the next fall because we didn't go back to college we weren't done our studies yet right so we didn't go guys were serious yeah yeah we were serious about it and of course the hippies were out there you know during the Christian hippie movement kind of in Detroit was pretty strong and we visited them and didn't quite know what to make of that they visited us and you know so we stuck it out and wondered kept wondering what to do and thought well we just have to take the steps one at a time and then we began reading the early father's Ignatius of Antioch church history of you said you said yes Eusebius how you pronounce that climate of Rome and right away you're struck with the bishops right and this whole thing of laying on of hands so we did a Bible study on laying on of hands and the anointing of priests and all this and it became obvious that the church believed in apostolic succession and that's something we had never heard of before and again we had no intention of becoming Catholics yeah I was yeah I think so you know I'd heard all the standard arguments growing up so that didn't even we were going to try to revive the early church as a as as another group of Protestants but after reading about apostolic succession we saw right away that we can't just become another sect we can't just become another division of the endlessly dividing Protestant churches so now what and that was a tough question for us it took it took a lot of time to sort that out because we then looked at the denominations that believed in some form of apostolic succession and it was the Eastern Orthodox Roman Catholic and the Anglicans well we spent we didn't spend a lot of time on the Anglicans because we you know after you read about Henry the eighth and all that it just didn't seem the path toward unity you know so then it became a question of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox and I think we figured that out within the first two years I remember by that time I had moved back to Manhattan and I got married and we started having children and we are still involved in this study but in there was one group in Chicago by this time in one group in Manhattan Kansas and we stayed in touch were you guys thinking of a of actually starting a church you guys I tell you I think yeah I think it was it was heading in that direction but we ran into that apostolic succession thing and that that huh harmed that yeah you know I deal I guess so so we started you know besides our regular we did have church services you know we didn't go elsewhere we had our own little church services we gathered a few people in Kansas more people in Chicago and then we would send people up there that one of them would come down we'd share what we've learned so far and it became obvious at one point that we're gonna have to look at the first ecumenical council and actually look at the Creed's and so we started this long process of going through all seven ecumenical councils and we met once a month just on that subject and so we came to the conviction again but see that the main purpose of that study was to decide whether we were going to become Roman or Orthodox and that hinge so much on their views of the papacy and how they worked with these councils what authority did the Bishop of Rome have versus the Bishop of Constantinople or Jerusalem Alexandria and that's what took us so long it took us 20 years to make that decision so by that time we'd actually bought a little church building and the Kansas and I'm not sure what they done in Chicago they were still meeting in Chicago and we are still in the Bible study and song and prayer and all of this unanimous group in Kansas yeah and the kids as I became a kind of lay leader at the same time I was working full-time we we're working full time because we had families by that time so I was a carpenter for years I was a truck driver for a while and since we'd all dropped out of college you know we didn't have that to rely on and then it kind of you know after 20 years you got to make a decision right we actually had a visit from Frankie Shaffer oh and he'd gone Orthodox by that time even though his father was even job very hard to insure yet aweful ossifer historian theologian and yeah yeah Frankie went that the Orthodox Jew Yeah right thank you reminding me of the of the group of folk about the same time that went Antiochian with they almost began the same way you guys we're gonna start from scratch yeah was a Peter Gilchrist crew yes yeah yeah yeah we read his stuff and we're reading Tom Howard you said was the first guest on the coming that's right at work I used to read his columns in the New Oxford Review and it was my favorite reading I just loved the way Thomas Howard wrote especially right so when he became a Catholic that that had some influence on me because I had been reading his work but we had to make that decision and for me and my wife because we were so concerned for unity the Orthodox Church has the difficulty that they've never had an ecumenical council since those first seven because they just their patriarch it's are enough independent from one another that they don't have any mechanism for working together across those barriers and pairing that with the masses of Jesus seeming to offer particularly particularly to Peter even though he gave the same rights to forgive and hold sins Unforgiven too the other apostles he seemed to particularly set out Peter so what we do we did a Bible study on Peter and it became apparent that he was a leader that he practiced as a leader that even st. Paul after a vision of Christ on the Damascus Road still felt it necessary to come and get the approval of the leaders in Jerusalem so that that steered me and my wife by that time we had kids almost in college and they'd been attending our little church and so then we we we basically allowed the congregation to follow their conscience 'as in Chicago most of them became Orthodox and started a church called All Saints and they were Antioch and Orthodox and in Kansas so they they sent people down and we you know we shared back and forth and so about I'd say 60% of the Kansans went Roman Catholic and maybe I don't know 20% of the Chicago's Chicagoans did and the others maintained that building that we had started and it's now the first Orthodox Church in Topeka Kansas so that and then once we became most of us in Kansas it became Catholics than we started attending a church there and just eventually blended into that and your wife came in with you yes and fortunately we were taking these this whole process we were going it together the difficulty was that our kids really hadn't grown up in the church and a couple of our oldest boys were going off to college and so they basically got baptized right before they left or you know or you know and confirmed but they didn't they hadn't been a part of all these studies as much as their parents said so that was that was difficult for us as a family now the younger kids then yeah got that Catholic education boy I could see that because you're all those years you're dealing with heavy stuff heady stuff that doesn't always get down to the kids in the process I mean we'd incorporated a lot of Catholic ideas like the Saints we we had a big celebration on All Saints Day and we would have drawings for the kids to color and all this of the Saints and we were concerned from very early on about the history that's in the Bible the Jewish history was instructive it just wasn't a secular history like we're used to in the United States God was informing his people by way of their historical lives for good and for evil so we were we were concerned about that and so we asked ourselves what about the feast of Purim the Jews have you know what about Hanukkah so we started celebrating everything you know we'll have Christmas we'll have Hanukkah - and then we'll have Purim after that and then we'll have the feast of booths in the fall you know and we did too much really really it was too much for families to handle but but I think it did lead us to that necessity of looking at the history of the church was God still directing his people by way of their history and so it shouldn't be a 1500 year gap in our knowledge no effect sometimes I wonder that you know we we look at the Old Testament history and the way it would record it down on how God worked very specifically not only with the hand chosen leaders but through the prophets and you know speaking through the prophets - the people of God who'd gone astray and we kind of described that up to Jesus and then we get Acts and then now the last 2,000 years we don't quite think of it that way though they'll say agustin tried to say in his book that the City of God that yes God still does guide his church there's no prophets there's still a purpose there's still a line to that and how do we interpret that 2,000 years of this long journey let's take a break Steve and come back because I want to you're a writer now you teach a mantra how that's fit into this story but also found out what you know you you really thought your way guided by the spirit into the church to discover in a way that very few of my guests ever go through what was the biggest barriers for you and then also were there's some surprises along the way that you didn't quite pick up in years Bible studies as you're coming into the church [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home my name is Marcus Grodi your host for this program and our guest is Steve Faulkner former nondenominational that little phrase former nondenominational doesn't tell it all does it I mean really from scratch you and your buddies study that's fascinating to me they were kind of multi-denominational I guess yeah because y'all brought baggage with you is there a group sir and some of it was Pro and some one was anti what you brought with you like you'd mentioned during the break that you guys kind of started off very non it I mean was true the sixties you know kind of yeah anti institutional we kind of had a doctrine almost that you couldn't follow the words of men right you have to follow the leading of the Spirit of course that can be interpreted in so many ways and then you run into obedience right to the whole doctrine you know and practice of obedience among the Saints and the Apostles and so that yeah that changed in the course of our reading of the scriptures and reading me early fathers as you and your wife were then drawn to the Catholic Church it's not the place you were expecting to end up I don't want to say you read your way in as if it was merely an intellectual journey because the work of grace was was there opening your heart says I know you recognize was there something that was the really hardest things to accept as you entered into the Catholic Church you realize this is where you got to come home but it was hard as far huh I I think for us probably like many Protestants it was the doctrines around the Virgin Mary we had already sorted out things like infant baptism by just looking at the fact that for 1500 years there was no debate about it or virtually no debate about it and so they had to be practicing it I mean we read in the book of Acts that whole households were baptized and we assumed even from that there must have been some little kids in there you but we couldn't prove it and then we looked at the experience of the church and if it been an issue it would have been brought up so we'd sorted that out and then I I suppose it was just a kind of Protestant visceral reaction to devotion to the Virgin Mary and that seemed anti-christian your identity because you're devoted to the one god we had memorized the Shema Israel you know in in Hebrew even you know because we were devoted to the one God so that that was a difficulty and we I tended to take the attitude or the idea that we've come to see that the church itself has been led by the Spirit and therefore if the church like Vincent of lorenz said believes what has always been taught by everyone everywhere then we've got to take that issue very seriously because there's I see no division between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics on that issue they both honored the Virgin Mary and then we looked at the seventh ecumenical council where they you know parse those words veneration and worship and that you offer veneration to the Saints into the Virgin Mary but you only worship God and so we kind of sorted it out in time and I think the probably the more surprising thing for my wife and me I guess two things we're finding out that there had been apparitions of Mary down through time you can read about them in the Orthodox Church and certainly in the Roman Catholic Church and so we found a little booklet or something on apparitions of the Virgin Mary and we're struck by Fatima because it was such a public apparition how could how many thousand tens of thousands of people gathered out there in that rainy day all saw the same thing and I even villages seven miles away people didn't even go saw the same thing you know so this looking for truth how can you ignore that some New York Times reporter was there and wrote about it but because it was during the World Series it got put back on the like a 38 page of the New York Times because the World Series is on the front page so it was a demonstrable act that was very biblical and tied in with what we'd been learning about the Catholic Church so yeah Fatima was a help and we read that several years before we actually became Catholic and then John Paul became Pope and he was an attractive proponent of Catholicism he very much was although our friends who went Orthodox have been as committed and dedicated as we and have done some great things the my friend Jim Kushner is the editor of touchstone and salvo magazines I write for them sometimes yes and they are an expression of this little groups dedication to unity because they have Christians who believe in the Creed's and in the Bible writing for them from the Catholic Orthodox and Protestant perspectives so we you get that because we agree on so many things you know it wasn't like we were jumping to a new faith when we became Catholics or Orthodox and there's much we can still share together and that's been an important part of it's called a fellowship of st. James that puts out those journals and that that's still important to will to us I've always whenever I've read touched on I've always felt that it was a great expression of authentica cumin is 'm really emphasizing the best without degrading into indifferent ISM right right and that's the challenge is not just to become like the world council of churches seem to do which is just water everything down to the point you don't recognize it you know another doctrine that seems to me if I could see our lady you know if you guys studying Scripture and maybe ending up with the doctrines of of Our Lady might not be a direct trajectory but you did end up Trinitarian yeah I mean you know I'm saying in early days of the church that part of it the Sola scriptura crowd ended up all over the place when it came to the relationship between God the Father God the Son God the Holy Spirit did you bring that as a grid that you were gonna let go of or did you deal with that at you know that was kind of up for grabs too but going through the early councils of the church that's where they sorted it all out there we go okay and so one council after another you know Jesus two persons are one person with two natures and and all of these ideas had been thrashed out at some pains for the church across those first centuries so in fact when we named our little congregation in Topeka Kansas it ended up being Holy Trinity well it's in a way your process beginning with a great devotion to not only our Lord Jesus but the scripture kind of took you beyond sola scriptura to recognizing the trajectory of the authority of the early church that it received from the Apostles have passed on right so if you because you're going to the consuls and you're accepting that authority right and and I think the turning point for me personally was finding out that John's disciple the Apostle John's disciple was what Ignatius of Antioch and and our Polycarp oh yeah I have the order wrong Polycarp we read the story of Polycarp and what a dramatic and wonderful story and then Ignatius was his disciple to some degree and then IRA næss and we've been reading and and so you had this kind of unbroken chain of Orthodox testimony to the reality of Christ and and the way the church should should function and so we we have we had the great good fortune of following in that line so that we just didn't come up with our own divisive interpretations and let that rule the day you became a writer yeah how that happened in your in that long process you know as you a truck driver for a while there - yeah yeah I made a grave alts for a while and planted them in graveyards I had I don't know 15 different jobs one day I heard that the there was a teacher at the University of Kansas teaching on the great books and I was just hungry to read I was by that time I was a carpenter and I just didn't get to read enough you know I I missed that from my college experience and so I heard about this for semester program you read the great books and four semesters there are a number of them so I I thought about how can I do this how can I do this so I picked up a newspaper route at night to support my family and tried continuing my job as a carpenter and then running off to classes on the in the afternoon that didn't work so I had to finally drop the carpentry and just work seven nights a week delivering newspapers so I could take those classes so it took me I don't know eight to ten years to finish my bachelor's because I could only take two classes a semester well but we read the great books and then come to find out this is part of what was called the integrated humanities program and one of my mentors became Dennis Quinn who was a member of the three faculty were a part of that and found out they were Catholic now we were already on our own route into Piku and chicago so i'm not sure they were that you know decisive but they were an encouragement so anyway to make a long story short after i finished my bachelor's then they offered me free tuition and a teaching gig to be a graduate teaching assistant so i just kept taking classes for umpteen years until i finally finish the PhD and when I was getting near the end of that I needed to write a thesis and I just by chance took a class on what was called creative nonfiction a professor whose field it was not just had fallen in love with it and decided to teach a class I didn't know what it was but it's the writing of memoirs and travel essays and personal stories and I read these all my life you know and loved them so suddenly I switched from Renaissance literature with two years to go I switched from that to create a writing I needed a thesis for my creative writing degree and when I was younger I'd found a book in a library book sale for a twenty five cents to read to your children and it was a story of Jacques Marquette who in 1673 along with some others went West in canoes and birch bark canoes and found the northern Mississippi River and I love that story I remembered reading it to my boys so I thought you know I could take that trip and then I'll write about it right this is creative nonfiction so I convinced one of our younger sons to go with me I needed someone else in the canoe and I told my two oldest boys they could come with me too and we'd have two canoes which is what they did Marquette and Jolliet but the older boys by that time had girlfriends in college and you know so that was out so Justin and I started where Marquette and Joliet up on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and st. Ignace right where the big bridge connects Upper and Lower Michigan and we we took off from there and we were not canoers we you know scarcely been on the water so in the first two of the three days God gave us calm weather and we managed to learn how to steer the thing and off we went for two months one a thousand miles in the canoe we didn't go as far as Marquette and Joliet they made it 1,500 miles one way and then they had to turn around go back yeah how they did that I don't know it was hard enough going with the current you know but it was a great experience and I found a translation of Marquette's journal so I was able to tie that in with our own experience and that became my thesis well I think I called it a middle American Odyssey or something and and later then I was able to get it published changed the name to water walk water walk a passage of ghosts because it's partly about my relationship with my son I was working so much running newspapers at night going classes in the daytime teaching in the afternoons that I was kind of losing touch with my kids and so I thought this would be a good opportunity to join up with Justin and so part of the stories about that and part of its about Marquette in his journal Wow you know when I try I love history too and there's something about being in a place when you realize that this person was here yes I mean was that part of what the journey was about you know you're reading his journal and you're you're on that side of the river and you knew that those guys were there yeah seeing it for the first time one of the I think the second place we camped was a place called epithet and we ran into an old old man mowing fields out there and got to talking to him he said yeah this is where the French trash produced a camp here so it's very possible that Jolie and Marquette camp at exactly that spot and yeah you get that you get experience the landscape the water scape the weather the storms encountering strange people all along that trip and I love that part of it because it kind of joins you in a way to that historical experience hi from my own studies I know a little bit about that but julietam Marquette's journey was not merely discovery there is a religious aspect oh yeah journey that was Marquette's intention ah Joliet apparently had gone to seminary and they were all serious Catholics under seven men and on the trip but Marquette was going out as a missionary and so I had that in my background too and so it was interesting it was very interesting to see his encounters with the Native Americans along the way and they once they were surrounded by canoes and attacked and he he holds up a peace pipe that he'd been given by another tribe up the river and they recognized this was a an act of peace not of war so he's a remarkable man I think he ought to be a saint he ought to be recognized as that because he really gave his life for this mission and after they had returned from their journey he went back to what is now Illinois - a tribe there that it invited him there you know on the original trip and he came on Good Friday and preached a several thousand and then came down with dysentery and died on his way back so it did kind of have a proper ending to that story in a way because he ever was able in some way fulfill his mission and then other missionaries filled in after he died and that that tribe in a place called kuskowski I think and and there were you know the tribe pretty much converted to Christianity I have a newspaper article at home I had no idea we're gonna talk about this but when Marquette died up by sue st. Marie for the longest time they couldn't find his burial site hmm and I have a newspaper article that says that a local guy named Pierre comme dad a worker found the bones my ancestor Wow open up in Sault Saint Marie yeah Wow I'll send you a copy yes indeed I'd like to see that yeah got an email Robert from Michigan Wow works of literature aren't always overly Christian wisdom and truth are certainly present do you have any particular recommendations for works of literature you think would be helpful to help open someone's heart to the Catholic faith yes III agree with that statement and certainly especially coming from a kind of Baptist fundamentalist background as I did Flannery O'Connor makes the mark there she and you know she's she's not easy reading and a lot of these Catholic authors and that's not an understatement yes but she's great no yes she is and she knows what she's talking about I think in the same way Graham Greene when we were on our trip we stopped at a used bookstore and I picked up greens a burnt-out case and we read it in the tents you know as we as we traveled and he he knows what he's talking about and again it's not an easy read he doesn't soft-pedal fundamentalist Christians or Catholics even and he is it can be a hard read you're not getting a kind of romanticized view in any way so I just finished reading Brighton Rock yes okay it has a wonderful scene at the end of a confession it was queasy ol priest who's you know got a pneumonia or something and he's he's the one so so he yeah he doesn't soft petal things but he tells you the truth yeah I was thinking that in some ways Flannery O'Connor remind me of Karen garden away but the the idea that writing from within the heart of the depraved person yeah looking out from that but yet it's a story of redemption yeah I think I think Walker Percy - in fact I just read one of his essays he had some marvelous essays they're like a signpost in a strange land I think was his last book of essays where he talks about his craft as just that as placing you know demonstrating our own disability by putting us a person in in difficult straits and then not just preaching at us but letting us see how things work out and he'll have some character in there who tells you the truth whether you want to hear it or not so Walker Percy I think is another good example I I know that Brideshead Revisited came out while we were on this search in a miniseries and so then we went out and found the book and read the book I know my wife and I we used to read to each other before we had too many kids and we read through that yeah I sometimes wish maybe we should be using the internet for that if you know a place where people would go I I need some good recommendations on authors good directors on books or maybe some books just to stay away from you know we and we live in a time when there are just so many options yeah a lot of it ain't good I like current Cormac McCarthy you know he went to a Catholic High School I can't figure out if he's a Christian at all but he brings up the issues in his books and he's a marvelous writer so I think there's some options out there all right another email Pete from Newark New Jersey who are some of the great Catholic heroes in American history that you think the everyday Catholic needs to be more aware of and be inspired by you know I I live in a very Baptist section of Virginia but I I have when I teach American Lit I have them read Willa Cather's death comes for the archbishop yeah and they're you know in preparation for teaching that class I read his biography Willa Cather changes his name in her book it's Bishop Latour his real name was Bishop Lonnie they used French Bishop that was sent to New Mexico right after the American Mexican War and so we just taken possession of this very Catholic area and so the church was trying to decide what to do and they sent this remarkable I would say heroic priest and his associate also became the first bishop of Denver and they were both really marvelous individuals who could be seen as heroic well when you touch on Marchetti and Juliet I mean you're touching on a group of Catholics in the North American continent that whole movement that a lot of Americans are just oblivious to I said my second book is called Bitterroot and in that I follow Pierre Jean De Smet yes who is I was just amazed by him first of all he's a good writer he used to write all kinds of letters and so we have a lot to go on and on his experiences but and I mentioned this in in Bitterroot that the Indians the solace Indians in the Rocky Mountains sent three different messengers all the way to st. Louis to try to get them to send priests out to the Rocky Mountains they an Iroquois REE trapper had married one of their women and was living with them and he kept saying you got to find these guys who wear the long black robes and carry a crucifix and say the mask that's the true religion and so they're one of their chieftains his name was Ignace la moose a big Ignis they called him took his two sons all the way to st. Louis with just 3,000 miles to get them baptized and then 3,000 miles back and then later launched another expedition to go ask the pre to come out again and he was killed by the Sioux on the way down so then a couple years later his son little Ignis and the the local chieftain whose name was insula I think sent another mission out and they made it all the way back to st. Louis and begged again for priests to come out and the priest that went was finally sent was Pierre Jean de smet and he established the first mission up in the Bitterroot Valley in the Rocky Mountains and he was the tribes the tribes trusted him so much that when it came to complex with the American military he became their intermediary even even the Sala SH Indians enemies the Sioux when it came to needing a negotiator they asked us met to do their negotiations for them so he was a remarkable remarkable traveling Jesuit missionary you mentioned the fact that they traveled thousand miles just to be baptized yeah with it emphasized yeah three thousand one way how crucial it was in the message of the missionaries as they went out the message of baptism right right which is a confirmation of what we finally picked up in our own community yeah let's say you've got somebody watching that's I don't know if there's people out there kind of looking around like you guys were looking back then you know an encouragement to them to make that same journey you made yourself you know I don't think any of us who made that journey or sorry we made it we did feel like the light you know lead kindly light you know to John Henry Newman song that he led us kindly and sometimes slowly along that path and it's we wanted to know the truth that's what we want to know in a relativistic age I suppose that is unusual but we wanted to know the truth and we were we had our differences in opinion so we let the church sort it out in the course of those centuries in which the church has done exactly that Steve thank you very very much join me yes thank you and you've been connected the coming on network for a long time I finally been it glad we've been able to get you on the program thank you and for your work and for your writing appreciate that your witness thank you and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray that Steve's journey is encouragement to you and mr. reminder if you go to CH network.org the website of the coming on network you can find out more about conference and the reverts like Steve thank you very much god bless you see you next [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

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Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01650

Id: UkSxuRmK3_Y

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019