Journey Home - 2019-10-29 - 10/28/19 Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble, Fsp

[Music] [Music] well good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program once again it's a great privilege to get together with you to hear the story of how the holy spirit is awakened someone to a deeper walk with Christ in his church and our guest tonight is what we call for want of a better word a revert but also a former atheist so I was reminding our guests that when Mother Angelica wanted this program one of the motives was because she had received so many letters from Catholics whose children and siblings had left the church and mother thought well if they had they could hear these conversion stories of people who'd come back to the church it would give them hope that if it can happen to this person it might happen to my adore a son and such as the case tonight our guest is sister Teresa Alethea noble and FSP we'll talk about that in a moment a sister Teresa welcome thank you welcome to the program it's good to have you here as we were talking I think your dad and I might have known each other long long back when we cross paths as students also have to connect on that it's great let me back up and let's hear your story if you want okay I'm so I was obviously my father was a theology professor at the University of Stephenville so I was raised in a Catholic family and my parents were very you know very in intentional about bringing the Liturgy of the church into our house and so we really I people asked me you know did you have a vibrant faith when you were younger and they say yes I really did I I believed in God my mom always tells the story about I was watching this this cartoon where kids would go back in time into the Gospels and there it was a crucifixion scene and I was probably around you know four or five maybe six and the the the cartoon characters that I've gone back in time are really upset that Jesus was dying and and I went up to the television state to the television set and I just said don't be sad he's dying for our sins you know he has to die he's dying for since so I really I did believe in God and I had a vibrant personal relationship with Jesus but I also was and you had all the information in other words you had you understood the theology there you go I mean my dad gave me apologetics classes when I was little I remember I knew the word heretic by the time I was seven I was I was pretty informed about the faith and in practicing your Catholic and practicing it but I always was skeptical in the midst of of that I I always had doubts and I would always be arguing with my parents about different religious questions and I remember the the first time I doubted whether God existed I was five years old and I was just walking up to it's a very vibrant memory I was just walking up the steps and I got to the top of the steps of our house and I thought what if God doesn't exist and I remember the it wasn't just a intellectual thought it was like I had this visual memory of everything kind of crumbling around me for a second and I was just kind of standing it in in this windy empty space and I pushed that thought away because I was really young at that time and I really couldn't kind of deal with the repercussions of of what if God doesn't exist but but I always had those those kind of questions I was the kind of kid who always was thinking about does is this really true and and I would argue with my parents at the dinner table I remember had a really difficult time with the fact that Moses couldn't go into the Promised Land after hitting that rock one too many times and I remember pounding the table just being so upset that God would do that to someone who had served him for so long and that that was that kind of was illustrative of my problem with the differing I really had a difficulty with the problem of suffering how could a good God allow suffering and how could he allow someone who had served him for so long - suffers for so much and and that's really you know that combines my skepticism combined with my my problem with the problem suffering kind of came to a head when I was around 14 and I just I was struggling with those those two different things and outside of that my father had worked in the church you know in Steubenville then we had moved to Oklahoma and he had worked in the diocese there and as as anyone who works in the church and knows people works in the church you see the best and the worst and I saw the best and the worst and I was young and very impressionable and I remember thinking to myself some of these people are really hypocritical and they don't really live what they say they're they're living and I remember having the thought I want to be a good person this is this is my purpose in life is to be a good person and some of these people have invested their entire lives into the church and they're not good at least from what I've seen and so that combined with the problem of suffering and my skepticism made me think you know is is catholicism real is this true and and does God really exist if he's allowing suffering on top of that so I I do remember the moment I just I became an atheist I'm sitting in the car and it was wrestling with these problems I had that I had been wrestling with for so long and it was almost like flipping a switch I just thought to myself I don't believe that God exists you know our guest is sister Teresa ilithyia you remind me of a fascinating thing we believed in the church that could even be controversial some people's Eisen and as this this idea that God desires everyone to be saved and salvation itself is a working of grace it's not our intellect oh but God can use a lot of things but it comes about by grace and the church believes that everyone who's ever lived has been given sufficient grace so even the person out there a Native American who had never heard of Jesus that in his conscience there's sufficient grace to awaken them and you can see if somebody's been brought up in an environment a totally atheist environment the way God's grace would work at some point in their life is to awaken them to their reality of maybe there's a god but also if someone's brought up in a completely religious environment grace works differently and maybe that's through doubt to strengthen to awaken so you were in the environment of total faith mm-hmm Barr's maybe was there a flaw in that well I bet your parents did everything they possibly could do but a part of your journey was that work in conscience okay let's see the strength in that and that's with doubt yeah yeah and you know I think I I do think I feel very positively about doubt the role of doubt in the life of faith but I think in my case at that moment when I made that decision you know I could have gone in different ways of my doubts I could have continued to walk with my doubt and continue to believe but I chose not to so I think that was that was where I made a mistake but really God worked with that to know yeah well there's a scripture in 2nd Corinthians that says that we're never tempted beyond our ability but God gives the grace yeah it's there so I mean yeah you walked away not did you come 105 percent walk away or was there the work of God's grace and you know let the leash go little boy and here you are yeah but anyway at that point in your life when the switch when it was done it was done it was done and I you know Here I am but I it's kind of a exempt lot of God's grace but also I'm a person of extremes so I do things 150 percent so I did atheism 150 percent and I so I just it was almost like when I flipped that switch I snipped the connection that I had with God and and really I didn't feel I didn't feel God's presence I didn't I I really was done and at this point 14 yeah did you how long did it take you before you told somebody that no way yeah so I told my you know I was at the age where I was supposed to be confirmed and my parents were kind of pushing me to do that and I said you know I don't believe in God and I don't think it's a good idea for me to do something if I don't believe in it and so that became a big big conversation in my house of course and we had I had a lot of conversations with my parents about it because they were trying to understand what where it's coming from is the phase is this just going to be very temporary and I remember at one point saying very clearly to my mom this is not temporary I am done like I do not believe in God but I I want to be a good person that's my goal in life and doesn't that make you happy mom and we're goodness children the siblings I mean watching your family yeah if the UH three sisters and a brother and I know this Karen you were the oldest so very interesting so you've got all these younger siblings looking to you as they're modeled to follow and yeah you switched you flipped the switch did it have effect on your siblings did yeah and I think that was a big concern of my parents too so one of the things that we kind of came to an agreement about was my parents said okay you know we're not going to drag you into the church to be confirmed obviously we're not gonna force you but you're coming to church with us every Sunday and and I respected that I respected that a bit that they wanted me to do that and so I you know I tried to do set a good example for my siblings in the sense that I wanted I didn't want to work against what my parents are trying to raise them in but I also obviously they knew that I was an atheist also so that influenced how they how they thought about the faith too so again our guess is sister Teresa Alethea know but you said that use we abandoned the foundation for a moral life mm-hmm but you kept it you kept the moral I well yeah in your convictions you kept the moral I kept the intention of being a good person at the forefront of my life and that really was what directed all of my decision and my actions for the most part I think that something that my mom said to me that kind of haunted me throughout that time of atheism was when I told her I want to be a good person doesn't that make you happy she said I just don't know if you're gonna know how to be a good person and and I just I was kind of offended by that but I truly believe that morality it was something that that I that my I could discover by reason and I could live by it and so I I tried my best to do that and I'm but I also I think kind of because I had thought that Christianity and I had seen hypocritical people in Christianity I thought to myself you know I bet they're they're aspects of morality that Christians just don't get and and I and a rejected aspects of Christian morality that I just didn't get so sexual morality I don't I don't understand why that would be relevant to an atheist who's just a materialist atheist who doesn't believe in a soul doesn't believe in any of that obviously I believe in respecting another person and things like that but marriage why what what's the point of waiting in so marriage what even is marriage you know so I so that I just totally rejected wholeheartedly I also at around the same age at fourteen one of my friends was a vegetarian and I remember asking her why are you a vegetarian and she said well she gave me you know the reasons for the environment it's better for your health and also for the sake of animals because they feel pain and I don't want to cause them pain and I thought to myself I think that's one thing Christians are missing and so I decided to become a vegetarian and so that was that kind of was one of my major moral focuses into college I became a vegan in college and I was the president of the animal rights collective and I just was very into animal rights but I also was just focused a lot on how can I be a good person and so I made other choices in college that were that were focused on that also did would you have seen yourself as thinking that as now an atheist you had you had come to a higher plane you remain in terms of a higher plane of of understanding life so that you had a I don't I don't mean to automatically convey a negative but a superior way of understanding morality and able to cut through the stuff yeah I did think that in some sense rejecting Christianity gave me kind of a leg up on on on understanding what would be best morally speaking now you could in fact now you're at the place in that thinking that you've recognized that that that humans and animals are the same and it's not so much that you've you've denigrated humanity down to the animal life but you brought animal life up to an equivalent mm-hmm so if you had to decide between saving a little baby in a pool versus a young a Bock you know beautiful Doberman Pinscher in the pool you would had a moral dilemma yeah and and in fact you know in college I I studied political philosophy but my boyfriend study philosophy so we had a lot of philosophical conversations and he was a vegan also we were both very involved in animal rights but we had a little bit of a difference in terms of how we viewed it and we both would argue about that that purse basically we would say if there's a child in front of you and a dog and you had to shoot one which would you shoot and I would always say the dog and he would say it doesn't matter because in terms of speciesism you know you're basically kind of siding with your species but for an arbitrary reason really and this is kind of a philosophical argument that comes from Peter Singer and I always had a difficulty with that but I couldn't really you know we would go over it and over it and over it but I couldn't really support my philosophical reasons for believing that human life was more valuable than animal life because really for animal rights activists a lot of it comes down to sentience we both we both are capable of feeling pain animals are capable of feeling pain so really you really that that's what we should care about in terms of what makes animal life equal when you factor in intelligence then that that complicates things because a baby for instance is less intelligence than a pig intelligent than a pig a pig can do you know math that a three-year-old can't do so really it creates these moral conundrums that animal rights activists say kind of complicated so really it should just come down to do you feel pain and that's what makes life valuable I love the way Lord works sometimes last night I happen to be watching an old movie called the devil and Daniel Webster and it's a it's a movie of an old short story by Binet but in the story the man sells a soul to the devil for two cents and and what happens is the devil convinces for him first that the soul doesn't matter it's not worth anything you know that we're so if it isn't worth anything well then why not sell the soul to the devil where were you with the soul have you got animals and human beings if it feeling makes them similar intelligence makes it complicated is there a soul left are you at the time I was a materialist atheist so no so I didn't believe in a soul but that's what that's what gave me trouble philosophically because I kept you know in college I just kept running over this problem over and over and over again and I could not think of anything else that could explain it besides the soul you know because it's not just intelligence there's something Agustin talks about levels of the soul and sentences like the second level goes to seven levels and the seventh is like the beatific vision and contemplation of truth and all these things that are that are inherently religious and so I couldn't I couldn't think of of how a materialist could believe in a soul but I had this deep deep sense that there was something there was something that made human life more valuable than animal life but I couldn't defend it philosophically and I remember I went to see Peter Singer speak at one point and he was he was actually talking about because his many people know that he believes that we should kill disabled babies because their life you know we shouldn't make them go through through life like that and I remember sitting there listening to him speak and I just got goosebumps I just felt this deep sense of that's evil and I so I I really went philosophically i I knew I knew that human life was very valuable but I was involved in this movement where people had differing views but the majority of people believed that animal life and human life is equal and in some sense you know some were even more radical than that they believed that because humans caused some so much damage to the environment it would be better if they were just completely wiped out yeah that whole movement right sees humankind is the worst disease that ever hit the earth yeah and on one hand they've got an argument because we have done some pretty nasty things with this world RC boom we thought we had the right to subdue it even by the words of scripture that it's our responsibility to subdue it and then we ended up using it for our benefit for you know for commercial gain so there's a truth there but who asked as Christians we believe that on the other hand Humanity is the peak of creation and that's the reason the world was created was for our benefit now we're to treat it in the image of God we didn't all often do that before we take a break though I had my another question how did your dad feel about all this the reason I say that is here he's a theologian gets up in class and teaches theology and his his number one daughter as rejected at all I would have thought that would been tough you know it was very devastating for both of my parents and I think especially in high school my behavior was really off the charts bad I was just sex drugs rock and roll in my case it was punk rock I was sneaking out of the house I was doing all kinds of crazy stuff but at the same time as I was maintaining high grades and I was doing so my parents weren't totally aware of what was happening but I think they could see spiritually what was happening and I remember coming home from something really late and I know I smelled like cigarettes and I had been drinking and and my dad hugged me and I knew that he could smell the cigarettes and he knew what was happening and I just he didn't say anything to me but I remember the look on his face was just this deep concern for what was going on with me because I think top of all of the intellectual things that was happening I had a lot of anger against the church and against you know people who I felt had done my family wrong who had done wrong in general and there was a lot of suffering going on in my family also so I was angry about the problem with suffering and since I didn't have God to be angry about it at anymore I was just an angry person so my parents were very concerned for me I'm jokingly said that the reason the Catholic Church made priests elevated so they didn't have to worry about pk's you know the real pain of their children yeah that completely reject everything that they stand for married pastors who have get up there in the pulpit every Sunday and then there's their kids or maybe they're not there because they're rejected it I mean that it's not about why have you done this to me it's more about Lord what have I done wrong yeah what have I done wrong yeah and does this make any who am I to be up here preaching yeah my own family so I'm sure they both remember those times you oblivious to that the time you think or didn't matter I mean I I knew that I was causing them great suffering but I also was I I was in love with the truth and yep you're on that plane that you to me that was the truth and I really I couldn't I couldn't reject the truth just because it was causing someone suffering so I I hated that I was causing them suffering I wish that I couldn't that I could do something that would relieve it but I also knew that what they wanted me to do to relieve it was just impossible for me so some atheists feel a calling to evangelize in other words you've by grace you know you want us to put it that way but a new plane did you feel that really what you need to do is to help them themselves break free from this junk so that they could have a freedom of do you feel a sense of that I didn't I wasn't an evangelist in terms of atheism I really just didn't see the point you because I thought to myself you know if people are happier doing believing something that's not true let them be happy they're just gonna die anyways and it's gonna be the end and they might as well be happier with their belief so I really didn't get in arguments unless it was with other people who were - with me seeing the truth and and in that sense if people were like open to discussing with me things then I would be really happy to tell them that I thought they were wrong but if other if they didn't really want to discuss it with me then I was just let them live yeah got them through the night yeah and it working you can keep them controlled yeah all right well let's let's take a break okay we'll come back and figure out how I got out of that by grace we'll find out but before we take a break you just want to remind you a couple things are tell you that sister Therese is written conversion story called a story of Hope is published at our website that's called that if you go to CH network.org you'll be able to read her whole story but also on our web site site she has a couple of short videos we call them insight videos you'll see them on a website and I think one of those is about you disgust death all right we'll talk about that in the second half I think to me I was I was thinking you know as an atheist you know the dude was you know human and the being and and you stand before somebody who's in a coffin it's got awakened to you to something that's well back all right [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and our guest is sister Teresa ilithyia noble and as I saw it rudely interrupted you and your story you just left us with the fact that you're out there with drugs and smoking and all this stuff and there you were so what was the trajectory so you know after after high school I I was really involved in the punk rock movement and sneaking out and doing all these things that were very concerned to my parents but I also was managing to keep my grades high and so it was kind of a saving grace that at the end of high school I got into a good college and at that point I knew that I needed to kind of drop some of these dangerous activities I mean I had seen friends die and overdose and it was I knew that if I continued in that why because I'm a kind of a person of 150% I could really die so I I decided I was just kind of leave those things behind but I was gonna really focus on being a good person and going to a good college as part of that and and you know I this was this was my plan now and so in college I started studying philosophy which was and it was interesting to me because a lot of it was I remember having this realization at one point that all the philosophers I was studying were theists except for obviously like Nietzsche or but but even he took he took Christianity so seriously that he would write huge diatribes against Christianity and I had kind of just totally dismissed it so I thought to myself huh that that's interesting and I started to to wrestle even more with the idea of whether the animals and whether humans have a soul and I remember in college I was so into animal rights that my parents were trying to kind of they were trying to connect with me and relate to me and understand where I was coming from but they also were trying to see like how can i what's an end to this worldview and one of them was they sent me this this I think it was like a news thing that vegetarians had picked up on that jp2 John Paul the second who is Pope at the time had said that animals have souls which is you know that's just a very basic philosophical thing but it was news to them that that Catholics think animals have souls and I remember they sent the news article to me and I thought what does that mean exactly to a Catholic and and I thought to myself what does it mean that an animal would have a soul so I remember doing a little bit of research - what Catholics think about Souls and and humans having souls and the difference between them and obviously I rejected the idea that humans have an immortal soul and there's something different about the human soul than animal souls but but it got me thinking that there are these I that I just thought to myself I reject that but I believe it somehow because I do believe that there is a difference and and in terms of materialism it's giving me no answers in terms of what that difference could possibly be so I could just continue to wrestle and wrestle wrestle with it after college I got into Teach for America and I was teaching in an inner-city school I was kind of also in my plan of being a good person I was going to do this kind of self-sacrificing very difficult thing and I did that for for two years it was a very difficult experience and I remember for the first time in my life I was doing something where I felt like I wasn't totally capable of doing it and I how I was not quite a good person got do you know exemplified almost every day when I'm getting irritated at my students and I would yell at my students and I would go home and think hey I need to be a good person for these kids like I had this very motherly instinct that they had such difficult home lives they went home to such difficult things and it was so important for me to teach them how to read I was teaching third grade and all my students didn't know how to read and I was so I really felt invested and being a good person for them but I also at the same time was really seeing how how in many ways I was just really not a good person and so I thought maybe okay what do people do when they're trying to be good people and they don't have the tools to do it and so I I turned to meditation which is what a lot of people you know do when when they're thinking something non religious but it's going to help me be more focused not about connecting to a source getting yourself an organ so peaceful but I found it incredibly boring and I was very bad at it I remember I would wake up early and I would sit in the corner and do my little meditation and I remember thinking to myself this is so boring I how do people do this and I would fall over asleep and just wake up and just like cut I also started going to Quaker meeting because I was I had gone to a school that was associated with other Quaker colleges and I was introduced to Quakerism at the time and I related to the social justice aspect of it obviously I didn't relate to any of the Christian aspects of it but the Quaker meeting that I was at was very intellectual and very some of them I'm pretty sure when it recognized dick and so I could relate to the people it was kind of this way to start off my my week in complete silence and people would say very nice things and I have a spiritual theme for the week but it wasn't really spiritual I made it very clear to myself I still don't believe in God is stolen and my atheist boyfriend went with me so we really we still weren't weren't believing in the existence of God but it was kind of giving this grounding for facing the difficulties that I was facing at the time of my life and during that time one of my friends he we had been very close throughout high school and college and he had been climbing a mountain and as he as he was reaching for a cornice it broke and he fell over like about three thousand feet to the ground and he died Wow and at that moment I you know when I found out about his death I remember thinking myself this question of whether humans have a soul is really urgent to me right now because I want to know it does is is something is there something more to my friend and every time I tell this straight I can hear the atheist and maybe like well that was very an emotional kind of need to believe in a soul but but I remember thinking to myself I want to know what is true it's not about what is more comforting it is about what is true and if the truth is that my friend is in a hole and his body is rotting and that is the end I want to know so I just decided to more put more effort into understanding whether there was a spiritual dimension to life and it wasn't that I was necessarily open to it it was that I was opening myself to the possibility I was finally saying okay I'm not finding answers in materialism so I'm gonna open myself to these other possibilities not because I necessarily believe I'm gonna find answers but because I feel like it's incumbent upon me as an atheist to have really explored all the possibilities I was thinking that not only in your life had you check the box that there's no God there's no soul there's also no devil there's no whisperer yeah there's no somebody trying to pull you away there's no somebody trying all that was it also if anything you were you were a victim to those absolutely which is all those times and I have to say you know looking back on on my behavior and the things that I did and the things that I fell into I think that's the that's the biggest pitfall is to realize that it's really difficult to objectively discover what is true when we have concupiscence but also combined with the devil just wanting to lead you to to the and he he does it so slyly and so subtly that even the most intelligent people just have no idea that they're being manipulated really yeah and manipulated to a place of a very deep despair because that's where he wants to lead us that's right but Grace had touched you though at least with that unfortunate death of your friend do you see when I've got to deal with this point so then what you discovered that in the dealing with that where'd you begin to deal with that well so the two years that I was teaching in an inner sea in Miami I was just kind of hanging on for my life and I was meditating but I wasn't really I didn't have so much time to really investigate those things then I decided I was going to take a year off and then I was gonna go to law school so I and my boyfriend at the time had gotten into a ph.d program at Stanford for philosophy and so I followed him there and I was just staying staying living there and I all of a sudden they went from this incredibly busy life to absolutely nothing to do and I gave me a lot of time to think about all these things but it also I was wrestling with it intellectually and I was reading all kinds of things but I was feeling despairing because I couldn't find any answers and I remember one moment where I was sitting under a tree ohs by myself and I I was looking around and I was like is this life even real I don't like what is life and what is the meaning of my life and am I going in the right direction and as is Law School gonna make me happy and as marrying this person gonna make me happy and I I was kind of planning out the trajectory of my life and just felt so empty and I remember kind of putting my hand against the tree trunk and rubbing it like just to feel pain because I was thinking it was almost like I needed to exteriorize what I was feeling inside it was so painful I felt so despairing and empty and I just didn't know where to find answers and I felt like I was kind of running up against the limits of my own intellect and my own ability to discover the truth but I wanted to know the truth so badly so from there I decided to travel to Costa Rica and I went there for three months and I worked on a farm in the very rural Costa Rica and there was a former Peace Corps volunteers who had kind of created this little western haven of you know we would make composting toilets and there were yoga classes and all these different things but I was kind of a volunteer on the farm so I would carry wood and I would bake things and in a solar oven and it was I was having a blast but at the same time I was kind of in this little Conclave of people who thought like me and you know didn't believe in God of course and all these kind of things and but surrounding us were these you know salt of the earth really faithful poor Catholics um some of them were and some of them were just you know native Costa Ricans and um I was living with a family at the time and they were in such a rural area that they they couldn't have mass except for bi-weekly on a Thursday and in the meet in the middle of that the mother of the family that I was living with would go to the church and clean it she would sweep it every single day and clean it and I just remember observing her faithfulness to that duty every single day she never talked to me about God no no one ever really talked to me very much about God but I felt their faith well you were there for three months so you're starting to capture this and the feeling of it but you remember a moment was it during there or what you got back that a light shined in the midst of your darkness yeah there were a few things that kind of me started to move me one of them was the village drunk came out to he and he he just you know he would just kind of banter with me everyone somehow he said Oh Teresita he's like isn't it a beautiful gorgeous day and I said Oh chap oh it's a gorgeous day he's like thank God for this day don't you thank God for this day and I said I don't really because I don't believe in God and he looked at me with mirth you know just kind of amused and bewildered and he just looked straight into my eyes and I remember feeling like I was seeing someone who knew something that I didn't know and who was wiser than me and it was the village drunk and I was very kind of astonished by that and he was making you know a farmer's kind of metaphysical argument very simple but kind of really you think this all is here just here okay and then he walked away but that was one moment that led a lonely he was just quoting st. Paul and arguments for the existence of God or anything yeah all right so you have that experience with him yeah and um so my conversion happened in a moment um it really was I think it was God and his compassion for me and my struggles seeing me just flailing morally flailing intellectually and just wanting to rescue me and so he he it was a moment of great grace that he just I was it was very early in the morning I was walking to the farm and I was walking over a hill and I looked around me and Costa Rica so beautiful was mountains and tropical forests and I said to myself this is so beautiful and I felt gratitude for the beauty and at the same time that I felt that gratitude there was a huge gust of wind that was so so forceful that I felt like a tree was gonna follow me then remember thinking a tree is gonna follow me and I and it was almost like I felt this mixture of gratitude and fear and awe and knowing that my gratitude had an object and in that moment God introduced himself to me you know just meet his his present so felt that I knew that God existed that he loved me and that he had a plan for my life well would you say then with in summary with all we got more time to that that virtue of gratitude which we take for granted is really the key thing that sets us apart even from animals but from atheists that it's that key of what gratitude is yeah it really is the diff it's the turning point yeah it really was for me I think humility prepared the way for that and and some atheists really modeled that for me humility and love for learning and love for the truth but yeah it was that moment of gratitude and realizing that gratitude had an object and that everything around me had a creator yeah yeah as I was I made that reference to that romans passage which i really want to point to it because he says in romans 1 this way he begins his whole argument he begins his heart that it's all right there what could be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them ever since the creation of the world it's invisible nature namely his eternal power deity has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made so they're without excuse it's right there yeah yeah but do we see a metaphysical argument basically Paul yeah yeah yeah but it's a turn that's that the gratitude and I love it that it was very simple man yeah it just pointed it out to you yeah well there you are awakened to the reality of God midst of the beauty of course Sarika but there's a long journey from there to here mm-hmm definitely um so after I knew that God existed I didn't automatically say Oh Catholicism is true in fact I was very resistant the idea that Catholicism was true but I was really happy that God existed and that he loves me and that he had a plan for my life I mean that the despair that had been feeling just it just went away I just felt so full of joy because to have a purpose for my life and to have someone who loved me and who not just loves me like a boyfriend loves you or there even a mother and a father but who is love itself that's that's a love that that can heal you on a deep level and that can bring you a joy that you just really can't realize otherwise and so I I just talked to God all the time I was on the plane on the way home and I thought God has a plan for my life got it you have a plan for my life is it to go to law school is it to marry the boyfriend and planning on marrying I didn't care an answer in that but I was like I don't think his plan is my plan so I got off the plane and I broke up with my boyfriend and I decided not to go to law school just because I'm a person of 150% and I believed in God and it was that was change in my life and so I I just was sleeping on my friend's couch and I had no idea was I was gonna do for with my life but I just felt I'd never had never felt so free and I had never felt so happy and so I just talked to God every day God what do you think about this God what do you think about that I would go to the to the store and I would look at the deodorant and be like God which deodorant should I pick I'm sure you don't care about that and I and then I would feel him say to me I care about everything that you do every decision that you make everything that you do and so slowly over time I felt him tugging at my heart and leading me back to the Catholic Church and he did it through the Eucharist because I there had been a moment in my atheism when I was at Stanford I had gone to their chapel in the middle of campus is a beautiful chapel and it was during a Catholic Mass and I walked by while it was happening and I saw a Dominican out front and his robes were blowing and I just thought that person it just says like so heavenly or something like attractive about that he looks so peaceful and I walked inside and I remember sitting here there thinking someone's looking at me and it's not the people around me like someone is looking at me and I realized after my conversion that that someone was Jesus and the tabernacle and that Jesus was present in the Eucharist and if Jesus if God is present in the Eucharist then I have to become Catholic and and I thought wow I have so many intellectual obstacles to that so many things I don't believe so many things I just don't understand and really really reject on a deep level but I but God led me that's in that direction I had trust that he was gonna work out those difficulties I no longer had the faith and my intellectual ability to figure everything out I just I really knew that his authority was gonna clear my mind and and and aid my reason I think you know but behind you is a special painting right you don't need to turn around but it's Rembrandt's wonderful picture yeah when did that moment happened when you let your parents know that your faith was back I told I told them pretty soon after that I believed in God I waited a little while to tell them about the Catholicism aspect of it because I wasn't I wanted to be totally sure this was like maybe this was just a stepping stone that I wasn't gonna go to something else or but eventually I did tell them and and pretty soon after I got to the church God started kind of nudging me in the direction of religious life yes the next yeah and that was that was not something I was interested in and not something that I really wanted to do a little so I really fought against that really I really wrestled with God it really wrestled in discernment even after joining the convent but that that fundamental relationship that I had with God and that relationship of of prayer just bringing things to him all the time and asking him and the trust that I had in his love for me made me realize again it's that that intellectual thing I trust you even though I don't understand I trust you even though I don't comprehend I trust you even though intellectually this is I really don't see how that could lead to my happiness poverty chastity obedience really I don't think that's gonna lead me to happiness but I no longer had the trust in my my my thought workings on things I really trusted that God had created me God was going to help me and understand how this would lead me to happiness and I was gonna do it because I trusted him not myself when did when did you sense the call to the particular first of all the strength and your conviction to be become really religious but also your particular religious order um you know I was I was in Northern California at the time I was working in iti was really looking around and all these different orders and so many different things so many different ways of living religious life I was so confused I had no idea about you know what to look for what I just was totally naive about everything and I really was but I trusted that God would lead me so at one point I was so tired of looking and not finding I said to God you know this was your idea and I don't even want to do it anyway so you better figure this out so I actually I was watching a YouTube video father Stan Fortuna who's a CFR and I was a really big fan of his I would go to all of his talks in the Bay Area and I was watching that video and he took up he picked up one of JP twos encyclicals John Paul the second and he said this is for my girls that the daughter is a st. Paul so we print up encyclicals all the encyclicals I thought oh I don't know who they are so I started to investigate them even though I worked in iti I wasn't particularly attracted to working with our charism is using modern media to spread the gospel so I wasn't particularly attracted to that but it was particularly I was attracted to the idea of evangelization and helping people to find the joy that I have found so I again joining the daughters the st. Paul was again I all these things kind of fighting against it and really not understanding on a human level why this would be the best place for me and but knowing that God was guiding me there and trusting that God was gonna lead me to happiness and really I would say that my comfort with becoming a religious is fairly recent even though I've been in the content for several years now it was really on meditating on my death that helped me to realize that I wanted to do this I wanted to dedicate my life to this and I wanted to die for Jesus we've got a couple minutes left talk about that specifically your meditation on death and how that was an important part of the journey yeah my our founder it was a very important part of his journey and he was kicked out of the seminary at one point we're not totally sure why that happened but we think it was because he was reading too much of things that he wasn't necessarily supposed to read and but when he came back I believe that it was through meditation on death and the last things that helped him to kind of realize what how he needed to change and that became a really fundamental to his spirituality and he kept a skull in his desk and he met he meditated on his death every day so a few years ago I just decided to do the same two years ago and so I put a skull on my desk and I started to meditate on my death every day and where we spread the gospel through modern media so I thought I'll tweet this so on Twitter I just decided to tweet my random thoughts about meditating on my death and I thought I would do it for two weeks but I ended up doing it for over 500 days tweeting it now I've been meditating on my death every day since then and it's totally it I call it a conversion within a conversion because it has really helped me to live completely for God to make all of my decisions around because I have no idea how much time I have I have no idea when I'm gonna die so today I want to live for holiness because I could I could die out on my car ride to the airport today yeah well I I am a firm believer that all the New Testament authors as well as our Lord talked about life in obedience to Jesus is it we're always in Waiting well you know like the like the the women waiting for the wedding you know are they ready are they ready you're ready and that's what everyday is to be like well that's what you're talking about it may be by completely awakened to the fact that that death can happen anytime it helps us be ready exactly because I would read those those passages that I read stay vigilant I would think how you know I really want to but how do you keep up that fervor constantly and for me meditation on death as what has helped me to do that because it's kind of given an urgency to my decision an urgency to my life every day how would you help on atheist watching you know what would you say to them so I know it comes by grace but what would you say to them right now if they were listening to you you know every every person's journey is so unique and after I joined the comment I wrote a book called the prodigal you loved inviting loved ones back to the church and it's it's to help people to invite their loved ones back to the church and so many people come to me who have children who are atheists who have loved ones who are atheist and they say sister how and I say it well it's my book is not going to give you a silver bullet answer to every person because every person is so unique but first of all I think our holiness our Christian holiness is so important as an evangelization tool so often we're focused on other people how can we change that atheist if you have him figure out how God exists become Saints because that's gonna convince people the Saints are the most convincing evangelization tool that there could possibly be so I think that's you but I think you know if there's any atheists out there watching continue to pursue the truth tenaciously because what else could could life be about it besides pursuing the truth and trying to understand what is the truth the truth is a person and your store also makes me encourages us to make sure that our lives convey gratitude yeah yeah coz that can be contagious definitely thank you sister juice well thank you for sharing your journey and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I pray that sister story is encouragement to you god bless you [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

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Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01676

Id: bZXq3M-CmWQ

Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019