The Journey Home - 2013-06-24 - Deacon Scott Jablonski - Revert

good evening and welcome to the journey home Marcus Grodi your host for this program we have a deacon with us tonight Deacon Scott Jablonski and when I think about that deacon it reminds me that depending on what tradition you come from the word Deacon means a whole lot different things in different Christian traditions what does the Deacon do Deacon is a transitional Deacon because he's on his way to becoming a priest so it's great to have Scott here he's a revert to the faith but he spent some time away former Protestant people bring in all those details so welcome Deacon Scott to the jury I mean it's great to have you here if I can real quickly say I it's a real honor to be on your show when I was kind of coming back to the church I actually spent a lot of time watching journey home episodes and don't discourage you them no it was it was wonderful and I you know I think one of the things that everyone who watches your show really gets from it is the fact that you know you see other people who have had similar questions or similar challenges or just similar life events kind of doing the same thing and it kind of encourages you you like I'm not the only person in the world who's thinking about this right now so thank you for having me I appreciate that you've affirmed why Mother Angelica wanted the program in the first place you know and by hearing journeys it would not only help Catholics get encouraged about family members that that have drifted from the church and you're a revert so I mean in that sense it's good to have you in the the program you're telling those Catholics out there be patient yeah pray don't give up hope but also for those outside to church to hear they're really a journey to the church is about a journey to Jesus I mean that's what it's about and so it's good to have you on the program but let me shut up and get out of the way and invite you to give us a look back to the beginning of your journey yeah um I was born thirty-one years ago and right after I was born within a few weeks I was baptized in the Catholic faith I'm not exactly sure all the details as to why but I think it was probably because of a strong presence of my grandparents on my mother's side just kind of encouraging my mother and my father to have me baptized but they divorced soon thereafter so they themselves had not been strongly practiced no I don't think so I mean they were married in the church but I think you know kind of baby boomer generation and kind of you understood a lot of the don'ts you know don't do this don't do that but in terms of a living relationship with with God and terms understand the sacraments and grace and the Holy Spirit and all that I think a lot of that was missing so I was baptized and then soon thereafter within a couple years they ended up divorcing and I have a younger sister I also have a younger half-brother but my younger sister a year and a half younger we lived with my mother and my father lived a couple hours away and you know every now and then we'd still kind of go to Mass a little bit here there and I think you know once again I'm not sure of all the details and my mom and I are still kind of trying to work some of this stuff out talking about it but I think once again a little bit more the insistence of my grandmother and my grandfather every now and then we go to Mass and then we'd kind of forget about it again for awhile and then start back up but this one on until second grade and then second grade hit and my grandmother once again I think really said you know you need to have your son make a First Communion and so I went through the actual First Communion preparation everything and it made my first communion but unfortunately you know my whole memory from that whole year of preparation everything was really just kind of goofing off with a few of the other kids in the class and you know I don't think we actually at least in my memory I don't remember actually ever learning what the Eucharist was really about and what the significance of the sacrament was about is more just this ritual that we had to do I want to pause there know what everyone in the audience all of you out there that did your catechism goofing off raise your hands I just saw six gazillion people and I'm one of them okay I mean there yeah a lot of us out there didn't listen very well ya know so that was really experience but um right around that same time soon thereafter soon right after somewhere around my first communion time my mother remarried and the gentleman that she married at that point he had kind of had a strong non-denominational evangelical protestant background and so he wanted to insist that we start going to those churches and we did that for the next seven eight nine years or whatever on and off but um you know unfortunately their marriage was not it was not very good marriage or a lot of challenges there he had a lot of sort of baggage from his childhood that he had never dealt with adequately and that kind of manifested itself in terms of their relationship and then also just the way that he interacted with my sister and myself and in all honesty religion during this period just it really left a bad taste in my mouth just partially because of the way that he would talk about his faith and then live in a way that was completely contradictory and then also just a lot of the other adults I met kind of through these church experiences um you know I a some baseball coaches who were also Sunday school teachers and they would talk about God's love and then come on the bus the next day and be throwing bats and balls and you know four-letter words after a loss or something and I always tell people that kind of after this kind of mixed experience in these various Protestant churches and you know we were good Protestants in the sense that we would when we kind of made the shift from the Catholic Church to these Protestant churches we'd go to a different Protestant Church every six months or so we'd kind of go to one for a while and something there wasn't rights that we'd moved to another one and I always tell people though that kind of my experience based off of all that was God was kind of I saw him by the end of that experience really as the giant insurance salesman in the sky and the idea being that you know you have your insurance agent and you have your policy and you kind of go and talk to your insurance agent when some sort of contact because disaster or something hits but you don't you know on a daily basis call up your insurance agent and say hey how are things going and stuff like that and it just struck me that for a lot of people you know they professed faith with their their lips but you know they're living more or less as practical atheists and and you know religion their faith didn't really matter a whole lot in their day to day lives and that analogy because it what's also fun about that analogy is a lot of people don't find out until they have a huge accident that they weren't as covered as well as they thought Yeah right there's a fine print there yeah yep yeah no I know yeah that's exactly it so so really by the time I get to you know merrily high school years um you know I don't think I really thought about religion a whole lot or God's existence but I think had I been pressed I probably would have said he might exist he might not it doesn't really matter and really it just came down to the fact that you know like I said my my experience with professed Christians um they live no differently than people I knew who never went to church and sometimes they actually lived you know much worse they would you know talk about their faith but then they treated people in ways that I was like well if you don't have to go to church he can treat people far better sign me up for that crowd so anyway uh this like I said went on for a few years then sometime middle of my high school years my mother and my stepfather at that point they actually divorced as well and this it was a blessing in many ways just because like I said that relationship was just a very very unhealthy relationship and there was a lot of you know just kind of emotional abuse that was going on between the two of them and you know sometimes my sister and I got a little bit of the end of it as well but um so by the time you know my my high school is finishing up I just more or less was like I can't wait to get away from home I'm going to go off to college and kind of start a new life if you will and you know kind of forget about everything from my childhood and just kind of forget about you know a lot of anger I had with first my parents divorcing I was really young and that relationship kind of not being so great and then my mom and my stepfather and and also during this time kind of going back to my junior high years and then early high school my dad and I we would see each other a lot every every other weekend or so but then there was a period where for about five years I didn't hear from him at all either and so really I just kind of was ready to leave behind being a kid just because it wasn't the happiest of childhoods there are happy moments and I don't want to pretend it was all bad either but it wasn't what I had hoped it would be in kind of what I think a lot of kids want you know when you're growing up how did you survive during that sports yeah I know a little bit both I mean God really blessed me with a good mind and I was pretty decent at school and then also I just I love sports baseball basketball football tennis you know anything with a ball or anything where you're running you know signing up for so I did a lot of that and yeah really kind of those two are dropping you know um so anyway when uh my senior year kind of came about I was trying to figure out what I was going to do and because of this great love of sports I decided I was going to go to the University of Wisconsin because I grew up watching the Badger football and basketball teams on television and the big state school and I thought I'll go there and I'll be able to kind of watch my teams and you know get away from home is a couple hours away from where I grew up and so anyway I went to Madison and you know part of it was to I thought well it's a really good school and I kind of had these aspirations at that point of studying medicine I thought I want to be a doctor someday I think I could become a pediatrician and I could kind of help kids and I think part part of it went back to the fact that I want to help kids because you know my childhood I I thought would be nice have some more people helping me so anyway I kind of that was a plan that first year and so I got my season tickets for the football games and I kind of did that and then you know went to class and everything and I really had no real kind of interest in religion or especially the Christian religion at that point but midway through that first semester I kind of I was living in the dorms and you know unfortunately one of the things that Madison has a reputation for is it's a very large party school it's got a very good academic program in a lot of ways but also a lot of people there kind of get caught up in a certain lifestyle sure it was something I had very little interest in so I'm in this dorm my first year and kind of looking around and you know Thursday Friday Saturday nights I'm just seeing all these people who are really bright young 18 19 year old students passed out in bathrooms um you know just hooking up with people and relationships that were utterly meaningless and you said they were smart and bright yeah yeah right I know excuse me for that yeah we understand what you're saying there's a contradiction here in these people yeah they had they were bright there's something why aren't they seeing it yep exactly yeah so anyway so anyway yeah you know midway through this first semester I'm trying to make sense of this trying to have like I said I wanted to leave behind you know this childhood there was a little bit disappointing for me and I thought Madison was going to be this new fresh start and I was going to meet all these really wise people that kind of it helped me make sense of why my my past was kind of so broken as well and I'm looking around and I just I mean it's more of a disaster there than even what I knew kind of in my family situation as a child and so anyway I thought well I'll just kind of continue with my studies and focus on that but I remember laying in bed one morning I woke up and you know I'm just I look at now and I realize it's just a moment of God's grace but I'm laying in bed and I just started fast-forwarding 5 10 15 20 years down the road and part of the reason I want to be a doctor like I said is I thought I'd help people but I also kind of wanted to have the American dream if you will I wanted to have the really nice house and I want to have you know the nice sports car and I thought marry a beautiful woman and have a wonderful family and all really really good things but as I kind of began a fast-forward I realized that you know we get because of the gifts that God had given me that those things would probably be within my reach but they weren't going to satisfy perfectly and that that was kind of a disheartening moment I always kind of joke with people that it was my existential crisis of sorts but on you know as I started project and forward and think about all these things and realize there's something more that I longed for and none of those things were it I started to become a little nervous like okay what am I doing with my life and that just brought up a bunch of other questions I started thinking well why am I even here in the first place and you know more or less despite some of this religious formation as a child I really had more secular perspective on things and so you know kind of scientific materialism explained everything and you know we're evolved amoeba and there's nothing distinct about being a human person and so anyway you know I was like well if that's it then I might as well eat drink and be merry because I could die tomorrow I could die in 30 years ago died in 80 years but it's all meaningless more or less if there isn't an eternity if there isn't something distinct about being human so I started asking questions about the meaning of life and you know where did I come from where am I going what's going to make me happy what is the purpose of it all you know just I kind of I was it's funny because I look back and even when I was five years old I was probably that that kid that you know kind of annoyed my parents little bit by always asking why questions why why why why why and that's exactly what I was doing you know as a college freshman so I those questions though they're very unsettling because I didn't have answers for them and I more or less just kind of uh coasted through the rest of that first year of college and you know I was able to pass my classes and everything but I just I didn't know why I was getting out of bed in the morning simply because I had no transcendent purpose in my life there was more or less as being told get good grades in college so I can make lots of money and I can live a self-centered existence and I just knew that wasn't going to satisfy me so anyway I I did that like I said just can't Coast it through the rest of my first year and that sums you have any friends that were chiming in on this with you were solo thinking hey a little bit I talked to some guys but mostly the guys I was hanging out with that first year we played basketball together or we would we'd watch some of the football games together and you know kind of more on the surface I had a couple friends that um one of them is actually pretty committed now as an evangelical protestant because of our friendship that year but um by and large is just me asking a lot of the questions by myself and it was kind of a somewhat of a lonely perience but you know one thing I will say is the Lord has really blessed me with a certain amount of stubbornness and I wasn't going to rest until I had answers for those questions so anyway I that subsequent summer then I was working construction living with an aunt of mine and I just had a lot of time on the construction site to kind of continue to think about these things and I kept saying you know there's got to be answers for these big human heartfelt questions that we all have I mean if I have them I'm not anyone all that special everyone's got to have these questions if you don't know why you're getting a bed in the morning or why you're working or why you're doing what you're doing I mean it's all meaningless and so anyway I ended up going to Barnes & Noble a lot and buying a bunch of books on various philosophies and religions and I started realizing that if you know there is no spiritual answer if everything we can see and tastes and touches all that there is like I said we may as well eat drink and be merry so I wasn't satisfied with that there had to be some sort of answer and once again God's gray is kind of indirectly pointing me to the spiritual there's got to be a spiritual answer but because of this lesson positive experiences a kid with Christianity I thought well I'll look into every other religion other than that so I started buying books on Buddhism and the New Age movement and even kind of looking into Islam a little bit but the more I looked into those things well there were interesting insights there they just didn't make sense of you know my lived experience in kind of the world that I saw where there's so much goodness a time at times but then there's so much evil at other times and my own aspirations longing for something that I couldn't find in this world and really towards the end of that summer really someone had desperation I just said ah right I've looked at all these other things I'm not finding satisfactory answers maybe just maybe there's something to Christianity and so once again I went to Barnes and Noble I was one of their most frequent customers that summer and I end up buying a Bible for the first time and really kind of began to look at it on my own I started reading the Gospel of John and the Jesus said I ain't there was very different than the Jesus that I had sort of encountered with the adults in my life as a child and you know he he went and met with the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the sinners and the people are kind of the outcasts and he also kind of came down on some of the religious authorities at the time and said you're completely missing the heart of what you know God is about and so anyway I I really at that point said you know I want to I really want to find out more about this Jesus the Jesus of the Gospels that Jesus has revealed himself so I got back to Madison for my sophomore year I had met some guys playing basketball in the dorms the year before and I saw them when the first few days I was back on campus and they had these um this table in the main area kind of where a lot of the student groups will gather to hand out pamphlets and they said hey we're having a Bible study you should come to this and I said well are you gonna be studying the Gospels and they said oh of course and I said well sign me up so I end up getting involved in with some of the Evangelical Protestant campus groups and and which are which are actually awesome group or they are fantastic and and the thing that was so remarkable about these people were they not only did they really want to understand Jesus as he revealed himself in the Gospel of John and Gospel of Mark and Matthew and Luke and then the rest of the New Testament Old Testament as well but um they were really serious about putting their faith into practice and so I I just absolutely ate up all my time with these guys they were just holy men they wanted to grow in holiness and um and they were very serious about their faith and and they thought that God really did matter more than just that insurance salesman god that was you know only in times of tragedy but he mattered in their day-to-day lives and they are the ones who taught me how to pray and taught me how to you know try to live out the faith more and grow in virtues and you know things like that and you know so it was wonderful I was I was really grateful and then kind of through that experience with them I end up getting connected with a very very good Evangelical Free Church in Madison and the pastors there they're preaching just spectacular every week you know they're opening up the book of Romans or the book of Ephesians or you know once again st. John's Gospel or something like that just taking the Word of God and making it come alive and it's just it was a finding answers for all these deep heartfelt soul felt questions that I had why am I here I'm here to honor and to glorify God and and to to give my life back to him as a gift of love what is the purpose of life it's to to share his love to share the good news of the gospel with other people um you know why why do bad things happen to good people well the doctrine of original sin and they wouldn't necessarily have called it that but I mean sin it makes sense of everything and so I'm just beginning to find a bunch of answers but as I kind of moved into the Christian world the one thing I said to the Lord is I kind of said all right Lord I'm I'm willing to kind of give you my life but I want to give you the totality of my life and so not only kind of my heart if I can use that image but also my mind and I still I'm at the secular University and I have intellectual questions and you know I want to also know the truth and if this isn't true if someone can show me it's not true you know I'm not just going to do this because it makes me feel good I mean the people I saw passed out in the bathrooms on Thursday Friday and Saturday evenings they were doing something that just made them feel good and so anyway I was reading all these apologetic works the historicity of the Gospels or you know Jesus being a historical figure in miracle accounts and things like that and just you know eating up all sorts of stuff reading theology studying Scripture early church history apologetic defense of the faith all that stuff and so it's kind of funny I always I always tell people once again that I was you know a full-time student and doing what I had to for my classes but I was also kind of a full-time Christian student on the side trying to learn the faith inside and out and trying to really make sense of it all so anyway that goes on the rest of my second year my junior year comes and I'm an RA and one of the big dorms on the campus thousand students some of these students I'm in charge of and one of the students on the floor was a young girl named patty and she was Catholic and I don't once again I don't think she probably knew her faith inside and out like it would be ideal if every young Catholic did but she was very serious about living it out and it was the first time I'd really ever engaged with a serious Catholic who not only was trying to live it out was trying to defend it as well my grandparents god bless him I look at them now and I realize that they've done their best their entire lives a little at their Catholic faith but they didn't always that generation didn't always learn to speak about it well and so here I'm meeting this young girl not only is trying to put into practice but is also trying to live it and so we're engaging in all sorts of conversations those first few months as I'm kind of the RA on the floor and she's you know this student living on the floor and I'm trying to convert her because I've had such a powerful experience kind of in this evangelical world now and I'm also finding these these intellectual answers in that tradition among some of the apologists and some of the theologians and people are writing and you know she's somebody who's got some answers but still a lot of being complete answers and um it's kind of funny because I look at it now and I realized that her witness was one of the most powerful things I had a hard time reconciling the fact that even if I thought she was wrong theologically and something she would try to explain you know the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist or the Catholic understanding of the Pope's or the Catholic understanding of Mary and I thought well all this stuff is wrong because you know it's not in the Bible and you know anyone who's spending time in the evangelical world you know you can't see some explicit Bible verses says do this it's hard to really believe that that's from God so I you know I thought well she's wrong on a lot of things but she was really living out what I thought was ultimately most important what st. Paul says love charity and she was putting into practice in ways that I didn't even see many of my evangelical friends putting into practice there's always always remember this one incident it was it was like a Saturday night and you know bunch of the people in the dorm had gone out to a party again and this one girl had gone out with some friends and you know they had kind of a band and her and she had been brought back to the dorms by some guy that she had met at this party and a credit to this guy he actually just brought her walked her home and then left her you know and didn't try to do anything you know all that all that awful with her which unfortunately sometimes happens but just left this girl and she was very very intoxicated and anyway I kind of did what I had to do and I went to bed because I had to get up the next morning to go to church I was helping lead a high school youth group at this point at this Evangelical Free Church and I had lots of things going Sunday morning so I'm in bed like 2:00 in the morning I get a knock on my door and I kind of sheepishly open it up like who's bothering me at 2:00 in the morning let's this girl Patti and she's like you know Scott there's um there's this other young girl in the floor and she's really really drunk up and taking care of her for the last few hours could you just come check on her and I said okay and I go over there and you know she ended up being fine and everything but more or less this girl Patti had spent the last you all were just really sitting by her bed you know getting her water and taking care of her which is remarkable in itself especially this girl that Patti was taken care of Marcus was not exactly the nicest girl on the floor and probably was not the most friendly towards Patti and for me that that incident really said you know even if she doesn't have all the theology and and kind of you know she's Catholic and that I still think there's some issues there she sure was able to put the Lord's command to love one another into practice in a way that I thought was remarkable so I didn't know what to do with that at that point I said okay well interesting but we'll see what happens next year I moved out of the dorms my last year and a half of college and I'm living with a bunch of other Christian guys and one of them he ended up going off to Duke and then Yale or I think he Almond Duke to do a masters and the doctorate in theology and he's a very very bright young man and we're living together and every day we're getting to like theological conversations and he's like well what about this and what about that and you know talking about everything from church history to specific doctrines about how do we worship God is a liturgical style or is it kind more free for all that you find in some of these Protestant denominations and especially the one I was a part of he started talking about the Creed and something that was not a part of the tradition that I was a part of at the time we didn't profess a Creed but he said you know yeah look at these Creed's they go back to the Council of Nicaea or some of the early church councils and I said well that's interesting if this is part of what it means to be a Christian why have I never seen this stuff before and just to kind of you know kind of explain just how serious he was about his theology his senior year I mean he read through kelvins institutes in their entirety so you know you can imagine you're not having easy you know theological conversations that are just kind of fluffy I mean very serious stuff but he's more or less challenging everything that was connected to the Evangelical Free tradition that I was a part of and like I said I kind of made this promise the Lord Lord I give my life to you I follow you because none of you have these answers but I'm finding the healing in my own life that I was looking for your forgiving me of my sins which you know I have my own sins just like everybody else does but um I also was finding intellectual answers for my questions but the more I'm talking with this roommate Sean the more I'm finding more intellectual answers or answers for these intellectual questions I have in kind of a more traditional Protestant tradition and so I was like I said of alluded to I was really involved at the Evangelical Free Church I was going to helping lead a high school youth group of a couple hundred students and um one of the other guys that was living with me who was my best friend throughout college mark he's helping with the high school youth group and he's also one of the guys living with us and so him and I were really good friends on many many levels but both of us are kind of talking to this other roommate Sean then and Sean keeps challenging both of us you know have you guys thought about you know the way that you are making disciples of these high school students are you guys thinking about the fact that you have no liturgy whatsoever at this church and if you look at you know earlier church periods they always are talking about a liturgy and I thought well okay that's interesting so he started raising a lot more questions and I kind of was at this point where I still had this very solid relationship with the Lord but he was becoming less clear to me that I was supposed to stay in the Evangelical Free Church I was going to but I didn't know where to go necessarily as I'm sure probably many of your former guests had a similar experience so anyway this kind of goes on my last semester of college and I took a history of the medieval church class I had a bunch of other courses I had to take by had one elective and I took this class and I don't think the professor had any particularly you know affinity or attachment to Christian faith I think he just was a good historian but he's presenting kind of the history of the medieval church and we're sitting in class and he's talking about bishops and he's talking about the Pope and he's talking about monasteries and he's talking about the liturgy he's talking about sacraments and I was like well you know that's pretty interesting like I thought all that stuff was you know just something more recent that Catholics had come up with the last couple hundred years or you know I thought we were the the more historical traditional faith Bible only Protestants you know I kind of subscribed to the whole Sola scriptura part of the Reformation of Luther and his followers and so anyway I'm kind of beginning to realize that the church to be a Christian in a different period in history looked a little bit different than how I'm practicing the faith and that kind of was like okay I'm not sure what to do this either um kind of after I'd had this conversion a couple years earlier my sophomore year and then kind of had begun to really grow my faith the last couple years of college I had really become convinced that the Lord was asking me to kind of leave behind being a doctor but to go into the Protestant ministry and so my thought was I was going to graduate from Madison and then go to some Protestant seminary and become a pastor become a minister learn scriptures inside and out and be able to teach them and make them come alive just as I had experienced it with some of the pastors that I had been working with and so I that was the plan but this last semester as I'm kind of in this church history class and having some questions and I actually had kind of moved from the Evangelical Free Church I was going to to know a more of a Christian Reformed Church it was down in the UW campus the Madison campus and you know I was warned a couple drew yeah more in a Calvinist direction and and anyone who's spent any time with Calvin the one thing I will say about him is he's very systematic and anyone who kind of was looking for more of a systematic more thoughtful theology I mean he really is kind of the great father of Protestant systematic theology and so anyway I'm kind of there and I'm you know I'm enjoying it but I still I'm not quite sure what seminary I'm supposed to go to so I eventually talked to this friend mark who was the other one who I was good friends with and as I'm wrestling with these questions he's began to wrestle with some of these theological questions he had kind of been raised Lutheran had come to Madison got involved some of these same campus ministries and we'd become friends to that and then working with these high school youth high school students together and so as our roommate Shaun is challenging things in my life he's also challenging things in Mark's life and Mark is like well I'm not sure what I'm going to do now because he had also thought he was going to go to a Protestant submarine so we we decide we're gonna as soon as I graduate we're going to move out to Colorado together I am I'd wanted to move to Maine and work on a fishing boat I was kind of tired of all these theological debates but um my friend mark he said well I don't really want to work on a fishing boat let's just move to Colorado and the idea was though we we thought that we just need to go somewhere where there's going to be some space to ask some of these questions that we had about how to live out the faith both of us were still very very committed to Jesus Christ and committed to following him because he had really changed both of our lives through a relationship with him but in terms of how to live that out and how to put that into practice and what does it really look like to follow him in this particular moral situation or with respect to this way of worship or with a way to think about this particular issue or what have you there are just lots of questions I'm wonder if we let's pause yeah because your bar ready to go for your Rocky Mountain High right you go to Colorado to get those questions answered yep all the options that are out there yeah Christian options and how to answer all those questions which one let's pause there we'll come back because we need to take a plan all right so I'm gonna be yeah thank you see welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host we have Deacon Scott Jablonski with us and I've paused you on your way to to Colorado right you know taken all the questions with you put them in your backpack in your oh yeah Colorado so yeah I guess that's not the reason Colorado is more than anything just needing some space because both my friend mark and I we were very very well connected in the evangelical nondenominational and now even becoming Christian Reformed communities we just and asking the questions we were asking you know and I don't this isn't a slight against those people but they were just uncomfortable questions because for a lot of the people in those traditions you built your entire life upon a particular understanding of what it means to follow Jesus Christ and to have some some young men who are saying well actually what about this or what about that or have you considered this or thought about that you know I think is just uncomfortable for some people and you know and so it was a difficult period but we decided let's just go somewhere for a year and kind of we can make sense of this a little bit more and we'll see where the Lord leads us from here and then maybe we'll end up going to a particular protestant seminary and i think that's actually what we were both thinking at the time but um so yeah we packed up and moved out to Colorado and and I say this this is kind of a funny part of the story but we didn't know where we're going to live in Colorado when we first got out there so I was looking online you know part of the internet age and I found a gentleman who was looking for roommates on Craigslist which I probably wouldn't recommend that everybody that you look at on Craigslist for roommates but um he was a a Protestant pastor and he was looking for one or two people to move in with him he just bought a new house and so I called him up and said hey we want to move to Colorado in a couple days can we move in with you and he said sure so we drove 15 hours and showed up at his doorstep and and moved on in with him anyway I I never switching my degree in college to psychology from the medicine just because as I kind of had these this powerful conversion experience then really was trying to live out my faith more it seemed that you know with possibly going to a presence part of in summary afterwards you know to have some pastoral counseling skills would be very helpful so I switch to psychology and all of a sudden I find myself in Colorado and I need to have a job and so I end up getting a job working at a non-profit with young boys who were involved with gangs and drugs and just bad background situations and I would um I kind of they would go to school during the day there and then in the afternoons we would kind of work with them and work with social workers and psychiatrists and counselors and kind of try to help them get back on their feet again so I got a job doing that my friend Mark a couple weeks actually after having moved to Colorado he decides to move back to Wisconsin which I gave him a hard time about at the time and but I actually worked out well he ended moving back to Wisconsin and marrying a good Catholic girl and have a couple little kids now and he works for a cathedral in Madison doing all sorts of you know catechetical type things and his oldest son I'm the Godfather of so God's providence you know it is perfect but it's like another conversion for another time yeah yeah right yeah exactly here looking for future guests or something but um so anyway he moves back and I find myself in Colorado I just had this sense that I needed to stay there that a Lord wanted me to stay in Colorado there's something there for me so I'm working at this job and I would work with the young students young kids I was working with until like 9:00 or 9:30 at night and then they would go to bed and I would usually stay until about 10:00 or 10:30 just because then someone else would come in to kind of supervise them while they're sleeping and make sure nothing happened but I would have about an hour every night to to kind of just read or do paperwork or whatever so usually I get my paperwork done right away and then I just I'd bring theology and I'd start reading theology or history or or whatever and as I'm continuing to kind of read more theology more and more questions are being raised and I'm trying to make sense of well how do you how do you make sense of this like the Lutheran Church teaches this the Presbyterian Church teaches something a little bit different on that the Baptist's they teach something a little bit different with respect to Communion and the frequency of it or the the way that we worship God or baptism who should be baptized infants or adults or is baptism even a sacrament so as I'm kind of holding all these different traditions side-by-side I one day I finally just opened up the phone book and I started looking because I was like you know once again I'm following Jesus Christ I love Jesus he's changed my life I'm convinced that he is the Lord that he has a plan for me and that you know his plan is goodness but how do I follow him most faithfully and do I do that as a presbyterian do I do that as a Lutheran do I do that as a Christian reformed what denomination so as I'm opening up the phonebook I start looking in you know they're just hundreds if not thousands of denominations and I'm thinking well I'm going to have to I actually studied Hebrew for two semesters at Madison so I was like okay I got the Hebrew down by my have to study Greek I'm at the study Latin I'm going to have to study history I mean this going to take me know like 10 years before I can figure out what tradition is most faithful to Jesus Christ and all of a sudden I was at this coffee shop then a couple days later and I'm over the last few years i every time i had a question i'd write out a little scrap piece of paper a napkin or whatever I had convenient and I met this coffee shop and I lay all these pieces out if you will on this table I'm like looking at all of them trying to make sense of all these theological historical philosophical questions and all of a sudden it was this moment of grace again but I came back to my junior year of college and when I knew this girl patty and like it's a petty she herself you know she didn't have every answer but one of the things that she did a remarkable job of Marcus was when she didn't know the answer she would go to the parish priest at the Newman Center on the campus and say you know father there's this guy who lives on my floor he's actually my RA so he's kind of in charge of me I don't want to mess things up there but he has all these questions because he's not a practicing Catholic he's an evangelical how do we explain this and so this priest would you know go to like answers calm or some of the other guests you've had a new show whether it's Scott Hahn or I know of Jeff Cavins but other other former people and print out things off the internet or give books and give them to her and then she would give them to me and at that point you know I didn't have a real openness to the truth even if I I like to think I did but you know I I didn't if I'm honest I was reading these things more just to criticize them and show why they're wrong and why the tradition I was a part of was right but as I'm sitting at this coffee shop looking over all these pieces of paper the thing that hit me was the whole catholic argument for authority and specifically for the Pope and the bishops and and just the hierarchy it dawned on me all of a sudden that I've tried the Sola scriptura thing and that was the one thing was I'm wrestling with all these questions I was convinced of is I just couldn't come back to the Catholic world the Catholics they didn't have any answers it was some Protestant tradition I was looking for he's I love the Bible I love scripture I was I had fallen in love with Jesus through reading st. John's Gospel and then the more I read st. Paul's epistles and all the the Old Testament writings I just I loved what I encountered there and my you know my understanding was Catholics they don't know what to do with the Bible but all of a sudden as I'm sitting there the whole argument for you know apostolic succession and papal Authority this living voice of authority that Cardinal Newman talks about it just hit me like a ton of bricks said you know you need a living voice of authority to interpret various scriptural passages but especially then to make light of certain conflicting theological opinions and so as around that time that I started reading some Chesterton a little bit more seriously the great England convert to Roman Catholicism and then also some Cardinal Newman himself and you know I know multiple guests that you've had in the show I've said this but you know Newman once again his great quote is to be deep in history is to ceased to be a Protestant and the more I started thinking about this medieval church history class I had where we're talking about the church from the 3rd century the 2nd century the 7th century the 13th century 18th century and it covered much more than actually just a medieval period but you're reading about a liturgy you're reading about the Eucharist you're you're reading about Scripture and tradition you're reading about bishops you're reading about priests and deacons and the Pope's even the bad Pope's see reading about but you're reading about all these things it just made sense to me that you need to have once again this living voice of authority the the Bishop of Rome who is ultimately kind of the final um you know arbiter of these theological debates and so there's at that time I started to kind of read a little bit of Cardinal Newman's great book in SA in development of Christian doctrine and I just don't know anyone that is able to read that book who's very open to the actually open to the truth that can come away and not be convinced of the genius of Roman Catholicism so I'm reading the reading part of that book and reading some Cardinal Newman and I eventually also stumbled upon Scott Hahn and then um then really like I said the beginning I stumbled upon your show I started kind of turning on Catholic television I found out there I didn't even know there was a Catholic television channel I started watching and I saw you know guess that you had who had had similar experiences either in the secular world or then in various Protestant traditions coming into the Catholic Church really for this issue of authority because that's the great issue that separates us Catholics from our separated Protestant brothers and sisters is scripture alone capable of interpreting itself or do you need scripture with living Magisterium and then with sacred tradition and it also dawned on me that every Protestant tradition it's a tradition that you cannot separate tradition from being a human person so I'm sitting at this coffee shop I'm like alright I think I have to go to the Catholic Church but I don't know anyone that does this I mean I knew my grandparents they still went to Mass on Sundays but like I said they never talked about their faith a whole lot but then my whole experience in college was fallen away Catholics would come into the evangelical world and so all of a sudden I see myself kind of swimming in the opposite direction I'm like well okay I've seen some people on your television so they had done this I'm not the only one but I don't know what tons of people that do this so I was living in downtown Denver I am I decided to go to the only church that I I knew of at the time which was the Cathedral and I go to a Sunday evening Mass and I'm sing in the back row I had Catholic sensibilities even at that point you don't like it too close to what's going on up front so I'm singing in the back I kind of taken the whole mass and everything and a lot of kneeling and standing and all the various you know genuflecting all the various postures you know I remember some of that from being a child but I waited for the whole church to clear out and then afterwards I um I said yeah I would talk to a priest I got to figure out how do you become Catholic or what what do I need to do and I'm walking around the church and all the lights are being turned off and the only person I could find I didn't realize who it was at the time but it was archbishop Chaput it was wandering and no I I don't remember exactly what I said to him but I think it was something silly like do you work here can you help me or something like that and he said you know what's going on and I said you know I I think I want to become Catholic do people even do this anymore and he said well let's get together in a couple days so I met with him a few days later and you know he eventually just kind of gave me a personalized RCIA course kind of a few areas I didn't have a great understanding of he's Elizabeth look at the Catechism and kind of walk through some of those areas and then let's have you could be confirmed and so I was confirmed by I just missed the Easter Vigil and so I was confirmed a few weeks after that with one other guy but I was confirmed and it was a it was really one of the happiest days of my life because I by coming into the church I finally found some rest I really found answers for these questions that had you know bothered me that first couple or that first year of college and coming into a relationship with Jesus Christ but now as I was last but there I had spent the last couple years um saying Lord how do I follow you the best I'd felt once again kind of adrift at sea every person I talked to said well it's this tradition or it's that tradition or and you know it's always there tradition that's always the right one but to all of a sudden come back to the Catholic faith you know I felt like I had kind of landed on solid ground again and so there's just a lot of joy there and you know it's interesting that I was still living with this Protestant pastor and he had actually been a falling away Catholic himself and as I'm kind of coming into the church his name is Jeremy and Jeremy is like Scott don't do this is the worst decision ever and you know we kind of we're really good friends a week this was like the one area we kind of had some disagreements about and I just know I was so convinced that the church was the fullness of the truth the fullness of what Jesus wanted us to know that it was his church the church that he established upon Peter and upon the thought of the Apostles and that it was a thought the same thing for the last 2,000 years yes there had been a development but it was the same church I was so convinced of that I said well you know Jeremy were really good friends I still enjoy living with you but I'm still gonna become Catholic you can't dissuade me from this he's actually now a practicing Catholic himself he works for focus for fellowship of Catholic University students so I always take a little bit delight in that that he is eventually kind of one back to and then like I said my friend Marc he would move back to Wisconsin he came into the church as well and so the Lord really uh he brought me a lot of peace in the midst of this decision and it was beautiful and but all of a sudden you find yourself a practicing Catholic and you know it's like well I can't doubt about this collar yeah so I was like you know I was going to be a medical doctor there's a hope and then I had this conversion and I said Lord I think you want me to do something else and going to ministry well listen you find yourself as a practicing Catholic and you can't become a Protestant minister anymore so I ended up spending the rest of that year kind of working at the job that I did and then I actually my father got quite sick and like I had said earlier in the show we had a kind of a rocky relationship earlier on but one of the things I had been really important to me was tried to reconcile that relationship especially after I had come into the faith a little bit more so I actually moved back to Wisconsin take care of him for a few months and I'm the doctors of the point he had cancer and they said that he was only going to have a few weeks left to live and so I moved back and thanks be to God he actually had three years he he ended up dying my first year at seminary but he'd up coming back into the church his illness the last few weeks of his life he received all the sacraments and we had the chance to kind of talk about why I was in seminary and all those kind of you know conversations I think you always want to have with loved ones we were able to have through his illness and I am I always thank God for because I saw firsthand how suffering can be redemptive and that's another great thing about our Catholic faith is that suffering is not meaningless we look to the crucifix and and we look to the writings of st. Paul who talks about finishing the suffering you know participating Christ's suffering and completing his work in our own suffering and I saw they with my father's life so with that so that was spectacular but I spent some time taking care of him eventually went back out to Colorado and I had the opportunity to spend a year living a Catholic retreat center up in the mountains of Colorado and jump olds who actually went there back in 1993 for World Youth Day so there are pictures of him checking in at the front desk that's always a funny wall I think there's a picture there of him walking praying the rosary in the woods yeah I know that yeah st. malo retreat center which unfortunately if they had a fire there a few months ago and it burned down so they're kind of in the process of trying to rebuild that but um so it's been a year there and through that time I just had a chance to kind of deepen my Catholic Sensibility spent a lot of time in prayer and just kind of saying all right Lord you brought me this far I never 10 years ago I never in a million years 10 years that doesn't make sense but 10 years ago I never would have considered myself being a practicing Catholic and Here I am what do you have for me now and it just is seen that the Lord was asking me to consider entering the seminary and so I did that I applied with the Diocese of Madison and I spent two years and in the Twin Cities at st. Paul summary in the you know the University of st. Thomas campus and then I've been in Rome for the last three years before since this last July I've been in Baraboo Wisconsin which is about 45 minutes north of Madison I just want a chance to kind of be back in a parish before being ordained just given have this long journey I thought is just it'd be important to kind of have a chance to be back in the diocese before ordination and so the people there have been very generous and having me and I was ordained a deacon a couple weeks ago here so yeah it's been a wonderful wonderful experience I've got a gazillion questions I'd love to ask you but with only a couple minutes I do have an email yeah Kara from Rio Rancho writes what reasons would you give to someone considering Christianity why they should become Catholic and not Baptist Methodist nondenominational and so on yeah I always think there are three big questions you have to deal with one does God exist - who do you say Jesus Christ is and it goes back to kind of the whole CS Lewis liar or lunatic or Lord question I mean Jesus claims to be God and you have to make a decision about him but then you also have to make a decision about the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church claims to be Jesus's Church it claims to be the church that he founded upon Saint Peter that he gave his keys to the church it goes back all the way time - to his lifetime and you know Chesterton okay he says when as I say why am i Catholic that there are 10,000 reasons it all reduced to one namely it's true and I think that that's been my experience I mean the Catholic Church is the only thing that can make sense of all of history all of Scripture all of theology all the the yearnings that we have as human beings the after having stayed psychology one of the things I've been most appreciative of is the Catholic theological philosophical intellectual tradition when it comes to human anthropology yeah we're the only place it really understands what it means to be human person today and and Lord knows in our culture this is one of the things that's most often attacked is you know the dignity of the human person by the church for 2,000 years has been standing up claiming no the human person is different than a monkey or is different than a robot that and is it isn't an angel either there's a body soul unity there and that you know we have our bodies but we also have our immortal souls and that's where the sacraments make sense you know I mean here these physical things that God gives us by which he pours out his spiritual grace into our lives um so yeah the church is it's true I mean at the end of the day that's the only reason to become Catholic it's the only reason to follow Jesus Christ he is the way the truth and the life all right thank you thank you deacon so one more year one more year yeah and if I can ask all your viewers says please say a prayer for me you know it's been a little bit of a whirlwind journey the last few years but I'm grateful to God but I also know that we need not just priests today we need holy priests and I want to be a holy priest so I would just ask that they would please keep me in their prayers well there's a lot of optimism about young priests today yeah you know there is yeah yeah ly I've had more support since I've pursued this vocation then possibly anything else I could have ever imagined and so I'm incredibly grateful to the people of God in to the church and to you Marcus for the show I would be sitting here today has it probably not done for some of the guests that you've had in your own journey as well thanks not on to God but RT wtn and Mother Angelica yeah well thank you yeah for sharing your time with us thank you and our prayers are with you as you continue I appreciate that thank you thank you for joining us on this wonderful episode of the journey home I pray that Deacon Scott's journey is encouragement to you god bless you see you next week you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 31,857

Rating: 4.8370371 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television, JHT01395

Id: QkzidyWyPgA

Length: 56min 43sec (3403 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2013