My story begins in late 1970’s England where I was born into an Irish Roman Catholic family. That is the first reason why I am a Christian and a Catholic, because I was born into it, and was reared in it. It was just part of who I was. As a family, we attended Mass every Sunday and prayed the rosary together every evening. The difference for me of growing up as a Catholic in England in comparison to Ireland meant my religion made me different from the rest of society. I was in the minority, as England was very much a secular society.
As Irish Catholics in England, my family was different again from the rest of the Catholic community. My parents had a different understanding of what it meant to be a Catholic because of their experience growing up in the forties and fifties in Ireland.
Being an Irish Catholic in England at the height of the Troubles brought another dimension to my identity. I remember watching the news as a child, hearing of bombings, innocent people being killed, the imprisonment of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four and I remember being horrified by all the violence and injustice. How did this fit into my identity of being an Irish Catholic? Which side was I meant to be on? Where was God in all this conflict? I had so many questions and very few answers. I was confused. I loved God, I prayed to God and I believed in God. I was taught that God is love. So why was it all so complicated?
As I grew older, my relationship with the Church changed. It seemed to become more and more irrelevant to my life as I became a teenager. I had a lot of questions and there seemed to be nobody or nowhere I could go to ask these questions and be listened to.
My search led me to choose Religious Studies at A-level when I was sixteen in a non-Catholic school. Up until this point I had been schooled in Catholic schools. This A-level consisted of studying theology, scripture and philosophy. It opened my mind in a way I was not expecting. In fact, it blew my mind wide open and from that point there was no return. I learnt about liberation theology, I was given the Cloud of Unknowing to read, I learnt about the politics of the Church and I began connecting with God in a deeper way through what I was learning. Unfortunately my thirst for knowledge was not welcomed within the Catholic Church and I felt alienated. I could not find God there so I began to look elsewhere.
For many years my life was not centred on God, although I was always conscious of God in my life, and a buried desire within me to connect on a deeper level and explore my spirituality. This opportunity came in the form of a serious snowboarding accident that left me injured for six months. During my recovery period I became aware of God in a real way. It is difficult to explain what I experienced during that time. It was as if I became gradually aware of God, without really noticing what was happening; a conversion experience, that occurred ever so subtly. All I knew was that God was real and that somehow I needed to change the direction of my life in line with this new-found reality.
The obvious starting point for me was to go back to the Catholic Church. While I was injured I was being taken care of by my parents and I started going to Mass with them every Sunday. I was struck by the compassion and concern I received from people within the Church community, and the amount of people that were praying for me, especially in my family. I did not need to be told people were praying for me as I could feel it. I was graced with a lasting sense of peace, despite the trauma I had been through. This restored my faith in prayer and I began to pray myself every day, starting with what I knew as a child, the rosary. I prayed that God would give me direction and God did, in the form of the Jesuit Volunteer Communities run by MAGiS, a Jesuit Young Adult organisation based in Dublin.
I started with the Jesuit Volunteer Corp (JVC) in September 2003 along with three other young adults, James, Eleanor and Maria. I had never met any of them before I arrived in Manresa House, a Jesuit retreat centre in Dublin, for a week of ‘orientation’. A week later we were living together in our eighth storey flat in the heart of Ballymun, on the northside of Dublin. I loved living in Ballymun right from the beginning. I found people warm and friendly, and it was there I learnt what it truly means to be a Christian. I learnt what it means to be accepted for who I am and not what I do. I began receiving spiritual direction and this, along with the other elements of JVC began my journey within, where I learnt what it meant to be in real relationship with God.
The following summer, at the end of my JVC experience, I applied and was accepted to MAGiS’s volunteering programme and traveled to Colombia, South America, with eight other young adults. I spent three weeks living in the Jesuit community in Bogotá while volunteering in an orphanage for children with special needs. When I came back I described the experience as ‘doing JVC in three weeks’. Yes, it was an intense experience and it challenged me on so many levels. But something about the experience captured my heart and I went back to Colombia for two further years, training as a leader facilitating other volunteers with MAGiS.
After JVC I had the opportunity to study theology at the Milltown Institute in Dublin. I had waited a long time to be in a place where those questions my sixteen-year-old self had asked could be heard and accepted, even if they could not be answered. I journeyed, struggled and grew with an amazing group of people, some of whom are still my closest friends. They had the same questions I had. They were trying to find God in the same way I was. And most of them were Catholics like me. I began to understand that we were the Church. It wasn’t the hierarchy who was the Church. It was the responsibility of every person to discern where God might be in their own lives, in their communities and in the wider society.
I went on to train as a Healthcare Chaplain and worked in a hospital in Kerry for a couple of years. I also more recently trained as a Spiritual Director. Both of these ministries have been extremely privileged roles in which I have been able to trace the footprints of God in people’s lives. It has also brought me more in tune with the footprints of God in my own life. I am currently discerning where these footprints may be leading me next and as part of this process I am going to walk the old pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago, in Spain with my father.
Why am I a Christian and a Catholic? I am back to where I started. It is something I was born into. The Dalai Lama does not recommend a person change from the religion of their birth because it is difficult to go to greater depth. This is why I am a Catholic. There are so many riches to be discovered from believers who have walked the path before I have, in a way in which I understand. I could not see this when I was younger, when I turned away from the Church. I still have many of the same questions I had when I was sixteen. The difference is I am able to live with the questions. The answers will come when I am ready to hear them, if they come at all. This has been frustrating at times and it has not been an easy journey. But I have been gifted with a loving, supportive family and I have met people along the way who have carried me when the burden became too heavy for me to bear.
All of this is why I am a Catholic and it is why I am a part of a Church that has caused so much pain to so many people. I have found God in this broken Church in the most extraordinary and unexpected ways, and I will continue to search for my compassionate God as I truly believe that God can be found in all things.