Advent Homecoming

My wife and I are fairly new converts from Anglicanism, and this year for Thanksgiving I returned to my hometown for the first time since we were received. And so the first Sunday of Advent was also the first time I attended mass at St. Anne’s, the Catholic parish near my childhood home. But to me, St. Anne’s is a little more than just the parish near where I grew up.

Midland Texas is deep in the heart of Southern Baptist territory. First Baptist Church Midland was originally built on the Bassilica model, in great yellow brick with Spanish Mission influences in its arches and great domed bell tower. And although there are four Catholic parishes in town, only one is on a major thoroughfare that we regularly traveled. So to me it was not merely a Catholic church; it took on the symbolic significance of The Catholic Church.

The author in 2008

I grew up in the radical restorationist communities known as the Hebrew Roots, or Messianic, movement. We believed that disciples of Jesus of Nazareth needed to keep the Law of Moses, the Torah in Hebrew, and so we observed the calendar of its feasts, kept kosher, wore tzitzits on our clothes, and studied the Bible in Hebrew. And we were firmly convinced that Christians, especially Catholics, were being misled by pagan practices and beliefs. But I remember distinctly strange encounters with Catholicism which stuck with me, like reading a children’s novel, A Trumpet Sounds, by Henry Garnett, or the time in synagogue when I felt a physical longing, almost compulsion, to make the sign of the cross, and was grieved in my heart that it was not permissible to do so. I remember visiting our neighbor, an elderly grandmother, and a parishioner at St Anne’s, and the distinct impression of discomfort combined with longing, that her house filled me with, with its strange statuary and vessel of holy water by the front door. Her granddaughter recently told me that our neighbor had long prayed for my family’s conversion. And these always called St Anne’s to mind.

St Anne’s had a kind of mystique to it that was greater than its architecture. The building was built in the late 1950s, and borrowed liberally from the architectural vocabulary of Frank Lloyd Wright. It is an unlovely building. But I remember as a child being enchanted by its statues, and especially by its labyrinth of courtyards between buildings, things neither the ubiquitous Baptist churches, and certainly the synagogue, did not have. I wanted to explore it, probably not least because it was off limits. It grew in my mind as a kind of mysterious, magical presence. Peter Kreeft talks about encountering St John of the Cross as “something solid,” and that is my impression of St Anne’s: something looming large and solid in the back of my consciousness.

I went away to Baylor University to study linguistics when I was 19, after spending some time in Israel to work on my Hebrew and be immersed in the culture. For the first time I really began to study historic Christianity seriously, and I what I found was remarkable. I had been told that Christians were unaware of the Jewish history of Christianity, but when I read N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and then Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth series, I found that these people at the heart of ‘pagan’ and ‘idolatrous’ Christianity knew all about the Jewishness of Jesus and early Christianity, nor were they trying to hide it.

Theological problems crept up on me, especially regarding the canon of Scripture, how we got it and how we were to interpret it without a continuous Jewish Christian tradition like the traditions of Judaism and Catholicism. James Kugel made the necessity of such a tradition powerfully clear to me in How to Read the Bible. I struggled to justify the explanations I had been given about St. Paul and the Torah, about the identity of Jews and Gentiles in the Messiah. The final break came one summer when I went home while reading E.P. Sanders’s encyclopedic Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and heard a guest speaker at our synagogue specifically address the issue of Jewish and Gentile identity and relationship to the Torah. Their explanation did not fit over what I knew, and it was deeply disillusioning.

I returned to college and became a catechumen in the Orthodox church. After some exploring I ended up becoming an Anglican in my senior year at Baylor. After all, the great Hebrew Christian Fr. Paul Levertoff had been an Anglican. And so I went off to Duke to study for an M.A. in Religion. Catholicism remained a bridge too far for me, but I was unusually high even for an Anglican in the Diocese of Fort Worth. I regularly prayed the rosary and defended a Thomist interpretation of Real Presence, but I adopted Austin Farrer’s maxim that because I could not accept the Papal fallacy, and was not born in the Orthodox east, I must be an Anglican.

About this time on another trip back home I finally ventured as far as the bookstore at St. Anne’s. And though I had by this time visited several Catholic parishes, and toured others, something held me back from actually entering the church at St. Anne’s. On one such visit home while still an Anglican I even visited a weekday morning mass at St. Stephen’s, another local parish. But never at St. Anne’s. I told myself that I didn’t need to. Holy Trinity Episcopal just down the street had better architecture, and it was in “my tradition.” Of course that didn’t stop me anywhere else in the world.

Anglicanism quickly turned out to be something other than what I had thought. It was fracturing at an alarming rate and could not agree within itself about basic tenets, like the importance of Tradition, which had brought me to it in the first place. The thing that weighed most heavily on me during my time at Duke was Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane, “That they all may be one,” a prayer over which he literally shed blood, but did not seem to be taken seriously. We were making little or no progress on greater unity even within the world of Anglicanism, let alone any ecumenical outreach to Orthodox, Catholic, or even other Protestant churches. It was this matter again of identity, which really boils down to ecclesiology: who and what is the Church?

The author in his St. Mary's College gown at St Andrews in 2017

St. John Henry Newman and Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, along with St. Augustine’s Hymn Against the Donatists finally brought me into the fold. By this time I had married my wife, and we had moved to St Andrews, Scotland, so that I could pursue my doctorate in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. We were received into the Catholic Church in St. James’s parish at the Easter Vigil of 2017. Soon after we had a son, Wendell Nicholas, baptized in the same St. James’s parish in Scotland. We were so busy with our little bundle of joy and with my doctoral work that we rarely made it back to the States. This year I finished my doctorate, studying the poetry of the Old Testament, and moved back to America.

And now, at Thanksgiving, we returned to St. Anne’s, and for the first time in my life I stepped through the doors of the Catholic Church. It is an advent of sorts. A coming at long last. The experience was far from ideal. The architecture leaves a very dingy interior, especially at an evening mass, the mass settings are not ideal, and two of the hymns hardly mention God or Christ. The baby fussed and had to be taken out for a while. The priest hearing confession before mass had to leave before hearing my confession.

Christ in the House of his Parents, John Everett Millais, 1850. With Sts Mary, Joseph, Anne, Joachim, and John the Baptist.

Despite it all, it felt like coming home. Our experience of the church is never perfect. It may be like

coming home to a house in need of some repair. But it is still our home. I felt a profound sense of peace and belonging. It occurs to me only now that all of this growth and spiritual travel was fundamentally about home-longing. Ecclesiology loomed large for me because at the heart of all these theological questions was one about where home is, and where family is. That is why I spent so much time in Israel, but despite the fact that I thought it was supposed to be my home, it never felt homely.

So it is no wonder that from early in the theological journey, before I left the Messianic Movement, Chesterton’s words from The Ball and the Cross lodged themselves in my mind, “To me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity.” I found that in the Catholic family, and so maybe it is no accident that I came home to the church of St. Anne, the mother of Our Lady, the mother of our mother, and at Thanksgiving I came home to grandmother’s house.