My Name is Maria
Preface to unexpected, but necessary confessions.
What have we done?
We were walking along the canal in Jericho, Oxford. It was evening, and earlier that day — it was the third Sunday of Advent — my wife and I had converted to Catholic faith with our two daughters.
The mass that morning had opened with an invitation to enter into that joy which only can be found in God, and stay there. Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete (‘Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice’). Now it felt impossible to do otherwise. Even though things were darkening along the canal, the sense was that invisible light penetrated everything; it had been a long day, and I was tired, but at the same time, my heart and feet felt strangely light.
But then, suddenly, a void opened in my stomach, sucking me in.
What have we done? What are we doing?
I was sucked in, but also pulled out — out of my own skin. And looking on myself from above, from the outside, I felt ridiculous. Upon entering into the Church I had, with my wife and daughters, taken the name ‘Maria’. In the Church’s records, my name is Andreas Maria Espegren Masvie. If you had gone back about a decade or so and told my former self about this, then I would have thought you were trying to pull some kind of joke on me, or, if you convinced me about the situation: that I had gone mad.
As we walked along the canal that evening, the reverse time travel happened: my former self decided to pay me a brief visit.
‘What on earth are you doing? Did you really get your family to convert to this jumble of rituals, relics, and saints? Surely, you did not genuinely take the name “Maria”?’
This voice was very different from that which had been dominating for some time. That previous voice pretended to be a wondering one and asked questions like: does it really matter? Do you really have to convert? It is nice to be attracted to Catholicism, for sure, but there is so much ugliness and weirdness there as well? Can you know that this is the truth (of course you cannot)? Is anything like ‘true religion’ even accessible to us in the fallen condition?
But now this soft tone and these numbing questions were exchanged with something sharper, harder, angrier. And as my former self confronted me in this manner, and the weight of our conversion hit me, the void opened up inside, sucking me in, pulling me out.
What have I done?
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I will return to this confrontation with my former self shortly. But before doing so, I want to interject and say something about the term ‘conversion’ itself. It is a term that is full of unspoken assumptions that for a long time had silently shaped my understanding of Catholic faith, giving my former self a rhetorical advantage that he should not be allowed to keep.
None ‘converts’ for instance, from Lutheranism to Pentecostalism or Anglicanism or non-denominationalism or vice versa. I speak from experience, having spent my whole life within and between such camps. But when it comes to Catholic faith, we use this very term, as if it is a given that this is a different faith altogether from genuinely Christian faith.
For me, the transition to Catholicism did not feel like a conversion. It was rather a sense of rediscovering the faith of our forefathers, and not least, of our Church Fathers. It long felt as though their Christianity existed in me as a kind of vague, blurry, and indeed ancient memory; a memory I could not make sense of and therefore frustrated me. The sense was that my spiritual life was missing something that I somehow knew I needed, but could not find, nor even say precisely what was. And now that I had found it in all its abundance in the Catholic faith, I understood why: it was Catholicism that I was missing.
Put differently, my experience was that I had now been uniquely allowed into, indeed embraced by, the fullness of truth. It sounds a bit much when I say it out loud, but I mean it. My wife and I had been searching again and again for this truth within various kinds of Protestantisms. But ultimately we searched in vain. For Protestantisms can only ever point toward this truth, but never fully be it.
Thus, there is a sense by which ‘conversion’ is the right term after all, if construed correctly: becoming Catholic was a very different thing compared to my previous denominational transitions. For it was ultimately to come home, even though that home was, at least to begin with, in many respects foreign.
//
That brings me back to the confrontation with my former self, as we walked along the canal. Was really Catholicism the fullness of truth? This and other such questions churned in my gut, not least because the term ‘conversion’ itself is so laden, and my name was now ‘Maria’. But this distress resided just as quickly as it bursted into me. For I knew very well the answer to the underlying and important question: why we had done what we had done.
Becoming Catholic was a necessary outcome of a series of realisations or concessions or (as I struggle to find the presise translation of the Norwegian term ‘erkjennelser’) confessions. Every time I glance back at that series, which spans a decade, it seems impossible to have chosen differently than we did. And that was how I felt now as well.
This ‘necessity’ is neither paralysing nor oppressive. To the contrary. As a Catholic, I have stepped into a new kind of rich, stable, and vibrant joy that I did not know as a Protestant — a new kind of peace and clarity, a new kind of love for our Lord Jesus Christ. And this is where I want to stay.
In this essay series, Confessions, I want to invite you into some of the most important confessions that led me and my family to the Catholic Church — confessions which silenced my former, accusatory self that evening along the canal in Oxford. It is a journey that will take us deep into the Protestant belief system. I am curious to see what you will experience down there.
For me, it was shocking. It amounted to a radical deconstruction. For I found myself standing in what was, to put it mildly, an unexpected dilemma: either give up faith in anything that resembles orthodox Christianity, or — as suggested — find it reconstructed and indeed perfected in Catholicism. There were no other alternatives down there, except self-deception.
Though the confessions that led me there are in some ways personal, they are nevertheless of a general nature. In this essay series I provide a somewhat tided up and straightened out — although still in the Augustinian style — account of these confessions. If you follow along, you may find that you will reject them. Maybe you will experience things differently or reason about the same experiences in alternative ways.
But I am fairly certain that over the course of the essay series, you will come to understand Christian faith somewhat differently than you did before. At the very least, this is an opportunity to reflect deeply on why we believe what we believe, and what kind of Christian life makes sense in the wake of serious scrutiny.
Friday in two weeks, I publish the first chapter of the first part. That chapter is about the deconstruction of an indifference that I allowed myself for a long time (and I do not think I am the only one). It can be summarised roughly like this: it does not matter much as long as you confess something like ‘Jesus Christ died for my sins so that I can enter into the heavenly kingdom’. I used to believe this, with some caveats, but not anymore.
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I want to end this preface by saying that this essay series is written to someone. To be honest, it is written to quite a number of people. It is written to my former self, probably gritting his teeth, so that he can understand that bearing the name ‘Maria’ is not to take love and glory from Jesus Christ, but rather to give it as Christ desired. I write to my daughters, to help them understand how the Catholic Church became our home and why it had to become so — and the infinite joy and freedom that lie in that necessity.
Similarly, I write to friends and family, partly to explain — more thoroughly than I usually manage when speaking — how we ended up where we did, and partly because I pray to God that we may one day be reunited as Catholics. I write to those I do not know. Some might be Catholics that have decided to live as Protestants: not submitting to the Church, but only to their self and their own ideas about faith and morality, which is really to place oneself outside the Church.
Others might be wondering if they should explore the path that leads into the Church. I seek to offer them thoughts and perspectives that I wish I had access to when I tried to navigate in remote terrain, and, on multiple occasions, wanted to turn back.
Others again might just be wondering what this path is about — and why someone might believe it leads to truth, especially when that someone once thought it led quite badly astray. In short, this essay series is for anyone who wants to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus Christ.