The Least Surprising Part of My Catholic Conversion

On a journey filled with surprises, one thing felt as natural as if I had been meant for it from the start.

There were many surprises along my journey to becoming Catholic. The biggest surpise was the fact that I was converting in the first place. Others included the number of misconceptions I had about what Catholics actually believed, the reaction of some of my Evangelical friends and the exclusion from those circles once people concluded that we must never have been Christians to begin with, as well as the way that my restless soul stopped being so restless in a way I didn’t know was possible before.

But there was one part of my conversion story that didn’t come as a surprise, though when I tell people my story sometimes they find it surprising how naturally it fit.

And that was how easily I came to accept the Eucharist as the True Body and Blood of Christ.

Drawn Toward Communion

One might think that after growing up my whole life believing that communion was a symbollic act and an optional addition to a church service, moving to belief in the Eucharist as essential, as Jesus himself in the form of bread and wine would be a stretch, or at the very least a decent-sized bump in the road on my journey home.

But it wasn’t. There are, I think, a few reasons why.

The first is that I’ve had a love of communion for a very long time. Sometimes when I was a kid, I’d try and grab the biggest piece of ripped-off bread from the tray that the ushers passed around at my church because by that time, we were nearing lunch and I was often quite hungry. But, besides the childlike hunger, a deeper part of me always loved communion. I loved remembering the words Jesus said and partaking in something that joined us together with Christians through the ages.

In college, I had a resurgence of appreciation for communion, and a desire for it more often in my life. I distinctly remember visiting a church that was held in a theater in Madison, Wisconsin. They passed out the bread and the little individual plastic cups they put grape juice in, and I held them both carefully in my hands. I stared at the grape juice in that cup and imagined that it was actually the blood of Christ, and what that blood meant for me and the hope that I carried in my heart. It brought me to tears then, and several times later as well when I received communion at a church service that offered it.

Another reason why embracing the Catholic belief on Communion wasn’t surprising is because it never really bothered me in the first place. I had a lot of complaints about Catholic beliefs, and most of those complaints turned out to be my own misunderstandings, but the Catholic belief on the Eucharist wasn’t one of them. When I began to date the man who is now my husband, I entered into a very Catholic circle with his immediate and extended family, and I didn’t really see any reason why their belief in the True Presence would be a significant issue. If they took Jesus’ words at the last supper literally, cool.

I am surprised at how that thought didn’t prompt me to further action, even back then. I’d like to think that if someone claimed Jesus was truly present literally anywhere on the earth that it would have sent me to swift and decisive action to find out if those claims were true. But for some reason, for me, at that time, it didn’t. At least not right away. That makes me to scratch my head even now, seven years after my confirmation. If I was comfortable with the fact that Jesus might be truly present at Catholic Mass, I’m surprised I didn’t look into Catholicism more seriously earlier on.

What I did do was lingered for a while in hurt and confusion when I would attend Mass and hear songs about One Bread, One Body, and All Are Welcome, while knowing that I wasn’t welcome to receive the Eucharist. It felt exclusionary, for the Catholics to have this potentially Very Special Thing and not to share it with non-Catholic Christians. I didn’t understand why, if I was willing to assent to the True Presence, that I couldn’t go up there and receive too.

Now that I’m Catholic, I know that receiving Communion is much more than just assenting to the Catholic belief in the Eucharist. I know that it is assent to unity in all that the Church is and means and believes. It seems silly to me now to think that I thought Catholics might have the Eucharist right but obviously had so many other things wrong to the point that I couldn’t join them. As if Jesus would set up his True Presence in a Sacrament in a faulty institution. But I also can’t go back and change my reactions and feelings back then, and I know that God was with me even as I struggled to sort it out.

The Eucharist in the Bible

Perhaps adjacently to my non-surprise at the Eucharist being Jesus, was my great surprise at learning how often the Eucharist is referenced in the Bible. As a Protestant Gal, the only reference to communion that I knew existed in the Bible were the accounts of the Last Supper, and in other New Testament accounts referring to communion after the fact. It was a thing Jesus did one time and told others to do and it is a New Testament thing. No one ever talked to me about John 6. No one ever talked to me about how we were to take the rest of the Bible, including the Creation accounts literally but for some reason Jesus’s words at the Last Supper were figurative. And no one ever talked to me about how many Eucharistic prefigurations are in the Old Testament as well.

During my conversaion, we watched a video study by Brant Pitre on the Eucharist, and I was floored at how much of the Old Testament set up for future Christians to understand the Eucharist in the New. Or even how some of the gospel stories, like the feeding of the 5,000, were also preparing people for what this Sacrament soon would be- the multiplication of matter so that all can be fed. For all the Bible reading and Bible quizzing and Bible studying I had done, no one had ever told me any of this.

To this day, I think that’s one of the great tragedies of the things that have been lost since the Reformation- the loss of the history of what early Christians believed Communion to be. Many Christians today who are in denominations separated from history and tradition simply don’t know. I certainly didn’t. There was a sermon circulating around a while back from Francis Chan, a prominent Evangelical minister, who had just figured out for the first time the importance of Communion in the early Christian Church, and it caused quite a stir. If I remember correctly, Protestants got uncomfortable and Catholics wondered if he’d eventually convert.

One would think that the True Presence of Jesus would be enough to do whatever we needed to do in order to draw close to it. I’ve wondered so many times how it could be possible for people living in the time of Christ to see God literally before him and still somehow go about their daily business as if everything was still the same. How they could miss hime when he was right in front of their face. But then again, I did that too. Jesus is a bit more veiled in the form of bread and wine, but he’s still there, in every Catholic church. At every Mass I attended with JP’s family. And I would see Him there then go along my merry way.

For a while.

But, in the gentle way that Jesus draws people to Himself, I was also being drawn toward Christ in the Eucharist for years before I realized what was happening. And now, I’m home and I receive Jesus into myself at least once a week.

What a gift. What a grace.

So, today on Corpus Christi Sunday, I am entirely grateful for the piece of my heart that was drawn in the direction of the Eucharist, even before I knew what the Eucharist was.

I am grateful for the Sacraments and the way God planned this all out before any of us knew it was happening. For the forethought of a God who planted Eucharistic seeds throughout the story of our faith, generations before the Last Supper, for our good.

I pray for those who wrestle with this belief, and for those who struggle to see our Lord in the here and now, and for those who have never been taught.

And I am profoundly humbled by the least surprising part of my Catholic confirmation- Jesus himself.

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-Lorelei