Journeys Home (9 page)

In 1963, together with our five young children, we were received
into the Catholic Church. We had truly come home. In those days,
it was rather rare for a Protestant clergyman to take that step.
Except for the angels and archangels, we had no one with whom
to celebrate our joy. But joy it was and is.

Dear brothers and sisters who are on the Way, or contemplating
the Way: The path may be dark for you, the problems seemingly
insurmountable, the sufferings great. But if you are looking to
Jesus, the Author and Finisher of your faith, you can be certain
of this: He will never betray your trust. Trust Him.

Ruth Ryland and Father Ray Ryland (see the previous chapter) recently
celebrated their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. They have five
children and twenty-two grandchildren.

former Methodist and Lutheran seminarian

SOJOURN AMONG THE LUTHERANS

GETTING TO KNOW CATHOLICS

MEETING THE CHURCH FATHERS

THE NEED FOR APOSTOLIC AUTHORITY

THE EUCHARIST

LOSS OF FAITH AMONG PROTESTANT LEADERS

NEW CONVICTIONS DEVELOPING

HOME AT LAST

The Spirit of God first entered my life on Easter Sunday, April
10, 1955, when, at the age of three months, I was baptized at
the Evangelical United Brethren Church in Union Furnace, Ohio.

Reared in Ohio, in a nominally Evangelical United Brethren (later
United Methodist) family, I grew up in an environment where neither
parent attended church. I was one of those kids who would be dropped
off for Sunday school. Afterwards, a neighbor usually would bring
me home. The greatest influence on my early faith development
was my Grandmother Anderson, one of the few churchgoers in the
immediate family.

Since I grew up Protestant, Catholicism was not a factor in my
life. We did have one neighbor family that was Catholic. The husband
would brag about going to Confession before a party to confess
any sins he might later commit while having a good time.

"You never know," he would say, "what the traffic might be like
on the way home."

Our neighbor might have been joking, but how were we to know?
We certainly knew he was telling the truth about the parties!
I was repulsed by the (mistaken) conclusion that such "pre-sin
confession" was an accepted Catholic practice.

These warped notions of Catholic doctrine were reinforced when
I attended catechism classes in preparation for confirmation in
the E.U.B. Church. The pastor's wife, while teaching us about
different Christian denominations, gave the following definition:
"Catholics are Christianized pagans who worship statues of Mary."

A basic exposure to the Holy Scriptures at Sunday school enabled
my faith in Christ to begin to mature, but only to a point. I
understood Jesus as my heavenly best friend. What it really meant
for Christ to be my Savior and Lord was obscure.

I wanted to be close to God, but I didn't know how. Every time
I watched a Billy Graham crusade on television, I would accept
Jesus into my heart again. I knew that the journey began with
accepting Jesus, but where was I to go from there?

In the fall of 1973, I enrolled as a freshman at Ohio University
in Athens. While taking a course in Western civilization that
autumn, an uneasy realization began to grow: The denomination
of my childhood lacked any real historic roots.

Christian history, I learned, reached back almost two thousand
years. My Methodist heritage was barely two hundred years old.
In our Sunday school classes, we discussed only what God had done
in the first century. Sometimes there was a comment about His
actions in our own church in the last couple of centuries, but
even that was rare.

Could it be that the Lord had taken a vacation for sixteen centuries?
Of course, such a belief was never voiced by the people. It was
just a living, working assumption that we had never questioned -- but now I was!

I didn't like the uneasy, precarious feelings these questions
produced in me. I was uneasy because I could think of no answer
that satisfactorily answered my inquiries. At this time, it was
only a faint uncertainty, forming a crack in the wall of my Protestant
worldview. Yet little did I know that this uncomfortable feeling
would be the beginning of eight years of growing questions and
surprising answers.

The next major step in my spiritual journey was a sojourn among
the Lutherans. My introduction to Lutheranism came through my
best friend, Brian, who invited me to his church on Easter Sunday,
1974. It was here that I first experienced the majesty of the
Lord in liturgical worship. Since up to that time I had attended
only Methodist Sunday school, the beauty of liturgical worship
came as a very pleasant and unexpected surprise. Sitting in the
back pew, I began to wonder whether the pastor had failed to show
up. The music had begun, the people were standing and singing,
but there was no one up front in the sanctuary.
Where could he
be?
I thought.

Then I heard singing coming from behind me, and in processed the
crucifer, the junior choir, and the senior choir, followed by
the pastor. So that's where he was! The Easter liturgy that followed
awed me.

Methodist Sunday school had taught me that Jesus is my Savior
and best friend. This Lutheran liturgy was teaching me the beauty
and majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is not only Savior and
Friend, but also the Lord and King of the universe! The Lutheran
liturgy began my training in what it means to worship.

While receiving instruction from Pastor Lueck in Luther's
Small
Catechism,
I remember telling him that I wanted to belong to a
church with a heritage and roots deep in history. I told him that
my only other option was Catholicism, but because of their idolatry
they could not even be considered. So the Lutherans were my only
choice. I became a member of St. Matthew Lutheran Church (a member
of the former American Lutheran Church), in Logan, Ohio, on the
first Sunday of Advent, December 1, 1974, which was also Communion
Sunday.

As a Lutheran, I was learning much about God, Jesus, and the Bible.
The Lord, however, had still more in store for me. Upon returning
to Ohio University in the autumn of 1975, I saw a course on "Basic
Christianity" advertised in OU's student newspaper. This course
turned out to be a watershed event in my life.

I discovered that there existed on campus a dynamic ecumenical
student faith community called River of Life Ministries, which
accepted me with open arms. River of Life had risen from the ashes
of a closed chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The
student leaders were an interesting ecumenical combination of
Methodists, a Messianic Jew, an Episcopalian, a Lutheran, and
a Baptist.

Even though River of Life was sponsored by Central Avenue United
Methodist Church, the group met in the basement of Christ Lutheran
Church every Friday night for prayer, teaching, and fellowship.
I figured that if they met in the Lutheran church, they must not
be too far off base. It was at Friday night fellowship that I
was able to deepen my understanding of prayer, Bible study, and
fellowship with other Christians.

Having been branded a geek in high school, I had never experienced
unconditional acceptance and love from people my own age. I was
taken aback at being immediately welcomed as a brother in the
Lord by the people of this fellowship group. I basked in the love
Jesus was giving me through my newfound friends. All my lasting
relationships from college have been with people who attended
this fellowship.

I must confess that I did have a problem with a few of the students
who attended Friday night fellowship. Several of them were Catholics.
How could that be? My misconceptions of Catholics had not altered
greatly over the years. Some of these Catholic students invited
me to a prayer group that met at Christ the King Catholic Student
Center. There I was amazed to find a large number of Catholic
Christians, and the only statue of Mary was kept in the back corner
of the church.

Maybe they don't worship her after all,
I thought. At least these
Catholics didn't. I soon learned that theirs was a faith based
squarely upon Jesus Christ and the apostolic teaching of His Church,
enlivened by the Holy Spirit.

At the end of fall quarter, I was invited to attend my first Catholic
Mass. I was aghast! The liturgy was very familiar to me, but there
was a major problem.

I could not shake the Elizabethan English of the Lutheran liturgy
of that time. The Mass was in contemporary English. I had thought
I was the one who belonged to the reformed and up-to-date church.
Now the Catholic Church seemed more reformed than my own Lutheran
church!

Thanks to a well-stocked book table at Friday night fellowship,
I began to be exposed to many Christian authors. The one who would
have the most lasting effect on my spiritual life was C. S. Lewis.
His books were influential in the maturing process of my theology,
giving it a solid basis in logic as well as Scripture.

My very first book by Lewis was
The Screwtape Letters.
I couldn't
put it down. In fact, I sat up all night, finishing it in one
sitting!

Next on my reading list came
Mere Christianity.
I discovered that
a reasoned defense of the Faith could be made with lucidity. Christianity
was true, and truth could be demonstrated through logic. Yes,
we need to have faith, but our leap of faith need not be a leap
into the dark.

Lewis answered for me the controversy of faith and works. His
analogy of faith and works acting in a person's life as two blades
of a pair of scissors made sense to me.

The Great Divorce,
another work by C. S. Lewis, was instrumental
in clarifying another Catholic teaching, purgatory. In this wonderful
little book, I discovered that the concept of purgatory made perfect
sense in light of the just mercy of God.

Of course, Lewis' representation of purgatory in the book does
not correspond to what the Catholic Church teaches on the subject.
He warns that it is only a story, not systematic theology. Yet
it still opened me to the possibility of the truth of the doctrine.

In the winter of 1977, a course was offered at the university
on the history of early Christianity. Thanks to this course, I
was introduced to the early Church Fathers. The class sparked
a deep desire to learn everything I could about early Church history
and patristic theology. Going to a local Christian bookstore,
I asked if they had any copies of the Fathers. The clerk there
didn't know what I was talking about. After some searching in
publishers' catalogs, I found I could order copies of texts by
the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Thanks to the early Christian writers
of the first and second centuries, such as St. Clement of Rome,
St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Justin Martyr, and St. Irenaeus,
I learned that many of the doctrines I had always discounted as
Catholic, and thus rejected, were in fact taught by the Church
of that age.

For example, I had always accepted without question the Protestant
doctrine of
sola scriptura
(Scripture alone), which claims that
the Bible is the only source of authority and revelation in the
Church. When I read the early Fathers, however, I discovered they
taught that the Church was based not on the Bible alone but on
Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the apostolic teaching authority
of the bishops (the Magisterium). I discovered statements such
as this one written around a.d. 185 by St. Irenaeus, a student
of St. Polycarp, who in turn was a pupil of the Apostle John as
well as a friend of St. Ignatius of Antioch:

The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although
she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it,
as if she occupied but one house. She likewise believes these
things just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart;
and harmoniously she proclaims them and teaches them and hands
them down, as if she possessed but one mouth. For, while the languages
of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the Tradition
is one and the same. ...

The true gnosis [knowledge] is the doctrine
of the Apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout
the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according
to the successions of bishops, by which successions the bishops
have handed down the Church which is found everywhere; and the
very complete Tradition of the Scriptures, which have come down
to us by being guarded against falsification ... . (
Against Heresies,
1, 10, 2, 4, 33, 8)

I also discovered that nowhere does the Bible teach that the Scriptures
are the sole rule of faith for the Christian. I deduced that if
such a teaching was not in the Bible and the Church Fathers taught
otherwise, then
sola scriptura
must be a tradition of man and
not a doctrine of God.

As a Lutheran, I had been taught that the priesthood of all believers
negated any need for a ministerial priesthood. But I found that,
while not denying St. Peter's teaching that all Christians are
members of a "royal priesthood" (1 Pt 2:9), the Fathers also insisted
on the necessity of apostolic authority in the Church.

For example, St. Clement, the third bishop of Rome, wrote to the
Corinthian church about the year a.d. 80: "Our Apostles knew through
our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office
of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect
foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned,
and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should
die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry" (
1 Clement
44:1 - 2).