A Journey Out Of The Cave and Into The Light: My Thoughts on Leaving Protestantism

 One of the pivotal moments in our young family's journey to Mother Church was Christmas of 2017 when our senior pastor at the time was not present during one of the most important seasons of the liturgical year. Before I explain his absence, I think it's important I ramble a bit about how I came to see his absence as problematic.  At the time, we were driving 30 min every Sunday morning to attend a large "Evangelical Non-Denominational" congregation located in South Orlando. It was our first year of marriage and this congregation had been a good place for us to attend as we prepared for our lives together. We enjoyed the preaching/ Bible teaching we were receiving from the senior pastor and we even had a few friends that checked on us during those early months of adjustment. However, due to my wife's experiences with the Reformed Episcopal movement during her time in Northern Virginia, she felt a longing for more "smells and bells" on big holidays like ...

 As I feed my son and get ready to attend mass at the parish we have been frequenting, a thought popped in my head. I pray today for those that are trapped in their little enclaves of the Protestant project. To the people hanging out in mainline churches listening to their "priestess" talk about how to be socially conscious, I pray you find your way to the light. To those in their self-proclaimed "Acts-style" churches sitting on folding chairs in living rooms singing to 45 min acoustic guitar music and waiting to hear a still, small voice tell you what to do or say during the ensuing Bible study, I pray for you to abandon that ridiculous and heretical concept and step into the light. If you are sitting in some 3,000 seat auditorium listening to a lite rock band with a guitarist playing echo effects like he is The Edge in front of 3 giant screens with the same 5 words to the praise choruses being repeated over and over again followed by a 45 min sermon on how to live...

 I guess I don't really know if anyone will ever read this. And to be honest, I don't really know why I feel compelled to do this. I guess this is my own attempt at therapy. You see, in the past 4 years, my own world has been a little shaken to be honest. I was raised to be anti-Catholic. I was taught to be suspicious of Catholics and that their brand of religion was insincere, shallow, and superstitious. I have a multitude more of adjectives to describe my former feelings on Catholicism if you want them. I would argue now they weren't my feelings, but rather feelings that were force-fed me by probably sincere, but as I've come to learn misguided and actually downright ignorant, arrogant, and delusional people. . . Yep, see, there it is again. . .That boiling anger coming to the surface. . . See, I trusted those people for my spiritual guidance/ growth. . . It's a bitter pill to swallow that they turned out to be so wrong. I feel the ramifications of their overconfi...