This is a personal essay that I wrote for the “Introduction to Spirituality” class I am taking this spring semester through the Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Saints Cyril and Methodius.
I was baptized as a Roman Catholic, but my family left the Church when I was around two years old. After that, we bounced between a number of different Protestant ecclesial communities before settling into a non-denominational megachurch. Those were where my earliest memories of the Holy Spirit come from, when I felt Him in my heart while listening to praise and worship music.
My family stopped going to Sunday services together when I was around ten, as my parents’ marriage became increasingly rough and my father fell away from faith. Once that happened I figured that it was okay if I didn’t go to church as well, so I stopped going regularly. My mom, brother, and I still attended Christmas and Easter services due to the influence of my grandmother, who was a devout Roman Catholic, but beyond that I didn’t think about religion much at all. I never became an atheist, but considered myself to be an agnostic throughout middle school and high school. I was always pro-religion, as I saw the value it brought to my mom and grandmother, but didn’t know whether God existed or not so I left it there.
The thing that woke me up to the spiritual life was being dumped by my high school girlfriend, who I believed that I was going to marry. I had always wanted to have a family, and put a lot of transcendent meaning into that relationship. I thought that marrying and raising a family with her would finally make me happy. After she broke up with me in my sophomore year of college, I was broken. It felt like the light had been extinguished in my life.
That experience taught me I could not find my fulfillment in another human being, so I began to seek what would satisfy me. I got into Daoism and Buddhism. I began to meditate, attended a meditation/learning community for about a year, and got a lot out of that tradition. But the Buddhist approach of obliterating the self in order to remove suffering never felt quite right to me. I had always wanted something I could fully commit myself to. I wanted to be filled, not emptied.
At this point I had graduated from college and began a PhD program back in my hometown, where my grandmother still lived. I began taking her to Mass weekly because I loved her but didn’t expect it to change me. As I continued to attend the services, something shifted. It felt right to be in a sacramental church. I felt the weight of history, and the theology I observed began to make sense to me. I began to feel things I hadn’t felt in a long time, what I would later recognize to be the embrace of the Holy Spirit. I then attended OCIA classes, was confirmed, and received my first Communion in the Roman Catholic Church.
I eventually learned about the Jesus Prayer and became enthralled by it. Praying it on my chotki1 brought me closer to God than I had ever been before. The remarkable similarity between Vipassana2 meditation and Hesychast3 practice made me feel right at home. The key difference was that, instead of merely being emptied, I was filled with the Holy Spirit. However, I thought that it was just an Eastern Orthodox thing. I did not want to become Orthodox in honor of my then deceased grandmother. Somehow I learned about the existence of the Eastern Catholic Churches, looked up the closest one, and attended my first Divine Liturgy. Its beauty overwhelmed me. The icons, the incense, the chanting—it felt like the embodied experience of the Eastern mystical tradition that I had learned about through self-study and practice.
After that, I was hooked. I began attending my local Byzantine Catholic parish regularly, transferred from the Roman Catholic Church to the Byzantine Catholic Church, and have continued to grow my spiritual life in the Christian East.
A prayer rope used in Eastern Christian traditions, similar to a rosary.
A form of Buddhist meditation focusing on mindfulness.
The mystical prayer tradition of Byzantine Christian Churches.