I grew up Catholic in the way many people do — Mass on Sundays, first communion, confirmation, and then a long plateau of going through the motions without really knowing why. God was a concept I believed in the way I believed in distant countries I had never visited. Technically real. Personally irrelevant.
I was twenty-six, sitting in my car outside a hospital where my father had just received a difficult diagnosis. I did not know what to pray. I did not have the words. I simply said, out loud, to no one I was sure was listening: I can not do this alone.
What happened next is difficult to describe without sounding dramatic. The closest I can come is this: the silence changed. It became a presence rather than an absence. A warmth that had nothing to do with the temperature. And a certainty, sudden and groundless by any rational measure, that I was known. That I was held.
I have been careful over the years not to build my faith on that experience. Feelings come and go. What I found in its aftermath was something more durable: the sacraments, the community of the Church, the daily practice of prayer that slowly rewires how you see the world.
But I will not pretend the encounter did not happen. It happened. And it set me on a path I am still walking.
I have been seized by something I did not choose and cannot explain — and every year I am more grateful for it.
