Oct. 31, 2012

By Marika Donders
Diocesan director of evangelization

If someone had told me thirty years ago that I would be a practicing Catholic and working for the Church, I would have laughed out loud. 

I grew up in a nominally Catholic family in the south of the Netherlands, a traditionally Catholic area of the country.  As such, the public school in town was affiliated with the Catholic Church, which meant that once a week, the parish priest would come and teach catechism class. I don’t remember much about those classes, except that we were always happy to see our elderly priest, because he told fabulous stories.

I made my First Communion with my second grade class.  I would occasionally attend Mass with friends whose parents required them to go and, once in a while, I would sing with the children’s choir (where we would play in the back to the choir loft during the “boring parts” of the Mass).

Looking back, music was an integral part of my faith story. Even though my parents didn’t practice the faith, many a Sunday I would sit and listen to choral music with my dad.

We moved to the Atlanta, Georgia when I was eleven and I stopped going to Mass all together.  Unlike our small town in Holland, it wasn’t like you could walk or bike to Mass.  There weren’t that many Catholic churches in Bible-belt suburban Atlanta. And since my parents didn’t go, I didn’t go.  It just dropped off the radar completely. Until my sophomore year in college.

I was living in an apartment with three girls and one Sunday morning I wanted to go listen to a choir.  Unlike most college kids, I was an early morning person and at six a.m. in the morning, it wouldn’t have been appreciated by my sleeping housemates if I blasted choir music on my stereo. 

So, where do you go on a Sunday morning when you are a broke college student and want to go listen to good choir music?  I could have gone to the little Church of God, Inc. down the street, which had a decent gospel choir but I was in the mood for something more akin to what I used to listen to with my dad.  So, I dug out the yellow pages, looked up the listing for the Catholic Cathedral where I assumed they would have a decent choir  (it took a while to find, since it was under R for Roman Catholic Church).  I ended up going to the 10:30 Mass and sat in the middle of the church, in the middle of a pew so that I could see when to stand and when to kneel, but far enough forward so I could hear the choir. 

And the music was glorious!  But just as I had done as a kid, during the “boring parts” of the Mass, I let my mind wander.  No, I didn’t go play in the back, but as an architecture student, I investigated the stone construction of vaulted ceilings and tried to make out the images on the stained glass windows. 

My gaze turned back to what was going on in the front of the church just in time to see the priest raise the host and say “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  Happy are those who are called to his supper.”   And I could not take my eyes of Him.  I remembered this.  There was a sense of coming home that is hard to describe that took my breath away.

From that point forward I would make it to church every once in a while.  Then one Saturday afternoon, I walked into a new building on campus at Georgia Tech.  It had no signage, but since I had watched the construction progress, I decided that it might be interesting to go and see what the inside looked like.  I was surprised to find an open space with a fireplace, couches and a big screen TV. 

As I walked further in, I noticed a small chapel, with a candle flickering next to the tabernacle.  Then, as I looked into a big open room, a girl playing guitar looked at me hopefully and asked: “Do you sing?” I answered: “Teach me the songs and I’ll sing.”  

And so I sang for Mass at the Georgia Tech Catholic Center that day and every Sunday after that and ended up finding my home away from home in that community.  

Eventually the faith that was awakened at the Cathedral and fed in the GA Tech campus ministry, would lead me to join a religious order with a Eucharistic spirituality and a charism for evangelization through media. 
Although community life was not for me, the formation I received continues to guide my life to this day.  I would eventually earn a Master of Arts in Ministry degree, would work as a campus minister and now am starting a new chapter in my life as the director of evangelization for the Diocese of Ogdensburg.

And as I look back, I think back to being a kid in my rural town in the south of the Netherlands.   There is a moment that I have come to recognize as a foreshadowing of things to come.

I was perhaps in third grade, maybe fourth.  I was in church early, waiting for the kids choir practice.  Our elderly parish priest shuffled up the aisle, and as he climbed the three steps to enter into the sanctuary, he put his left foot on the first step, touched his right knee to the second step, and with much effort got up and continued into the sanctuary.

I remembered thinking even then, that there was something special here. There was something different.  I mean, we don’t bow or kneel for anything these days.  Even the queen shakes hands like to normal person.  But here, an old priest, who had difficulty walking, made the effort, in what he thought to be an empty church, to genuflect.

A little seed was planted that day which would help me to recognize Christ again in the raising of the Host, and in the community at Georgia Tech, so that in many moments to come I could taste again for the first time the gift of faith.