I couldn’t have explained it while it was happening, but there have been moments in my life when I quickly and intimately connected with an absolute stranger.

I’ll find myself confiding the most personal of details to this person in line at the grocery store, or at a party or on the sidewalk. Or I will be on the receiving end of someone’s personal account, both of us present to the conversation with such affection and tenderness that the sharing does not seem unnatural or inappropriate. It is only afterward that one of us might comment: That was weird; I am so sorry I said all those things.

And then, somehow—through a word, symbol or sign—it becomes clear that we are both Christians. At that moment, we know why we entered that sacred space of sharing, there in the Costco parking lot or the skyscraper elevator. We are connected in the most mystical of ways.

In many church calendars, there is a time in January set aside for prayer for Christian unity. It is an octave of prayer called the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (this year, Jan. 18-25), and it serves as a reminder of the prayer our Lord prayed for us on the very night he was betrayed.

On that darkest of nights, Jesus prays the tenderest of prayers, which is recorded in the Gospel of John. He prays that future believers will “be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you…so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

In a time like this one, like the centuries before us, when there is so much division in the church and it seems as if ideologies have taken over Christocentric theology, I long for that mystical connection among Christians. I catch glimpses of it, in those moments with strangers, but also in prayer and in simple acts of service from my fellow Christians.

But so often I hear, “We aren’t the same type of Christians as them.” As Madeleine L’Engle said, “We fall into Satan’s trap of assuming that other people are not Christians because they do not belong to our particular brand of Christianity.”

Frankly, this is the enemy’s intention—to divide us.

Then I think of Jesus’ words to Paul at his conversion on the road to Damascus, “Paul, why are you persecuting me?” Harm against the church is harm to Christ himself. We are his body.

On a journey of faith

Now I am a Catholic, but it wasn’t always so. I converted to Catholicism nearly 20 years ago. Some converts might enjoy disparaging the other churches that they have come from. I will do no such thing. Each step of my journey of faith has taught me about Christ’s church and brought me closer to him.

I grew up in Southern California during the 1970s and ’80s. My parents came to faith during the Jesus movement, during which the seeds of the Calvary Chapel church were planted. Many of the adults in the church I grew up in had been hippies. They had experimented with drugs and sex and never found the freedom they hoped to find. Many came from very dark pasts. It was not uncommon to hear a testimony that included addiction, overdoses, cults, prostitution; there was even one woman who had been part of the Manson “family.”

In that church, I learned the power of the Gospel in a way I never have since—people who had come from such utter darkness into freedom in Christ. Their faces shone when they spoke of what Christ had done for them. The contrast between their life before and after belief was astonishing. Their lives were a powerful testimony of Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John: “I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness” (12:46).

During that time, most of the churches I attended met in parks, public school gyms and once even a carpet store during off hours. But usually we met in the residences of mostly young families who did not yet own homes. We met in small apartments, each family bringing several children. I experienced community in a way I have never experienced since. We shared life together. We ate and played, sang and worked together. We shared life together. There wasn’t a weekend that went by that I didn’t hang out with a gaggle of kids from our church. I knew they loved me, and their parents loved me like their own. We used the language of brothers and sisters in Christ so much that, as a child, I really thought some of these children were my siblings.

Something I have learned and realized about this group of Christians, years later, is how much the adults prayed for us children. They understood how Satan can snatch up the seeds of the Gospel, and they had lived in that darkness. They did not want it to happen to us.

I know they prayed for us fervently because I still have deep friendships with some of those children. We are now grown, with a profound faith of our own learned from our elders. In a way we cannot put into words, we know our parents prayed for us, for we have felt those prayers and experienced their fruit.

When the time came for me to start school, I was fortunate enough to be sent to private school. My parents were teenagers when I was born, but my grandfather paid for me to attend a small Grace Brethren school from kindergarten through eighth grade. It was within this church community that I learned my Bible. We memorized Scripture. We had Bible drills—when a teacher hollers out a Scripture reference and all the children race to see who can find it first. When I became Catholic, so many cradle Catholics said they wished they knew their Bible like I did. I told them: You do. You just don’t realize it because you can’t give a book, chapter and verse for every line. 

In the Grace Brethren community, I learned temperance. The members of this community are teetotalers, and not a drop of alcohol was served at events or dinners at the homes of my peers. This was a contrast to my own home, where my father eventually fell into alcoholism. It was a good contrast to experience. I now value moderation in such things, but I would have never come to this conclusion had I not experienced both abstinence and gluttony.

These, too, are a steadfast people. They are not swayed by emotion or the latest political trend. They understand that to live is to tarry with Christ, that the results of much of their work for the kingdom would never be seen in their lifetimes. It is an eternal vision. I think of these believers when I hear of the building of the cathedrals of Europe. As construction took hundreds of years, most of the workers never saw the fruit of their labor.

There is a teacher from that little school, now in her late 80s, whose vocation spanned three generations of students. When she recently moved from her home to a retirement community in another state, we students used the opportunity to share the lessons we learned from her steady faith with her. These are sentiments many often wait to share at a funeral, when the person is no longer in this world, but we had the opportunity to tell her how her faith informed our own and now the faith of our children and grandchildren.

Church past and present

In high school, I became involved with the Vineyard Church, a charismatic church that focuses on the presence of the Holy Spirit. I had experienced the Holy Spirit in mystical experiences as a child but never understood or had language for what had happened. In this church, I understood his presence a bit more. I learned adoration, to simply sit in the Lord’s presence and understand there was nothing I could do to conjure his presence or earn it. That I simply needed to sit still and “know that he is God.” (Ps 46:10) It was in this church I experienced—no, knew—the sweetness of sitting in God’s presence until you find yourself cold, goosebumps surfacing on your skin, and nothing else matters but him. 

It wasn’t until I began a master’s degree program at a Protestant seminary that I began attending Catholic Mass. I had started dating a high school friend, who would eventually become my husband, and he was a cradle Catholic. I attended Mass to understand the faith of this man I was falling in love with, and in the process, I fell in love with the liturgy. 

Never had I experienced Jesus, the Word, so strongly as through the Mass. Scripture and the homily were not forced on the listener, as I had experienced at churches before, where it was used to evoke a certain emotion. In the liturgy, the Word just was. He lived and breathed, informed and comforted.

And there was a quiet I had not heard in such a long time—or maybe ever. There was even intentional space for silence within the Mass, a quiet that comforted me.

But it was transubstantiation, that the host actually becomes the body and blood of Christ—the theology I, at first, thought would be a stumbling block to me—that has become the most formidable of doctrines that keeps me connected to this church. 

When I receive the Eucharist, Christ is present. I connect to God and receive grace in that moment in a singular, particular way that is unique to me. I am in communion with God. The “restless heart” that St. Augustine speaks of is held still for one quiet moment.

As if this wasn’t the most magnificent moment in my life (and I get to experience it every week—every day if I want to), it is even more expansive. In the moment when I receive the Eucharist, I also connect to and am in communion with my fellow parishioners. 

There is also a connection to the Christian church as a whole, past and present. I pray with the grandmother whispering over candles in a small village church in Italy, with the families in China living under persecution and with the Nigerian seminarian moments before he is martyred.

There is a sense in which the Eucharist is timeless, out of time, eternal or, as I recently read, a panorama of salvation history. We look to the past, remembering Christ’s resurrection. We look at the present, our relationship with him now. We look to the future, his second coming. In this moment, we also connect to the faithful who have come before us: the apostles, saints, the stranger on the street, my teacher from Brethren who prayed over the class roster and that woman who left the darkness of addiction because she experienced Christ’s marvelous light. 

Considering that marvelous light, I do not think it too audacious to pray as Paul did: “that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought” (1 Cor 1:10). For as he also said, “we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body” (1 Cor 12:13). If one part suffers, we all suffer together; if one part rejoices, we rejoice together. May we remember that we are mystically connected. May we pray that we would remember and treat each other as his body.