Helena Mary Cole

So, why don’t we start with the basics? How did I come to the Christian faith?

I grew up in a Protestant denomination called the Mennonite Brethren, which belongs to the branch of Protestantism known as the evangelical churches. So, I grew up unbaptized but attending Sunday School, Sunday morning service every week, Pioneer Girls club Wednesday nights, and Vacation Bible School in the summer. When I got too old for Pioneer Girls, it was Junior Youth Group, followed by regular Youth Group. But the key ingredient in the mix was spending a week out of every summer at the denomination’s Christian camp, located in a particularly beautiful area of Southern Ontario called Muskoka.

I mention the summer camp because before I came to faith, it was the one Christian thing I had in my life that I enjoyed. When I was a teenager, my dad stopped attending church, and subsequently, so did my brother and I, whenever my mom wasn’t around to drag us out. She was a health care worker, so she had to work on Sunday half the time. I can remember my dad dropping my brother and me off at church for Sunday School, but the two of us would enter the front door, go straight downstairs, walk through the church basement, leave through the most obscure back door, and spend that hour wandering around downtown, sometimes making it back in time to be picked up again, sometimes not. But Dad didn’t rat us out. So, I skipped Sunday school and church whenever I could. Also, Youth Group was too big and noisy for me, too much for my social awkwardness – I no longer enjoyed it, so I almost never went. But, like I said, that one week at Christian camp every summer was something I never missed. I loved it.

And that was how, the summer I was 16, I had my conversion experience.

It was the last night of camp that year (1992), around bedtime, and all the girls were sitting around in our cabin with our camp counsellor, whose name was Jackie. And some of the other girls were expressing to Jackie that, every year, when camp was over, they’d go home with this powerful enthusiasm to read their Bibles and pray every day, and for a little while, that would go great. But then time would go on, and they’d get more and more lax in the practice, until it would all but disappear.

Jackie said, “Yes, that can happen, but you know, you can ask God for help with that. He wants you to do those things and He’s there to help you.”

I didn’t say anything at the time – it’s safe to say that in a group situation like that, I was almost never able to talk – but what the other girls were describing sounded like the same problem I had every year, too. So, before I went to sleep that night, I prayed, “I want help with my devotional life, God, and I don’t think I can do it on my own – could you please help me?”

Some people don’t come to faith with a distinct moment that marks the before-and-after, and that is a blessing in itself. Imagine being able to say you don’t remember a time when you didn’t know Christ! But that’s not me. In the days that followed this little supplication, I knew that something had changed. Where there had been restlessness, there was now peace; where there had been despair there was now hope; where there had been darkness there was light. The saying “There’s a God-shaped hole in all of us,” despite its trite cheesiness, makes perfect sense to me. Something inside had been empty before and now it was full. I remember the feeling very well. It was perfectly wonderful.

It was as if you asked someone to come into your house to fix a leaky tap and while they were at it, they renovated the whole house. For free. I can remember walking around with a secret smile on my face, thinking, “Goodness, Lord, I just wanted to read my Bible more, I didn’t think you were going to change everything.” But it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Reading my Bible and praying every day wasn’t even something I struggled with – I went joyfully to this new habit and my enthusiasm didn’t wane, not for many years. There was no more slipping out the back of the church during Sunday school. I never missed Sunday school, or church, without good reason, and when I went, I sat and soaked up every bit of what was said, desiring to learn and grow in my newfound faith.

It was a particular joy to me, as an undiagnosed autistic teen, to think that God had picked me to be one of his children. That may not be theologically sound – God picked all of us for salvation, the difference is that some have accepted and some have rejected – and you never know when a person rejecting the grace of God will change their mind and accept (case in point: me). But that was how I thought of it then – God picked me here and now to be a Christian at my high school. I was not the sort of person that anyone picked for anything. People generally didn’t want me on their team in gym class; I was almost never sought for friendship; I was the kid left without a partner whenever we were asked to pair up for classroom work. But this… This was God bestowing the gift of faith on me. I had all the zeal of a new convert, and I wanted to let it shine.

You could say I took my calling very seriously. Connecting with people socially was not happening for me, for reasons I didn’t understand back then. I very much felt trapped inside. My outlet was, well, writing, but as the only people who ever read my writing at school were teachers, my main outlet for trying to connect with my peers was through class oral presentations.

It is not at all uncommon for an autistic person to be unable to join in the conversation over a family dinner but to be very good at getting up in front of people and giving a speech. The thing you have to understand is that autistic people have problems with social situations, and giving a speech is not a social situation. During the family dinner, there are too many things for an autistic brain to coordinate: too many people talking at once, taking in too much information at once, too much background noise, not knowing how to find an opening in the conversation, too many facial expressions and other body language to process, and therefore not knowing how to respond to people… Asking us to join in the conversation is often so difficult, it’s fair to say we can’t do it. It’s true in my case anyway. But if you give us time to prepare something to say, to write it down, and give us a room full of people who are going to simply sit and listen, and then give us a ready-made opening to say the things we want to say… That’s right up our alley.

When you want to connect with people but you can’t do it in the way that everyone expects (social conversation), you have to have some sort of outlet, or you’ll explode.

But I always tried my best to find some way to turn my oral presentations into ways to talk about my faith. It wasn’t always possible. But I did try. I don’t think there were many people in my year who didn’t know I was person of faith. Let’s just put it that way.

I was baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost in November of 1994, at age 18, in the proper manner for the Mennonite Brethren (i.e. conversion/repentance first, at an appropriate age). My extended family turned up in good numbers to fill the pews on that occasion, and offer their support.

The following year, after graduating from high school, I continued my studies at the denomination’s Bible College in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As this post is getting much longer than I originally thought it would, I’ll leave the story there for now. Since the story of how I became Catholic begins in Winnipeg (in a very roundabout way), that’s where I’ll begin the next chapter.