Helena Mary Cole

My journey to the Catholic faith, as I mentioned at the end of the last post, begins with a seemingly unrelated and minor event that happened during my four years studying at the Mennonite Brethren denomination’s Bible College in Winnipeg. Oddly enough, the thing that set that process in motion was finding out that some of the guys I knew were reading The Lord of the Rings.

They were not the first guys I’d ever known to be reading The Lord of the Rings, but the only others were the nerdy ones in the back of the grade seven classroom playing Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know where I get off calling them nerdy – I was one of the biggest misfits in the class. But I didn’t particularly like or understand those guys and the perceived link to Dungeons and Dragons struck me as BOR-ing. I didn’t think those guys would be reading anything interesting. But when the Bible College guys set out to read The Lord of the Rings together in order to compare impressions, thoughts, ideas, my interest was piqued. They were dedicated Christian young men. I was really sure they would never read anything that wasn’t worthwhile. And of course, I had a crush on one of them at the time.

But it took me a few years to get around to actually reading Lord of the Rings. I can remember picking it up a handful of times off the library shelf and putting it back, thinking, ”Not yet.” Finally, in fall 2001, I saw the trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I knew it was time. The trailer was just so beautiful! So, I went the bookstore at the local mall, bought the first volume, and I sat down and tackled it.

Reading Tolkien was one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life, but I don’t have the space to expand on that here. Let’s just say, I bought the first volume only, thinking I’d only commit to the next two if I liked the first one. Now, that first volume is a long, difficult slog the first time through, but all the same, I decided I liked it enough to find out what happens next, so I bought the other two. By the time I got to The Return of the King, I loved it wholeheartedly – I could barely read that third volume for weeping.

That movie trailer was just the tip of the iceberg. The thing was unbearably beautiful.

Beauty will win people every time.

After I’d fallen in love with Lord of the Rings, I heard or read somewhere that it was full of Christian symbolism. I was intrigued. While I had been able to see Christ-figures in characters like Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn, that was where my insights ended. I knew full well that Tolkien had lived and died a Catholic – you’d have to be living under a rock not to know that. So, I picked up a book that promised to spell out the Christian symbolism for me (I can’t for the life of me remember the title or author). The book included a chapter on Tolkien’s family, and that’s when I first heard about Mabel Tolkien.

The thing that struck me was this: Mabel Tolkien, JRR’s mother, had grown up in the Church of England, but then after the death of her husband, she became a Catholic. That was enough to blow my mind right there. Growing up in the evangelical church, you hear all the time about all the ex-Catholics sitting in the pews beside you. But I had never once in my life heard of any ex-Protestants in the pews at Catholic mass. Seriously. I thought Protestants never became Catholic, because I’d never heard of it happening. But what blew my mind even more was the fact that Mabel became a Catholic at the cost of being cast off by her family, not only her own family but the Tolkiens as well. She was disowned and without financial support as a widow with two young children.

This was extremely confusing to me. I had been taught that the Catholic faith was wrong about many things on many levels. Why, I wondered, would anyone willingly suffer in that way for something that was wrong? Why??? It went against everything I had been taught about Catholicism as a Mennonite Brethren. A chink was blown in the wall I’d built up between myself and the Catholic faith. So, I decided I wanted to find out why Mabel would do something like that.

Well, when it comes to Mabel Tolkien, I don’t think she left behind any writings that could help lead us to a definitive answer. But I know now why I left Protestantism for Catholicism.

You could say, what happened next was I met and started dating my (now) husband. Mr. Cole and I talked about faith early in our relationship, and he made no mystery of the fact that he was attracted to a liturgical style of worship, as opposed to the style of services you get in the evangelical church. I know there are branches of Protestantism that use a liturgy, but for some reason, it was always Catholicism we talked about. And, thanks to Mabel Tolkien’s witness, I was not at all opposed to exploring it.

After we got married, we would sometimes attend mass together. In 2010, we moved into a new house in a new area of town and started haunting the neighbourhood parish quite regularly.  And then at some point, in the fullness of time, a very common thing happened to me: I began to be aware that Jesus was present at the Catholic parish in a way that I’d never experienced at my home church. He was present in my home church of course, but this was something different. Something deeper, fuller, surprisingly concrete. From there, I was only a hop, skip and a jump away from believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I can’t pinpoint an exact date or time when I came to this conviction. All I know is that it happened.

Now, this was the same Jesus I’d known since I was sixteen, when I had my conversion experience. That much was crystal clear to me. When Jesus says, “My sheep know my voice,” that has a very special meaning to me now. Amazingly, that voice that I already knew was calling to me from the Roman Catholic parish, saying, “Come over here.” I never in a million years would have guessed this would happen to me. And I really, really wanted to follow that calling.

I don’t know why I didn’t tell all this to Mr. Cole. I most certainly wasn’t going to tell my family, and neither did I tell my friends. I became a “closet Catholic.” I continued to go to my home church, the same one where I’d been baptized, but I sat there, week after week, outright starving for what had become in my mind “REAL Communion.” Unfortunately, the pastor at my church at the time had grown up attending a Catholic school as a Protestant, and as he was perpetually barred from taking Communion during school masses, he developed some serious issues with Catholicism.

For me, this was never an issue. I always understood that Catholics believe something different about communion, and so it was not appropriate for me (as a non-Catholic) to partake. Even after I came to agree with Catholics about the Eucharist and felt a desire to receive it, I refrained with no offense taken. There are processes for these things that I respected. But for whatever reason every communion Sunday at my home church, this particular Pastor was in the habit of taking a little jab at Catholicism the moment he got up to start the communion ritual. “We, as the Mennonite Brethren, do not believe there’s anything magical about this…” he’d say every time. And every time, I felt the jab.

All of this made me sad, but also fearful of what he, my entire family, and all my friends would say when they found out I wanted to be Catholic. All of this was making me feel backed into a corner when it came to whether or not I had the bravery to follow the Beloved Voice where it was leading me.

If you’re a Protestant pastor, and you have a sore beef with Catholicism, I kindly advise you to please keep it to yourself when you’re behind the pulpit. I get that you have problems with Catholicism, otherwise you wouldn’t be Protestant. But you never know what God might be doing in the hearts of your listeners. What’s motivating you to say these things? Maybe think about that for a while before you speak.

Some people think I became Catholic for no other reason than to plague my mother’s peace in her old age, to be a suborn and rebellious daughter. Oh, I knew full well that if I became Catholic, my mother would not understand, would be grieved. But it was this knowledge of my mother’s reaction that held me back from becoming Catholic for years. Years. At one point, I even decided that I probably wouldn’t be able to do so until after she had passed away. It was considerate of her feelings, to be sure, but it was in all other ways a sad disobedience.

So, time went on and Mr. Cole and I had our first child, a son named Clark. One of the traditions of the Mennonite Brethren is to have a “child dedication ceremony” during a Sunday morning service. They do not believe in baptizing babies, but in the dedication ceremony, the parents, with the support of the entire congregation, pledge to raise the child in the Christian faith. Even as there were things going on inside me that Mr. Cole didn’t know about (regarding my changed conviction about the nature of Holy Communion), things that I didn’t know about were going on inside the mind of Mr. Cole during Clark’s child dedication.

Mr. Cole had had qualms with the evangelical church for many years, so when he was vowing to pass the faith on to his son, he was thinking, “Is this the faith I really want to pass down?” But he also didn’t want to give up faith altogether. Not long after the ceremony, Mr. Cole went back to the same parish we’d haunted for years, and approached the pastor, Father Matthew. My husband had just gotten very serious about exploring Catholicism, to see if it was the faith he wanted to pass on to Clark. And (long story short), he decided to commit to it. He was told he had to start with the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA).

When he told me what he was doing, I don’t know why I didn’t just jump up and joyfully exclaim, “Sign me up, too!” The fear must have had a very strong grip on me. I had already become reconciled to the idea of not becoming Catholic as long as Mom was alive (she was and still is). Maybe I was having trouble with switching to a plan B (i.e. become Catholic now instead of later). I do remember that Mr. Cole started playing a lot of Lighthouse Catholic Media CD’s in the car when we were out driving. He said he was trying to help me understand why he was becoming Catholic. He didn’t know that I already wanted to become Catholic with every fibre of my being.

As an autistic person, it can be hard to communicate things sometimes, and the weightier the thing, the harder it can be to talk about. Eventually, I managed to tell him that I already believed in the Real Presence. When it got right down to it, I could barely stand the idea of watching him get confirmed as a Catholic and not being there beside him, still feeling painfully famished for the Eucharist. The idea was eating me alive. We wondered if I should wait and enter RCIA the following year. The task of finding a babysitting for Clark, in the case that both Mr. Cole and I were attending the RCIA meetings together, is uncommonly difficult for me, as an autistic person (not that we knew that then).

Of course, the subject of “my wife” came up in Mr. Cole’s discussions with Father Matthew. Then one day, when RCIA was about to start up, Father approached me after mass and said quite bluntly, “What’s it going to take to get you here on Wednesday nights?” Once he understood that the only concern was what to do with Clark, Father said, “Why don’t you just bring him with you?” I hadn’t known that this was an option, and was happy to take it. Once my participation in RCIA that year was secured, Father left and I took a moment to indulge in a little smile to myself. After all these years and so much doubt as to whether I’d be able to become Catholic anytime soon, it was finally happening. I had only about half a year to wait till I was going to get REAL Communion.

In the end, all three of us, Mr. Cole, Clark and myself became Catholic on the same night. Everyone in our RCIA group had been baptized already, so that meant there would be no baptism at our parish that Easter Vigil, and Father Matthew saw that as a sad problem. “It’s not right if there’s no baptism during Easter Vigil mass,” Father said. So, he asked Mr. Cole and me if we’d be willing to have Clark baptized on the same night, which was slightly unorthodox. We had been told we’d have to wait till after our confirmation before we’d be able to discuss Clark entering the Church. It turns out that when both parents are going to be confirmed Catholic ten minutes after the child’s baptism, those ten minutes can be overlooked as a mere technicality. That’s how we were all received into the Church as a family, on April 5, 2015. I took the confirmation name of Thérèse (not of Avila but the Little Flower).

My mother was and still is grieved, as I knew she would be; my former Pastor strongly disapproved but handed over my baptism certificate when I asked for it; when the news reached my extended family there was a bit of a sensation. Some remain outright hostile to what I did; most, while not approving, don’t make an issue of it. My friends may or may not understand it but do not discourage me. But it is not something we get congratulated on by anyone outside the Catholic faith.

Well, let’s not dwell on it. Most Protestants who join the Catholic Church pay some kind of social cost, even if it is not getting disowned and losing the financial support of our families, as Mabel Tolkien experienced. Sometimes it’s the hurt of at least one lost friendship.

But becoming Catholic remains one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It’s a strange clashing when something that brings me so much joy creates negative feelings in most of the people in my life. For me, there’s a glorious consistency to going from the Protestant church to the Roman Catholic – it’s the same faith, only fuller, and exponentially more intimate. But that’s not how it’s viewed by the faith tradition I left behind.

And I am pleased to call myself “one of Mabel Tolkien’s converts.” The idea that her witness to the truth and beauty of the Catholic faith is still having influence in the world is too encouraging a thought. I look forward to meeting her in Eternity.