Into the Deep

An Unlikely Catholic Conversion

Favale

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532605024
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Into the Deeptraces one woman's spiritual odyssey from birthright evangelicalism through postmodern feminism and, ultimately, into the Roman Catholic Church. As a college student, Abigail Favale experienced a feminist awakening that reshaped her life and faith. A decade later, on the verge of atheism, she found herself entering the oldest male-helmed institution on the planet--the last place she expected to be.With humor and insight, the author describes her gradual exodus from Christian orthodoxy and surprising swerve into Catholicism. She writes candidly about grappling with wounds from her past, Catholic sexual morality, the male priesthood, and an interfaith marriage. Her vivid prose brings to life the wrenching tumult of conversion--a conversion that beganaftershe entered the Church and began to pry open its mysteries. There, she discovered the startling beauty of a sacramental cosmos, a vision of reality that upended her notions of gender, sexuality, identity, and authority.Into the Deepis a thoroughly twenty-first-century conversion, a compelling account of recovering an ancient faith after a decade of doubt.

Part I

The Shallows

“Let me, then, confess what I know about myself, and confess too what I do not know, because what I know of myself I know only because you shed light on me, and what I do not know I shall remain ignorant about until my darkness becomes like bright noon before your face.”

—St. Augustine, The Confessions

Saved

My earliest religious memory is not really my own. It is an inherited memory, a story handed to me that has, after the fact, been given the flesh and fabric of true memory. Even now, as I call it to mind, specific images appear; I can see the moment unfold, but from a third-person distance, as if I am watching what happens, rather than experiencing it firsthand.

This is the night I was saved, the night that I first accepted Jesus into my heart. I am three years old, driving with my father and brother in a Toyota Land Cruiser. We are coming back from a basketball game. It is mid-March, March 17 to be exact, the Feast of St. Patrick—although of course the ideas of feasts and saints are not yet part of my world. We live in central Idaho, so there are, no doubt, still piles of snow along the road, glowing momentarily in the passing headlights. Probably trees too, evergreen and snow-laden, but nothing more than tall, flickering shapes in the dark. I’m probably staring out the window, listening to my dad talk to us about Jesus; my brother, two years older, is asking questions, wanting to know more. Then Dad asks us The Question, the one that, in this world, is the most important to answer. It is a question with eternal consequences, and a simple “yes” has the power to permanently mark one’s soul. Are you ready to accept Jesus into your heart? Yes, we say, and my dad pulls over and prays with us.

I actually don’t know if it was dark. Maybe the surrounding night in this post-hoc reconstruction is imported from the darkness of my own recollection. Or perhaps it heightens the drama of the moment, expressing its spiritual meaning. For those who were in darkness have seen a great light.

There is another facet of this story—one told to me much later, but now fully integrated into my rendering: at the same time my dad was praying with us, my mother was at home in bed (a detail that lends credence to the darkness) and a feeling of sudden suppression came over her, a great, crushing weight, an invisible force bearing down. For the record, my no-nonsense, levelheaded mother is not one to see demons regularly lurking in the shadows. Once told, this experience, with its uniqueness and intensity, was fully ingrained into the story of that night.

My brother, being a little older, remembers the moment in the car directly. I do not. This lack of recollection was a continual source of anxiety throughout my childhood. Not being able to know my own thoughts or feelings in that moment—had I really understood? Did I really mean it?—made me wonder if the salvation actually took. I felt as if, somehow, I had been saved by accident, mere proximity, riding on my brother’s coattails and sneaking into glory on a technicality. What if I hadn’t been in the car that night? Would I have had my own salvation experience later, giving me a real memory to which I could cling in subsequent years?

In those moments, late at night, happening not infrequently, I thought about hell and wondered whether I was really saved. It all seemed so easy. Too easy. To be safe, I made sure to repeat the salvation prayer at regular intervals, just in case. I don’t know what the original prayer was like, that long-ago March night, but soon enough I learned the A-B-C formulation, thanks to formative experiences like Vacation Bible School. Accept that you are a sinner, Believe Jesus Christ is the savior, Confess your sins and ask Jesus into your heart. A-B-C, 1–2-3. Without meaning to, I began to see this prayer as an incantation, a spell that must be meticulously cast to take hold, a spell I worried might wear off after awhile.

There was a time I almost got re-saved by accident. I was probably seven, sitting in the sanctuary of our small Bible church in southern Utah with dozens of other restless children. It was high summer, the week of Vacation Bible School, the sun pummeling through the windows, reminding me that it was almost noon, time for lunch. We’d just finished singing a round of rousing, clap-infused songs, the lyrics written on bright poster board and held aloft by enthusiastic teenagers for us to see. I am a C. I am a C-H. I am a C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N. And I have C-H-R-I-S-T in my H-E-A-R-T and I will L-I-V-E E-T-E-R-N-A-L-L-Y.

Then we were quieted and coaxed into our seats, and the pastor came up front to prime us for an altar call—though I can’t resist pointing out the misnomer now, as there was no altar at the front of the sanctuary, only a pulpit.

“Everybody close your eyes and bow your heads,” the pastor was saying, and we complied; the movement was second nature. “Good. Now. . .”

He went on, and my attention wandered. I opened my eyelids ever so slightly, blurrily looking down at my fingers, then to the right, to the left. I couldn’t see much with my head down.

“. . . Jesus Christ as your personal savior, raise your hand.”

I raised my hand, taking the chance to peek a little more, but I didn’t see any other hands, which surprised me.

“Good. Lots of hands. You can put them down now, thank you.”

He prayed, we sang one last song, and then we were excused, two minutes past noon, bolting out the doors and outside, hoping for a few last minutes of outside play before parents began to collect us.

I was stopped just outside the sanctuary by one of the teachers, a gentle, smiling woman who invited me into a small room off to the side. Reluctantly, I followed.

“Thank you for being brave and raising your hand, Abby.”

“You’re welcome.” I stood there awkwardly, fidgeting, looking longingly outside as she began to explain the A-B-C formula. I was confused. I already knew this. I had already accepted Jesus as my savior. That’s why I’d raised my hand.

“Can I pray with you?” She asked, and before I knew it, we were launching in, getting ready to save my soul.

“It’s okay,” I finally interrupted, my desire to be outside overpowering my fear of saying the wrong thing. “I don’t need to say the prayer. I’ve already said it.”

She looked at me, dubious. “Oh? When did you say it?”

“A long time ago.”

“Then why did you raise your hand?”

“I thought, I thought you were supposed to raise your hand if you knew Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”

She seemed unsure, like she didn’t believe me. “Wait here a minute.” She left, and came back with the pastor. They both sat down and the pastor began to ask a few questions, trying to gauge whether I needed saving. I must have answered to his satisfaction, because after a moment he thanked me and said I could go, but I could sense a tinge of disappointment in both of their smiles. I felt embarrassed, wondering if I should have just played along and said the prayer again, rather than making a fuss. At times, I couldn’t fully trust the simple prayer, but I was also wary of abusing it and faking my own conversion, spawning a new salvific story that gave my pastor and teacher the satisfaction of believing they’d led me to Christ. This story, I sensed, would eventually clash with the founding narrative of my salvation, and even though I had a hard time believing “once saved, always saved,” I knew that was what I was supposed to believe, so I decided to trust that I’d done the right thing.

Looking back, through a now-Catholic revisionist history of my own life, I see in my child-self a nascent Catholic sensibility, an instinctive desire for continual reconciliation with God, a persistent suspicion that the need for sanctifying grace was ongoing, and doubt that one prayer, no matter how carefully worded, could encase one’s soul in celestial amber, forever preserved from a damning fall.

Mormonland

My family moved to Utah when I was five. This was my third move, though I barely remember the other two. My memories of McCall, Idaho, the town of my birth, were mostly limited to our small cul-de-sac, and our brief year in Corvallis, Oregon, is only a mosaic of scattered images: the gray, melancholy ocean; pots of simmering blackberry jam on the bright green stove in our compact apartment; getting in trouble for chewing a wad of gum I found on the sidewalk; learning how to pump my legs on the swings and count off my age on my fingers 1–2–3–4–5; the sticky glazed donut holes we got to eat after church; waves of shock ripping through my chest and out my fingertips, when I sat on an electric fence in a nearby field; my brother standing in the doorway of our apartment, backlit by lightning, after a brief panic when he went AWOL during a thunderstorm. For our move to Utah, my dad drove a bright yellow moving truck, impossibly huge, and sitting next to him on the black leather seats, I was on top of the world, indestructible, and could feel the thrill of the unknown ahead.

Southern Utah seemed like a different planet. The bright sun, dry wind, and bare, orange hills contrasted starkly with the lush gray-greenness of Oregon. The cultural landscape was just as foreign, though I was less aware of that at the time. For our first few weeks in Cedar City, we stayed at The Crest Motel, a brick 60s-era motel, with a sign decorated by large colorful balls on spikes. The motel was run by a polygamist family, something my mom whispered to me after we checked in. I’d noticed the woman at the front desk, with her elaborately coiffed hair and clean, simple dress; she looked like Ma from Little House on the Prairie. There were several women like her around the motel, doing the laundry, cleaning the rooms, and lots of children, the girls with long braids and dresses, the boys in suspenders and trousers. We didn’t interact much; they seemed wary of us, perhaps similarly perplexed at our strange, modern clothing and small family.

One afternoon, my dad was playing with my brother in the grassy courtyard of the motel, batting softballs for my brother to field. There were a few of the other children around, watching curiously, but standing at a distance, behind some bushes. My dad noticed them and waved them over, batting a grounder toward one of the boys who, after a moment of hesitation, ran out to grab it and throw it back. After that, the invisible barrier breached, the other children ventured forward, our separate worlds, for a moment, forgotten. There were probably a dozen of them, enough to start a makeshift softball game with two teams. My dad was the perennial pitcher, easing slow lobs toward each batter, some of whom were as young as me.

There’s one girl in particular I remember, the clearest image I have of this game; she was probably seven, with two blonde braids stretching down her back, wearing a long purple dress dotted with tiny flowers. She came up to the Frisbee serving as home plate, holding the bat high but firmly, a hard determination in her eye. And then the crack of the bat, the softball curving through the air and landing over the hedge beyond the grass, the hedge behind which she’d been hiding and watching before. She ran and ran, past first base, second, on and on, and that’s where I still see her, suspended in flight between second and third, her braids streaming behind her, legs churning beneath that purple dress.

Before long we moved into our house, a big bungalow with a wide front porch stretching across like a smile, two windows above like eyes. A happy house. The house was on the east side of town, facing the mountains—Cedar Mountain a little to the south, and due east a bright limestone hill that, to this day, I simply think of as My Mountain. At sunset, this mountain caught the light, glowing bright orange, as if lit up by some divine presence. Even now, my soul has been marked by that luminous, sunburned landscape that will always somehow feel like home.

There is another aspect of the Utah landscape that revealed itself more slowly, growing more and more pronounced as I got older. This was the social terrain, which, in contrast with the topography, I never quite learned how to navigate, feeling always somehow like an outsider looking in, like that girl at the Crest Motel, peeking over the hedge at the strangers. And it’s certainly true that, like that girl, I was a religious minority in the land of Zion, an evangelical Gentile in the Mormon Promised Land.

This created a sense of cognitive dissonance. My best friend was LDS; we lived across the street from each other, played every day, her family was like my extended family. The Mormons I knew well, I loved. But the sense of social alienation was bigger than any one person or family; it was in the atmosphere. When I entered public school, I was the only non-Mormon in my class, and we were one of only two non-Mormon families on our block. The LDS culture was endemic, and although it wasn’t usually hostile, it was never one to which I could belong. I could never see it from the inside.

Once, when I was in fourth grade, our class was going on a field trip to Brigham Young’s historic home in St. George. On the way back, we were going to drive by the LDS Temple; I was sitting by myself, as usual, looking out the bus window, when my teacher turned toward me. “In just a minute,” she said, “We’ll be driving past St. George Catholic Church. It’s a beautiful old building. You can see it just up here.” Then she smiled at me, almost apologetically. Of course, at that time, Catholicism was almost as alien to me as Mormonism, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless, simply for its kind, momentary awareness that it must be weird and hard to be a non-Mormon girl growing up in southern Utah.

In the midst of Mormonland, my family took refuge in a conservative evangelical bubble. We went to a non-denominational Bible church about twenty minutes from where we lived. The geographical isolation of the church befitted our sense that we were, spiritually, in exile—a small but vibrant troupe of God’s chosen holding our own in Canaan. The church was tiny and in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere, suspended between towns, tucked behind two immense water tanks. There were a few scattered juniper trees here and there, but the landscape was mostly rocks and dirt, prime for lizard chasing, which was our regular post-church pastime.

Our first pastor was warm and light-hearted, with two daughters and a petite, mouse-voiced wife with a professed “lead foot” when driving. I befriended the younger of the daughters and, later, when we got a new pastor, I similarly befriended his daughter until she hit adolescence and traded me in for some more stylish friends. This later pastor had a different vibe, more serious, more intense; he took sola scriptur...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Shallows
• Part II: The Storm
• Part III: Into the Deep
• Notes