TESTIMONY of FAITH: Part Two

Continued from "TESTIMONY of FAITH: Part One".

After leaving hospital to go to Wodonga to be with my family, I decided to undertake my own research on different things to do with religion. I surfed the internet quite a bit, looking up information on different things, one of those being my Confirmation Saint.

Those of you who don't know much about Catholicism, Confirmation is one of the seven Sacraments in the Catholic Church. Most people do it as a primary school student, around the age of ten or eleven, also around the time when you receive the Sacrament of First Holy Communion. Basically, Confirmation is just that - Confirmed as a full member in the Catholic Church. In order to be confirmed, you have to work through some workbooks, all different from one another depending on the diocese you reside in, and one of the things you do is study a Saint of your choice, learn about their life, what they did, why they became a Saint et-cetera. You then take on that Saint's name, so my name for instance is David John Stanislaus Clarke, Stanislaus being my Confirmation Saint.

I already remembered a fair bit about St. Stanislaus Kosta - that he is "the boy Saint". He died when he was nineteen - ironically, I turned nineteen only days after the accident. Before he died, an angel appeared to him and gave him the Eucharist, so one of the things he is patron of is last sacraments. Seemed fitting given that Samantha had died. What struck me even harder however is that he is patron Saint of broken bones.

Never in my life had I broken a bone - never even been into hospital as a patient, believe it or not! I grew up without ever needing a plaster cast on my arm or having to learn how to use crutches et-cetera. Quite strange as most kids break an arm or a leg sometime while they grow up; falling from trees and what-have-you.

That, however, changed with the car accident where I broke the bone in your body you DON'T want broken - my spine. One of my vertebras was crushed by 50%, meaning that it was only half as big as it should've been, and a section of my spine was fractured. The vertebra had to be removed in surgery - quite a delicate operation I must say, trying to take out a bone that has the spinal cord enclosed within it. The tiniest knick the the spinal cord and there could have been some major damage done, but I had a great surgeon - one of the best in the country - so things were fine. So my Confirmation Saint is patron of broken bones, and here I was having never broken one EVER, then finally breaking one of the most dangerous ones in the human body!

I found all that quite interesting, that with it plus the dream I had (and a few other little things here and there) there was no doubt someone was looking after me from upstairs. Sure, it could have been a coincidence, but even skeptics would have to think that they are pretty damn big consequences. I prefer to call them miracles.

Without too long, I was reading up on heaps of different religious things on the internet. I looked into all different Christian religions - from my original one of Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism and Lutheran - through to Pentecostal and later on the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons.

One Sunday morning I was up pretty early and my mother asked me if I wanted to go to church with them. They had no reason to ask me as they had no idea of the research I was doing on my laptop via the internet. I decided to go along with them to the Catholic Church and it felt like I was at home.

Soon after that, I would visit the Catholic Book Center in Albury, looking for all different types of books for me to read up on. I then decided to go to a few other churches - Anglican, Pentecostal, Mormon, Jehovah's - just because I wanted to keep my options open in case God was calling me to a specific denomination.

While I enjoyed the services at some of these churches, such as the Pentecostal Church, Faith City, there was a hole in my heart - something didn't feel right. There were no crucifixes, but crosses instead, if that at all. No statues of Jesus or Mary, no "Stations of the Cross", no priest in the vestments reading from a set book. No splashing of Holy Water or burning of incense. I just didn't... fit.

So God drew me back to Catholicism, where I have been since, what I believe to be the one, true Church. At times I struggled with certain teachings, but as I researched them, I found they weren't there to control us, but to guide us.

Since returning to the church, I have loved it! I've since grown quite a collection of books - from dramatised Bibles you can use to act out Biblical stories to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is full of question and answers that one may ask. Books about different religious orders such as Opus Dei and the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits.

Many of the beliefs I had as an atheist or agnostic - I really don't know which I was - I had changed my thoughts on with the guidance of Catholic teaching. Abortion for instance, once seen by myself as the choice of the woman, it's her body, to now being staunchly opposed to abortion or any type of killing. Why? Because of the way it is taught to you - that human life starts at conception, not at birth.

The year of the car accident, 2005, World Youth Day was in Cologne, Germany, and Pope Benedict XVI announced that the next World Youth Day would be in 2008, in Sydney, Australia. I was absolutely stoked!!! I had my faith restored, and the biggest youth gathering in the world was coming to my country in a couple of years! Naturally, I attended and had an absolute blast!

Now I go to church every weekend, occasionally missing it here and there, and I also try and find the time to go at least once during the week. I enjoy going to church now. It's not a chore like it was when I was a child - it was interesting, hearing the Word, meditating on it, praying in a large congregation of people. I even undertook training in 2006 to be a Eucharistic Minister! I made an initial website for the Wodonga Parish and only in the last couple of months I have also offered my services to work on the website for Sacred Heart parish, North Albury - conveniently located 20 meters across the road from my house!

I am now involved in Catholicism and love it - not ashamed one bit. I am Christian - I am Catholic!