I once heard a convert to the Catholic Church talk about how unfamiliar statues, candles, images, and devotions to the saints appeared to him.  "You know what I mean," he said, with a nod of his head, "for instance, what about that statue of Jesus as a toddler, all dressed up?"  He was referring to the Infant of Prague often found in Catholic Churches; the Basilica Cathedral of St. Augustine has just such an image.  Indeed, the Stations of the Cross and the crucifix found in practically all Catholic Churches must seem strange to Protestants whose buildings are usually bare of like ornamentation.  Cradle Catholics, nevertheless, take them in stride; the saints become rather like a family of friends.
     Actually, such images represent just one more way to express the Incarnation, that Jesus became a human being, one of us.  Children understand this automatically.  One Christmas, I took my four year old granddaughter into the Cathedral and showed her the Infant of Prague.  "Look, Brooke," I said, "this is Jesus."  With great admiration, she tenderly lifted the snow white lace garments that adorned the little life-sized statue and sighed, adoringly, "Oh.h..h..yes, when He was a girl."  And the Word was made Flesh!
     The Roman Catholic Church contains the full deposit of Truth because it is the one Church founded by Jesus Christ.  Over the centuries, a treasury of devotional riches has unfolded to illustrate those truths.  Icons are religious images which contain symbols of profound meaning.  Candles and incense, statues and saints; one might say these are the objects, the sacramentals that are used to express love, love for the God who is Love itself.  It was by way of these sacramentals that I was drawn into the Church.
     Mine was conversion by beauty, a romance that led to the faith which is now the bedrock of my being.  How, God, with exquisite attention to every detail, matched the inmost secret longings of my heart, how He called me by name.  I fell in love with an image and a concept that appeared inscrutable, until image and concept merged into a Person, the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
     I look back at the past and find certain ordinary events reshaped by grace, transformed into epiphanies, revelations of a faith which was to become more intimate than I could ever have imagined.  These are the icons of the heart, sacred images that drew me along the path to conversion.  I linger over them as one would over the cherished pictures in a family album, turning the pages of time, rather like the way one lets the beads of Mary's rosary slip through the fingers while contemplating the mysteries of Jesus' life.
     It all happened when I was a girl…On one of those days in early spring, breezy and fresh, the Saturday matinee at the neighborhood theater had a special showing of Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings and it was free!  Mama explained that movie house did this so people could learn about Jesus; it was Easter weekend.  She said I was to put my quarter in the basket in the lobby just like we did on Sundays at the First Presbyterian Church downtown.  Oh, and she said the movie would be in black and white.
     Actually, for me the big attraction was the left-over money I would have after the movie.  I knew who Jesus was.  I went to church every Sunday.  Sunday School at 9:30am and church at 11:00.  Jesus was a nice man who was God; He went around doing nice things for people.  He had long, curly brown-blonde hair and was always looking sideways in the picture on the Sunday School wall.  In my bible, He looked a lot better.  He had a kind of turban around his head and long, flowing white robes.
     But the picture I really liked was Jesus standing on top of angry waves licking at His bare feet, holding out His hand to Peter who was drowning and reaching up with all his might.  This image on the stained glass window opposite the family pew at church, portrayed a tremendous life and death struggle, a powerful Jesus, scarlet robes whipping in the fierce wind.  He stood atop the waves commanding both swelling sea and menacing sky.  It appealed to my flair for drama, and was an exciting contrast to the elegant, but funeral-parlor appearance of the dark, wood paneled church, where the minister, in voluminous black robes, droned endlessly on through his sermon.  From Sunday school, to sermon, to Cecil B. DeMille, I was about to meet another Jesus.
     The only child of divorced parents, I was accustomed to going placed alone; that afternoon I walked to the Five Points theater, my head full of plans for the trip to the dime store after the show.  I can still picture the darkened theater, the scant number of patrons, the black and white drama of Jesus' life unfolding upon the screen before me.  I had never seen the crucifixion depicted before.  There were no pictures in my bible, the one Mama gave me for my sixth Christmas, of Jesus dying.  I was stunned.  I walked out of the theater swallowed up in a silence I didn't understand.  The dime store excursion had vanished.  All the way home, I kept turning over and over in my mind thoughts of Jesus' suffering and death.
     When I arrived home the house was very quiet, grandmother was asleep.  I went upstairs to Mama's room and sat staring out of the window for a long while.  And then, I did something I hardly ever did.  My mother was an artist; but I had little artistic talent and no interest in drawing.  However, for some unknown reason, I took out a fresh, pure white piece of drawing paper and a slender slice of charcoal and began to sketch Jesus on the cross.
     It was really a very simple drawing finished in a matter of minutes, without any embellishment.  Standing back, I looked in amazement at a work that was considerably better than anything I knew I was capable of doing.  I could not lift my gaze from that majestic bearded face, the eyes downcast and closed in death.  Some how the lines themselves seemed noble, infinitely gentle yet strong.  I stood for a long while before that drawing; I felt a indescribable longing.  It was the very first crucifix I had ever seen.  I can not explain the attraction I had for that image; yet, after all these years I can still see it in my mind's eye.  That Saturday afternoon was the beginning.  I was 12 years old.
     My mother must have led a lonely life, a divorced woman in an age when that was relatively rare and considered unacceptable.  I was always somewhat embarrassed, not to have a father.  I had one, of course, be he played no part in my life at that time.  The concept of God as a Heavenly Father meant little, but my artistic mother with her sky-blue eyes and tiny, delicate hands, was everything to me.  I just adored her!
     Mom didn't go out much and yet she loved to travel.  She had a friend, Enid, who lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  One summer, a couple of years after that special Saturday, Mom and I went by train  to Enid's home, where the three of us were to board a bus for a 10 day tour of Mexico.  I though at the time that New Orleans, with it's flower entwined, brocade balconies and horse drawn carriages must be the most romantic city in the world.  I was the only child on the trip, although at almost 14, I considered myself quite grown-up.  I was just beginning to think I knew what "romance" was.  Compared to the teens of today, I was pitifully and unimaginably ignorant.  Ignorant and wonderfully naïve!
     Visiting a foreign land exposed me to worlds I'd never known.  I wandered through the bustling open air markets of Mexico City, held my breath while native youth leapt from jagged cliffs to dive hundreds of feet into the sea below in Acapulco, reveled in the flowers at the floating gardens of Xochimilco and went in a great many Catholic Churches.  Anyone who has ever been to Spain or the Latin or South American countries, knows that their churches are richly ornate, filled with statues, linen covered altars, candles, and that musty odor of incense, a virtual feast for the senses.  Looking up, with great surprise I saw, now molded into a solid form and hung high above an altar, the Body of my Saturday afternoon drawing!  With terrible wonder, I gazed at the crucifix.  Spanish crucifixes are by far the most graphic, the corpus often twisted and tortured into grotesque poses, blood flowing freely.  To my surprise, there was a crucifix in every Church in Mexico.  Catholics seemed to be fascinated with Jesus' suffering and death, I reasoned, but as it turned out, I was the one who was fascinated!
     I'm certain we visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, although I have no recollection of it at all.  Our Lady, with typical humility, did not want to introduce me to herself, she knew another was fulfilling that role.  No, it was her Son, she wanted me to know.  She arranged that in Taxco.
     We traveled through the Sierra Madres mountains, eventually arriving at the silver mining town of Taxco, a frequent and popular tourist haunt.  Visitors come to purchase the world famous, hand-crafted silver jewelry that is daily offered in shops in the hillside town.  As Mom and Enid poured over the displays, I stood by the open door, watching a rambunctious crowd of street urchins.  Scantily dressed, their brown feet bare, their black eyes darting after every movement the tourists made, the little beggars thrust eager hands out for coins.  Mom, seeing my wide-eyed stare, explained, "there is a lot of poverty here."
     In the afternoon, the tour guide took us to an abandoned convent.  We wandered through empty rooms that seemed eerily filled with the ghosts of long deceased nuns, until we came to one particular room.  It was a rectangular hall, its brick walls the color of desert sand, a thousand prayers once said, lingered in the silence.  Arched doorways yawned at either end, it had been the refectory.  Splashed with afternoon sun, the room was completely bare except for wooden pegs evenly spaced along the upper walls.  Upon each peg hung a coarse brown garment, on top of each garment, a hand-woven crown of spiked thorns.  The guide, in his soft, Spanish accent said, "this is the penitential garb that the nuns wore every year during Holy Week."  Poverty, penance, sacrifice?  My thoughts were muddled; I didn't understand.  Why would anyone choose to wear such rough, ugly clothing, and a crown of thorns pressed into their heads?  The whole matter was puzzling, but somehow, the idea did not repulse me.  Instead, it filled me with wonder; I became determined to find out what it was that would make a person purposely endure pain, choose to make a sacrifice of this nature.  The tourist group moved to the next room, but I paused in the doorway, reluctant to leave that room, the keeper of such momentous secrets.  I resolved to search until I found the answer.
     When I came home from Mexico I began to read everything I could about the Catholic Church.  As I walked home from high school, I would stop off at the Willowbranch Library and comb the shelves for anything Catholic.  First I read novels, A Candle for St. Jude, An Episode of Sparrows, then I read The Song of Bernadette, the biography of a saint.  One day, my "Catholic" books on top of school books, as I passed St. Paul's Catholic Church, with a great rush of excitement, I realized the Church just might be open!  Summoning all my courage, I pushed against the big heavy door.  It opened.  There was no one in the Church.  But, there, before my eyes was the now familiar crucifix.  And Mary, a large statue of her, in blue gown and white mantle, a crown of gold upon her head, lots of flickering candles at her feet.  I made my way down the nave and turned at once to her statue.  Because of Bernadette, I knew who Mary was.  From that day onward, every afternoon I made a visit to Mary.  Later, I was to buy a gold bracelet, which had a little, hollow mother-of-pearl "bible" dangling from it's links.  Inside the bible was a tiny white rosary, the prayers of which I learned, after a fashion, to say.  I prayed ardently, that I'd be Catholic.
     The years flew by; I left high school, went to college, married and had children.  But always in the back of my mind, were thoughts of the Catholic Church.  One day I stopped at a rectory and inquired.  In those days converts took private lessons; the priest instructed me well in the faith.  When the great mystery of the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament was explained to me I understood why the nuns in Mexico had worn their rough garb and thorns.  I knew why the Church so honors Our Lady who stood beneath the cross, offering her Son to the will of the Father.  I knew why it is that each Catholic Church has a crucifix over the altar, an image that signifies the propitiatory Holy Sacrifice that is taking place in a mystical way once more, from now until the end of time.
     And I understood poverty, the poverty of  One who "though He was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at.  Rather, he emptied Himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeliness of men.  He was known to be of human estate…"
     My soul had been a beggar at the altar of God for many years, now I would kneel and receive the Bread of Angels, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of my Savior.  It was Jesus of the wind and waves, the Christ who clothed Himself in humanities rough flesh, the Christ who walked on water, yet bowed His sacred Head to piercing thorns.
     It was this poor Christ who would come down from Heaven each day at the words of the priest, descend into humble bread and wine, transform these elements into His own Body and Blood that I may receive Him as my nourishment.  And it was His cherished Mother, whom my own earthly mother had so unknowingly modeled with her love.  It was Mary who had shown me the icons of the heart, the icons that brought me the greatest gift of all, the gift of faith.  It all happened forty years ago, when I was a girl!