Seeing where ‘it will go from there’

College sophomore Brian Tierney and his father were sitting on the stoop of their home looking at the stars when he asked his dad about his Baptism, only to find out it had never happened. It was an “interesting revelation,” for the 19-year-old politics major at The Catholic University of America, but soon with support from resident ministers (students spiritual advisors in the dorms), seminarians from his Latin class and Capuchin friars, he found his way to the RCIA class on campus and began studying about the Catholic faith.  

“It’s been an amazing experience, sharing it with the people on campus,” said Tierney. Religious sisters he met will see him on campus and ask him about his journey, said Tierney. One of his fraternity brothers is serving as his sponsor, and both his parents, his girlfriend’s parents and a seminarian friend who “really took me under his wing” were present at the Easter Vigil when he received all three sacraments of initiation.

But for now Tierney is just looking forward to it all being over, so that he can see where “it will go from there,” he said. “Father Eric (Delapena, a priest in CUA’s campus ministry program) compared understanding God and understanding the Bible to an ocean. You can swim down as deep as you want, but in the end you’ll never truly understand how deep that you can get. I’m excited to explore more of what the faith means to me.”

‘I have a home’

One summer Meaghan McGrath and her daughter Josephina traveled on vacation to a small El Salvadoran village that sat by a lake. There, every Sunday, all the villagers faithfully attended a simple, open-air Mass. The way the culture embraced the liturgy, and the way the universal Church opens her doors as often as possible for people to experience the acceptance and joy of worship spoke to her heart.  “This is the way faith should be,” said McGrath: welcoming even to strangers, the same in different languages and countries, integrated into the fabric of one’s life, and available many times every day. No matter where she is, and especially at her parish, Church of the Annunciation in Washington, “I have a home.”

McGrath grew in up Southern California in the 1970s, “probably the time and the place where there was the least amount of organized religion anywhere,” she said. Yet throughout her life, she had a desire for significant moments to be blessed by a church; after adopting her daughter from Guatemala “it’s as though my path [to faith] has been alongside hers,” she said. Her nine-year-old daughter will receive First Communion in May, while McGrath will receive all the Sacraments of Initiation at the Easter vigil.

Between her job at the World Bank and her daughter’s many extra-curricular activities, “there could not have been, logistically, a more difficult time for this to happen,” she said, yet everything worked out “relatively easily. It’s one of those instances where each piece of this was very full of grace.” None of it would have been possible alone, said McGrath. “This only works because at every step of the way, people have helped lead me,” she said, like her sponsor and best friend from law school Veronica, or tthe parish volunteer whom she and the other RCIA candidates grilled about the details of going to Confession. “What gratitude I have for people who are willing to open themselves,” she said.  

‘This best version of me’

St. Therese of Lisieux once wrote, “It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to love.” The quote inspired Evelyn Xin Yu Xu, a senior at the University of Maryland at College Park, to choose the Carmelite nun as her confirmation saint, after she experienced profound joy and certainty once she found the Catholic faith. “I felt so much more confident … like I was starting to become closer and closer to this best version of me. I viewed the world so differently; I [saw] the best in everyone,” she said.

In the spring of her junior year, Xin Yu Xu began to feel like her anxieties and insecurities were coming to a head. Those factors, she said, included low self-esteem, frustration with body image, difficulties trusting others and above all, a feeling like something was missing in her life. Though her family was traditionally Buddhist and Daoist, essentially she grew up and lived “without a religion,” she said, until she went to Mass with her confirmation sponsor, Tyler, at the Catholic Student Center at the University of Maryland. It is there that she entered the Church at the Easter Vigil. “I’m just going to be crying the entire time,” she said in an interview beforehand.

Though she has a job lined up after she graduates as a technical consultant for a recruiting company, she has other even bigger plans, like her dream of going on a mission trip, of becoming a motivational speaker and of “giving back to the world in some sort of way,” she said. Whatever she does, she plans on relying on her faith, as she seeks to be the person whom God “made me to be,” she said.

“My life has just been so much better because everything I do, I try to glorify Him; I feel like that summarizes everything.”