Welcome to my blog, here’s a short bio of myself and how I came to be a devotee to the Sacred Heart.
I did not have much of what one could call a religious upbringing. My sister and I were raised with some general Christian values, but we really didn’t practice until I was around 7 or 8 years old. My father was raised Catholic, but stopped practicing as soon as he turned 18. So he had no interest in religion throughout my childhood. My mother had my sister and I attend a Methodist church, with a female pastor, most of which I fondly remember. My mom did what she could to give us some sort of foundation in Christ and the Gospels, but wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about learning her faith. We were never baptized, my mother believing we should choose, but I had a stronger attachment to faith than my sister, and we attended weekly for a year or so.
We moved a lot when I was young, so once we moved away from our church, attendance sharply dropped off. My mom would drag us to maybe one Methodist service at Christmas or Easter, and that was really it. My teenage years saw a heavy interest in video games, fantasy, and metal music. With a strong emphasis on the music. As I discovered more diverse and “heavy” sub-genres within metal, I began more and more to be drawn towards the “dark” and “satanic” acts. This lead to a collapse of what little faith I had into nihilism and satanism as I grew older.
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By the time I graduated High School, I was a total “edge lord.” I hated Christianity, hailed Satan, listened to black metal, death metal, deathcore, all sorts of shocking and evil music. Once I went to college, my opposition to God and Christ shifted to atheism as I got caught up in the New Atheists through YouTube. Hitchens, Harris, Thunderf00t, the Amazing Atheist, were all staples to me. So I of course adopted their straw-man arguments and pathetic understanding of basic philosophy to trash Christians and Christianity. I was an extremely irreverent and unpleasant person who would openly mock those with faith. My girlfriend was also an atheist, so she enjoyed mocking religion as well. Although my understanding of Christianity was limited to Protestant and Evangelical caricatures and tropes. Strangely, I had some odd appreciation for the Catholic Church. Even though my mother was opposed to Catholicism as the “church of guilt,” there was something about it I found alluring.
By the time I graduated college in 2014, with a useless Bachelor’s in broad-field social studies with a History focus, religion kind of fell off of my radar. I didn’t really care about it anymore, still didn’t believe in God, but thought it was boring to continue to mock people for their faith.
By 2016, my girlfriend (now wife) was unexpectedly pregnant, which dramatically changed my outlook on the world. This is the point that I can identify a “push” from the Holy Ghost toward some sort of theism. Given the reality of the new human life that was going to enter our insular existence, I seriously reconsidered my doubts about God. This lead to a “quest” for knowledge, which unfortunately brought me into some unsavory ideologies on the darker corners of the internet. I fell in with the so-called “alt right” mentality, complete with esoteric spirituality, traditionalism, and some regrettable fascism (God forgive me!). But, this dark period reawakened my faith in the most unexpected way. I found myself increasingly interested in monarchism and the traditional Western culture which permeated Europe for over two millennia. I grew disillusioned with the progressivism, liberalism, and outright nihilism of modern culture. And began to rediscover the beauty of the Western cultural “spirit.”
This did not lead to an immediate conversion to Christianity, as I still had biases rooted in a Protestant view. Yet it did lead me to a sort of perennial spirituality in the vein of Aldous Huxley and Julius Evola. This belief and appreciation for the gods of our ancestors, which lead to a forced belief in Asatru (Norse neo-paganism) which developed into an even more genuine belief in Roman paganism. Out of intellectual intimidation, I hadn’t delved into the works of the Greek philosophers. And honestly, thank God for that, because I may not have converted to the True Church when I did. This fixation on Rome lead to a curiosity of the Catholic Church. I still had my reservations about “meek and mild” Jesus, but the practices and beliefs of Catholicism noticeably mirrored the earlier practices of European paganism. Thanks to my perennial outlook, this lead me to notice more and more commonalities and threads running from the myths of the Greeks, Romans, and Norse to the truths of Catholic teaching and Scripture.
By September 2017, the Holy Ghost began to take over and draw me towards Catholicism. My previous devotion to Apollo and Jove lead to a fascination with the Blessed Virgin and Saint Michael the Archangel. I wanted to practice some sort of pseudo-santeria and worship them as divinities in themselves, but this only accelerated my conversion. I soon was preoccupied with an inner struggle, trying to reconcile my newfound curiosity of Catholicism with my own opposition to Christianity. Eventually, in mid-October 2017, I came across the argument which J.R.R. Tolkien used to convert C.S. Lewis. And it put my perennialism, paganism, and their commonalities with Catholic teaching into perspective.
That November I began RCIA, much to my wife’s aversion, beginning my road to entering the Church. I read a lot on my own, inflating my ego due to my discovery of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. Of course, my RCIA class never delved into any serious theology, sticking to basic tenets of the post-Conciliar Church. My online interactions lead me to a sort of traditionalism long before Easter, so I was already skeptical of a lot of the things my instructor would talk about. I was finally baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church on Easter of 2018. And from that point forward, I have received tremendous graces which have lead to a fervent zeal for the truth of the Catholic Church, devotion to Our Lady, Our Blessed Lord, and the holy rosary. And today I stand firmly in the camp of Catholic traditionalists, with a specific loyalty to the ideas of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of Saint Pius X. I hope this gave you, dear reader, a sufficient look at my own conversion and history with the faith.
Catholic bonus stuff: My confirmation saint is Augustine, with Sts. Margaret Mary, Pio of Pietrelcina, Pius X, Joseph, Michael the Archangel, and of course Our Lady as patron saints. With my favorite devotions being the Sacred Heart (obviously), the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the rosary, the brown scapular, and the chaplets of St. Michael and the Sacred Heart.
Image credits:
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https://foreignpolicyi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Greek-Roman-Mythology.jpg
Slave to the Sacred Heart 
