Why I Converted to the Catholic Faith.
I am not a native Catholic, but from birth I was destined to become Catholic.
When my mother was 8 months pregnant with me, complications arose and my father took her to the nearest hospital on the back of his bicycle. Coincidentally, this was a Catholic hospital run by nuns. Everything went well and I was born. One of the nuns dressed me in a nun's cap and carried me through the hospital to show the cute newborn nun to the patients. Our neighbors across the street were Catholic and the lady of the house was like my second mother; we shared a great love and had a strong bond that lasted until I left for India when I was 14. Like them, I wanted to be Catholic, go to church and learn to pray before meals. Of course none of this happened, so I made up my own prayers and recited the ABC before the meal. At least that's how my lips seemed to pray!
At the Protestant school I went to, every Friday afternoon a pastor came to tell us stories from the Bible. I loved every minute of it and can still remember some of the stories he told. So until I was 12, when I went to high school, there was a lot of Christian imprinting.
I come from a strange family. My paternal grandmother was Indonesian, and my grandfather came from the back corner. They were freemasons and founded the first mixed lodge in the Netherlands, together with their spiritual teacher, Adolph Ernestus Thierens, a renowned astrologer. He believed that jealousy was the most destructive emotion a human being could have, and taught them that leading an "open marriage" was therefore preferable. My grandmother lived by the Bhagavat Gita, one of the Hindu scriptures, and my grandfather was an expert in Tarot readings. They were all astrologers, including my parents. My grandfather taught me about reincarnation when my grandmother died, when I was 10 years old.
When I was 12, the first Indian yogi was introduced to our family and my father taught me to meditate. He told me to imagine a coiled snake at the base of my spine slowly waking up and making its way to the top of my head. This serpent is called the Kundalini and is considered to have divine energy. Being a visual thinker, I kept seeing his tongue darting in and out of his mouth. I have been doing this meditation for much of my life. Two years later, when I was 14, my parents decided that I would accompany my mother to India for a 9-month yoga teacher training course so that I could learn a trade. In the end I stayed for 5 years, my mother stayed for 10 years.
The guru, or spiritual head of the ashram, decided to raise me as an Indian girl. I was formally initiated into Hinduism and learned many ways of worship and rituals. Such as the daily worship in the Shiva temple, which is depicted as a phallic symbol contained within a vulva-like structure. I was told to fast on Mondays to get a good husband, and to recite a chapter of the Bhagavat Gita daily before eating. Every full moon month I had to read the entire Gita.
After about a year I was ordained as a monk. For this, my head was shaved and I wore orange robes. It was a busy and strenuous life in the Ashram, from early morning to late at night we were busy cooking for large numbers of people, cleaning, working in the office, studying the scriptures and teaching many yoga classes. In the Hindu tradition, the spiritual teacher is equated with God and you are expected to blindly obey and give your life completely to service. It was living in slavery. Here I learned to put a man between me and God, something I continued to do for the rest of my life, until I repented. Demands of total loyalty aside, this teacher turned out to be a monster. There followed 5 years of indescribable and violent sexual and physical abuse, including abortion. I'm not going to go into details, but I'm mentioning it here because there are so many people who have fallen into similar circumstances, who, like me at the time, don't know what to do with this, who to talk to or not to, and how the hell can they heal their wounds.
It was only by writing this that I saw the connections. All this happened 2 years after my father taught me to meditate on an awakening snake within my body! The guru cursed me. He said if I ever left him I would end up in a wheelchair like one of my sisters. I left him and I never physically ended up in a wheelchair, but I remained a spiritual and emotional cripple for most of my life, suffering from extreme lethargy and depression, until I welcomed Jesus and His Mother Mary into my heart.
After 5 years I returned home, plunging into all kinds of worldly pleasures and celebrating my newfound freedom. I had my daughter at 24, but my wounds had not healed. Three years later I found another Indian guru and moved to the US with my little girl. We traveled with him for 3 years, the last year of which we spent in India. He took care of us in a very different way than the first guru, we were well fed, nicely dressed and he showered us with jewelry (by 'us' I mean myself and a large number of other young women). Discipline in this ashram was strict and the focus was on meditation (the same snake) and studying the Indian scriptures. But as I got closer to him, he turned out not to differ much from the other teacher. After his death, I returned to the Netherlands with my daughter.
All my life I was always looking for God, but I was so confused, indoctrinated and easily influenced that I usually looked in the wrong places. And then the new age hit me. It started with reading all of Jane Roberts' Seth Speaks books and I started playing with the Ouija board, followed by a period of automatic writing and channeling, never knowing what I was doing and never knowing who or what I was inviting. I often went looking for psychics and attended Tarot readings. Without exception, I drew the devil card at every Tarrot session. I met an American spiritual teacher who claimed to be enlightened. I followed and served her for 12 years. I set up her European organization, edited and helped translate her books and interpreted for her at Dutch meetings and programs. She offered a system that promised "the end of suffering." It consisted of a mental process in the form of questions, to examine anything that caused you misery or pain. Incidentally, her workshops and programs cost people the top prize and made her a millionaire in a short time.
As with the Indian gurus, I placed her between me and God, and all my worship and focus went to her. Her first biography called 'Cry in the Wilderness' pointed to John the Baptist and she compared herself to Jesus. I was proficient in her method and became quite independent, traveling all over Europe and conducting workshops and training programs, while making a lot of money. When she realized that I was gaining popularity, she kicked me out and banned people from attending my programs. I lost my entire source of income overnight and plunged into another deep depression.
I switched to another new age teacher who was talking about non-duality. The teaching of non-duality is still very popular among today's spiritual seekers. It's basically about nothing existing. There is no world, no you, no free will, no God and only 'nothing'. Everything is a dream that you have to wake up from. You are taught that you are not the 'doer', that you do not think, but are 'thought'. In principle, this relieves you of any responsibility. People who have immersed themselves deeply in this find themselves in a kind of blissful state, which convinces them that they are enlightened, or at least approaching enlightenment. To be enlightened means to be one with God.
Mixed with their theory that we all create our own reality, this basically promises you the spiritual and material jackpot. Everything is possible and it has nothing to do with God. This whole train of thought comes directly from one of the Hindu scriptures. I went deep enough down this rabbit hole to eventually lose touch with God. I had always followed my heart in my search for Him, but I became convinced that He did not exist and that we live in a kind of random universe, where you are lucky or not. There is nothing you can do and praying is useless.
It felt like I had hit rock bottom and that my depression was permanent or chronic. Everything was dark. I felt old, fat and passé. And it would only get worse from now on. During this new-age event I had a conversation with my good friends Charlotte and Lee who had already converted to the Catholic faith. I told them that I fully respected them and would like to hear their stories, but that I would not follow them down this path. Becoming a Christian was far from me and actually I felt a bit above it.
One day I couldn't stand it any longer and called Charlotte for help. She said she was going to send me a Catholic prayer. I didn't care anymore, I was ready to do anything, if only this darkness would disappear. She sent me the prayer of Wonderful Confidence from Our Lady of Tepeyac. Look it up, it's really beautiful. I prayed it many times, for many different things. At first nothing happened, or so I thought, but after a few weeks the Lord's Prayer, which I had learned as a child, began to repeat itself in my head. I could just listen to it. It went on for weeks, in all my waking moments, and I envisioned images of me being baptized. I felt surprised, confused and embarrassed and didn't tell anyone. After a while I decided to call a priest so I could talk to someone about it.
Pastor Carlos Fabril and I met weekly for the next year to talk and pray. I had a really hard time with the whole Christian/Catholic thing, especially with stories about the Vatican, the pedo-priests and the popes and bishops who seemed to keep their hands over them. Father Carlos never judged or reprimanded me, just let me express all my doubts. I also started attending Mass and our local Bible classes. I was baptized on Pentecost and was finally allowed to receive Holy Communion. My dear friend Charlotte flew over to attend the ceremony and be my godmother.
One day I was praying and talking to God when suddenly a very clear presence was felt on the left side of my face. I very clearly heard a voice saying, "I'm always watching you and you always have my undivided attention." There were many experiences in the beginning, mainly the experience of a very blissful state that could last for days. Of course the honeymoon ended after a while, but so did the darkness!
The night before I was baptized I dreamed of my father. He beamed and smiled at me with a big smile. It felt like he was giving me his blessing. The next day I was sitting at the terrace table with my children and suddenly I saw a small plastic bag on the table. I picked it up and saw that it had my father's handwriting on it and it had a whole bunch of little gems in it (which he used to collect). We were amazed and wondered where it came from as I had never seen it before. I looked back at the table and another bag had appeared, also filled with stones that looked like diamonds. I still have no idea what this meant, not to this day, but it was a nice touch!
My life as a Catholic began to unfold. At first when I went to mass, I would start sobbing and my whole body would tremble as tears of gratitude streamed down my cheeks. I became active in the Church, volunteered, and became part of a wonderful community. My kids and grandson live with us so life is pretty busy but at night I dove into google and youtube and started a journey of discovery of all the great catholic authors out there and great priests as well I studied the lives of several saints and saw all kinds of films about Jesus and the apostles. The best so far is The Chosen. My hunger was great and I had to take it all in and process it.
Then Charlotte invited me on a trip to the Holy Land led by Roy Schoeman, a converted Protestant who is an excellent author and a most inspiring speaker. His YouTube channel is a testimony to that. I had already read his book "Salvation is from the Jews" and listened to his Radio Maria podcasts. It is his mission to convert as many Jewish people as possible to the Catholic faith. I find one of his most fascinating statements: "Catholics are actually Jews who have recognized Christ and Jews are actually Catholics who have not recognized Christ." I had visited Israel in 1999 with the new-age teacher and seen many of the holy sites, but this was a very different experience. It became the journey of my life. Now when I pray my daily rosary, I have visual reminders of all the mysteries, which only deepen and enrich the prayer.
Words cannot express my gratitude to God for calling me back home and helping me deepen my faith, for placing me in a community that feels like a family, and for constantly teaching me about prayer . It was an immediate and unexpected twist. I have lost friends and family because of my conversion to the Catholic faith. Some of them just can't and won't understand, and while this saddens me at times, I understand where they're coming from, because I've been there myself for most of my life, confused and desperately trying to make this thing that 'live' called to understand. But now I am learning on a very deep level that without God's grace, without the Presence in the Eucharist and without our Lord Jesus Christ, life can never have meaning.