Preface
I wrote this because many people have asked me to share my story of how I became Catholic, and I felt the time had finally come to do it. For the past year, I have intentionally let that decision settle more deeply into my life. I did not want to speak too quickly about something that was still so new, and I did not want to reduce a real spiritual transformation into a rushed post or a simple announcement. I wanted to give it time, let my commitment deepen, and allow the reality of being Catholic to take firmer root before I tried to explain how I got here.
I am also writing this for another reason: I feel called to create more Catholic art. Sacred art was one of the doorways that led me to the Church, and I believe that matters. So this is not only a testimony, but also a statement of direction. I want to be honest about that. I want to do more Catholic paintings, more sacred work, and more art that carries reverence, meaning, and devotion. I am proud to say that this story and that work are connected.
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I. The Search for God
For years I questioned whether God exists. That was not a passing doubt or a phase I moved through quickly. It was a real and ongoing question that sat in the background of my life for a long time. After my parents passed away in 2015, that question became even heavier. Loss has a way of stripping away shallow answers. It forces you to confront what you really believe, what you only hope might be true, and what you do not know at all.
In the years that followed, I explored different religions and philosophies in an effort to understand suffering, peace, and whether there was something greater than the visible world. I spent time studying Hinduism and Buddhism, and I took especially strongly to Buddhism. At that point in my life, it offered a way to maintain peace and composure while moving through grief. It gave me a framework for observing pain without being swallowed by it, and for a number of years I operated from that philosophy as honestly as I knew how.
I was not looking for Catholicism. In fact, I did not expect it to become part of my life at all. My previous experiences with Christianity had mostly been through Baptist churches, Church of Christ environments, and more modern churches that felt highly produced, brightly lit, and emotionally amplified. That may speak to the preferences of many people, but it never felt authentic to me. Something about it felt disconnected from what I was actually searching for. I was not looking for a spiritual performance. I was looking for truth, depth, and something that could hold up to my skepticism.
Then in 2019, I was commissioned by Fr. West to restore and repaint Catholic statuary. At the time, I knew almost nothing about the deeper meaning of what I would be working on. The project involved resculpting and repainting statues, including the Stations of the Cross, along with saints, Jesus, and Mary. The older statues had been painted decades earlier with lead enamel paint and airbrush techniques. Over time the surface had become brittle, flaking and chipping away. My job was to remove as much of the old paint as carefully as possible and repaint the sculptures with oil paint using walnut oil as the medium.
That is the technical side of the story, but it is not the heart of it. The deeper reality is that while I was painting, I was also being taught. I did not know the meaning behind each station or the significance of the sacred figures I was working on. Fr. West began explaining them to me as I painted. He taught me, in detail, what each station of the cross represented, and over the course of roughly six months I found myself immersed in the visual and spiritual language of Catholicism without ever planning to be. What began as a commission slowly started becoming something else.
In Loving Memory of Fr. West of St. Edward’s, Texarkana
At one point Fr. West asked me about my beliefs, and I told him I was Buddhist. He did not react defensively or dismissively. He told me he appreciated that, and that he found some of the teachings of Buddha to be in alignment with the teachings of Jesus. Then he said I should look into it. That was a great connection moment. He met me with respect rather than pressure. He did not try to corner me into agreement. He simply pointed me toward Christ with enough openness that I was willing to keep looking.
When I did start looking more closely, I found that he was right. There were real points of contact between some of the ethical and spiritual insights I had admired and the teachings of Jesus. But I also began to sense that Christianity was asking something more personal of me. It was not only a philosophy of peace or detachment. It was a claim about God entering history, about truth becoming flesh, about suffering, sacrifice, love, and resurrection. That was a different kind of proposition entirely.
Not long after that, I attended my first Catholic Mass with a friend. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced in a church. There was movement, structure, reverence, kneeling, participation, incense, pipe organ music, and a sense that what was happening there was older and deeper than modern preference. It felt ancient in the best way. It felt serious. It felt ordered. It felt alive without trying to entertain me. For the first time, church did not feel like a performance built around personality. It felt like I had stepped into something far larger than myself.
At that stage, many of my experiences were still deeply personal and partly aesthetic, but they were already opening into something more. I was being drawn in through beauty, symbolism, reverence, and sacred art, but underneath all of that was the beginning of a much deeper question. I had spent years searching for peace and questioning whether God exists. Now, unexpectedly, I found myself standing in the presence of a faith that did not just speak about God in the abstract, but claimed to encounter Him.
II. The Dark Night of the Soul
As I spent more time in the Church, something deeper began to happen in me. At first, I was drawn by sacred art, by the reverence of the Mass, and by the seriousness of Catholic tradition. But over time it stopped being only intellectual or aesthetic. Being in the church around the Eucharist began to affect me on a deeper layer that is hard to fully explain. Something was shifting in me before I could neatly define it. I was not just learning about Catholicism from the outside. I was beginning to feel drawn into it.
Around that same time, Fr. West asked me to film his classes because he knew I enjoyed video work. That became another doorway. As I recorded those classes, I listened closely while he answered questions about Catholic history, even Catholic art, and the meaning of Christ’s life and sacrifice. I would occasionally ask my own philosophical questions, trying to make sense of God, Christianity, and the claims the Church was making. Those classes gave me a deeper understanding of Catholic thought, but more importantly, they gave me a look inside the life of the Church. I was no longer standing at a distance. I was understanding the beauty and what the church requires.
What drew me in was not only doctrine, although doctrine mattered. It was also the wholeness of it. Catholicism did not feel like it was missing parts of it to me. It did not feel like a stripped-down set of emotional slogans or a performance built around a stage. It carried history, symbolism, art, philosophy, ritual, and a strong sense that truth had to be embodied, not just talked about.
I love the seriousness of it, the ancient feel of it, the active participation of the Mass, the kneeling, the incense, the organ, the discipline, and the way beauty and structure were not treated as optional. It felt human in the deepest sense because it asked something of the whole person.
As the restoration project continued, I was still painting the Stations of the Cross and tying up the final details. By then I had spent months immersed in sacred imagery. I had learned the meaning behind what I was painting, and the work itself had become spiritually charged for me. One part I dreaded from the beginning was adding the blood to Christ. I put it off until the end. Something about it felt too heavy and I knew that once I did it, the work would cross a threshold for me. It would no longer just be paint and sculpture and technique. It would become something more direct and harder to keep at a distance.
Then everything was interrupted.
A few months into 2020, Fr. West suddenly passed away after being sick with what was called the flu. I don't think it was the flu. Shortly after that, the church closed, and so did the rest of the world. What had felt like a living path forward suddenly collapsed into silence, confusion, and grief. We had come so close to becoming Catholic, and then the person who had guided us into that world was gone. The place that had become spiritually important to us was shut down. The timing of it all felt brutal.
That period left me with anger I did not know how to process. I was angry about how it happened. I was angry that something which had begun to open so deeply in my life seemed to be cut off just as it was becoming real. I was angry at the confusion of the moment, at the state of the world, and at the deep division I saw in people I loved. Friends and family were pulled into suspicion, hostility, and ideological conflict in ways that felt ugly and destabilizing. Of course division has always existed, but in that season it seemed to intensify everywhere. It was hard not to become cynical.
My wife and I also began drinking more during that time, and over the years it became a problem. For me, though, the drinking was not the deepest issue. The deeper issue was anger. It was grief that had not fully healed, disappointment that had hardened, and the sense that I had been brought to the edge of something sacred only to watch it disappear. That did not make me walk away from the memory of what I had experienced, but it did make me question God again. I had already spent years wondering whether God exists, and now I found myself wondering something even harder: if God does exist, why would things unfold this way?
That is the part people do not always talk about when they tell stories of faith. There are moments of beauty and conviction, but there are also long seasons of interruption, resentment, and spiritual resistance. My path toward the Church was not a clean upward line. It was not a simple emotional breakthrough that carried me forward without complication. It passed through delay, anger, and the kind of darkness that tests whether what drew you in was only atmosphere or whether something more real had taken root.
Time went on. The restoration project long ended. The world kept moving. Outwardly, life continued, but inwardly there were things still unsettled in me. I had been brought very close to the Catholic Church, but I had not yet crossed over. I had encountered beauty, truth, reverence, and something deeply alive in the faith, but I had also run headlong into loss and disorientation. That tension stayed with me for years.
And yet, even in that dark stretch, something remained. Beneath the anger, beneath the confusion, beneath the resistance, the attraction had not disappeared. I could not fully dismiss what I had experienced. The Church had gotten too deep into me for that. Sacred art had opened a door, the Mass had stirred something ancient and real, and the presence I had encountered there was not something I could simply explain away. Even in the dark night of the soul, the light had not gone out. It had only become harder to reach.
III. The Choice of Gold
Years went by, and eventually I came to understand that the drinking was not the deepest problem. For me, the deeper problem was anger. It was anger over loss, anger over disappointment, anger over how close we had come to becoming Catholic only to have the path suddenly ripped away. It was anger at the state of the world, at division, at confusion, and at the way grief can harden when it is left unresolved. Once I started dealing with that honestly, something important became clear: when the anger was faced directly, the desire to become Catholic was still there.
That mattered to me. It meant this was not just an emotional reaction to a certain season of life, and it was not merely the influence of a particular priest, however meaningful Fr. West had been. It meant that underneath all the interruption, all the confusion, and all the delay, something real had taken root. The attraction to the Church had survived the collapse of circumstances around it. Even after the project ended, even after the church closed, even after years of frustration and resistance, I still wanted to become Catholic.
That choice was not easy for me, and I think that is part of why it matters. I still struggled with belief. I was not suddenly transformed into someone who had no questions, no doubts, and no intellectual resistance. In some ways, I needed a definition of faith that respected both the mind and the will. What helped me most was the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His understanding of faith made sense to me in a way that cut through a lot of confusion. Faith, as he describes it, is not a forced conclusion and not mere intellectual agreement. It is an act of the intellect assenting to divine truth by command of the will, moved by grace. In other words, faith is not the absence of thought. It is a free and responsible choice to assent to what is not yet seen fully.
That idea changed something for me. I did not need to pretend I had solved every mystery. I did not need to wait until I had eliminated every question or satisfied every possible objection. I could choose. My will still mattered. Grace mattered, but so did my response. That resonated with me deeply because free will has always mattered to me. I did not become Catholic because I was pressured into it, manipulated into it, or emotionally cornered into it. I became Catholic because, after everything, I chose to believe.
That choice was difficult for some people around me to understand. For years I had been a strong agnostic, and I had expressed that publicly and openly. Some friends and family were shocked by my decision. Some probably felt confused. Some may have thought I had betrayed something or let them down in some strange way. Others likely found it simply hard to reconcile the person they knew with the choice I made. I understand that. From the outside, it may seem strange that someone who once questioned so openly would choose to become Catholic.
But from the inside, it feels very different. I have never been happier. That does not mean life became easy or that all suffering disappeared. It means that in choosing Christ, I found a deeper peace than the one I had been trying to preserve on my own. It means that connection to Jesus has made life better in a way I could not have manufactured for myself. At first, faith meant hoping that God exists. Over time, it became something more personal. I have had my own experience of proof, though not the kind that can simply be transferred from one person to another like an argument on paper. Some things can only be experienced for yourself.
That is one of the reasons Catholicism means so much to me. For me, it is not about coercion. I have multiple friends who were raised in Christian cults, and I understand why the very idea of organized religion can make some people recoil. I was raised with athiest parents and it's no better I assure you. In some ways everything is a cult like.
The Catholic church is conducive to freedom. Free will is at the heart of it. Nobody is making me show up. Nobody is making me paint Catholic paintings or explore iconography. Nobody is forcing me into devotion, prayer, or participation. I want to be here. I want to do this.
Looking back now, I can see that the path was lit, even in its darkest parts. The years of questioning, the grief, the beauty of sacred art, the reverence of the Mass, the death of Fr. West, the anger, the delay, and the eventual choice to believe... all of it became part of the same movement.
Like pottery some things pass through fire and come back transformed. Sacred art was the doorway that led me into the Catholic Church, but it did not end there. What began in paint, sculpture, symbolism, and reverence became something far more personal. It became a testimony. It became a choice. And for me, it became gold.
2025 Baptism and Confirmation into the Catholic Church with Sponsors David and Chris Thomas and Fr. Williams of St. Edward's Texarkana
David and Chris Thomas were our sponsors, and they witnessed us going through the darkest part of this story. They prayed for us, had us over for dinners, spent real time with us, and never pulled away. We have also done art workshops together so this was never just a formal role in the Church. They are great friends, and I’m deeply grateful for their steady faith, friendship, and support.
I’m also grateful for Fr. Williams, who helped take us into the Church and get us started. He is very different from Fr. West. Fr. West was more analytical and philosophical, while Fr. Williams has a lighter presence and a great sense of humor. He has jokes but also had real patience with us. That mattered as he never pressured us and I appreciated that deeply.
