Fr. John O’Toole
My faith journey was and is more a road to Emmaus than a road to Damascus. There have been no flashing lights and few dramatic events. Rather it was and is a gradual journey of learning, growing and deepening in faith. This might, however, give the wrong impression that the journey is in a straight line! Not so. As with life generally, so my life of faith was and is a matter of some high points, some low points and some level points.
My faith journey follows a fairly classical model of journeying from inherited faith, through questioning faith to personal faith. I was born in Dublin in 1950 as the fourth child in the family. Being born into a culture where 99% of the population was Roman Catholic I simply inherited the faith of my parents. My mum and dad had a simple but not simplistic faith. Going to church and trying to live a good Catholic life was the ‘natural’ air that we breathed. The faith was very much ‘caught’ as well as ‘taught’ by the example as well as the teaching of my parents at home, of the priests and people in the local parish and of the teachers in the local school that I attended for a year or two.
When I was 8 years old there was a big change. A Damascus-road experience of a sort, after all! My dad lost his job as a bus conductor and went to England to find work. After some months my mum and we kids moved to join him in England. Suddenly there was a completely new world to face. There was no room in the Catholic primary school and so we went to the local state school where, as Catholics, we didn’t go into assembly during prayers but filed in for the notices. Faith was no longer something ‘natural’ but ‘strange’ – at least to others.
Years later, it was attending another non-Catholic school when I was in the sixth form, that helped me to move from an ‘inherited’ to a ‘questioning’ faith – simply because I was being asked so many questions by my fellow students about what these ‘strange’ Catholics believe! I was greatly helped by some excellent priests we had in our parish at the time who not only helped me to provide some answers for others but who, by actually encouraging questions, helped me to deepen my own faith.
I would also single out a friendship I made in the sixth-form with Paul, a devout evangelical Anglican. We used to argue about which was the true Church! As a compromise Paul used to come to Mass with me occasionally on a Sunday morning and I would go to his evangelical church on a Sunday evening. Paul taught me a love of the Scriptures and how friendships can cut across denominational boundaries. Later he married a good Catholic girl and they have 4 children. I am god-father to one of them. Paul is still an evangelical Anglican but attends Mass regularly with his wife.
It was the questioning from others and the experiences of life that led me gradually from an inherited faith to a ‘personal’ faith. Over 40 years have passed since I was in the sixth-form with Paul but, in many ways, I am still living on that formative time and experience. I am immensely grateful to my parents from whom I inherited my Catholic faith, to people like Paul who challenged me to question my faith, and to so many others who by their witness in the past and in the present support me in my personal faith journey along the Emmaus road.