I was received into the Catholic Church on the Easter Vigil of 2019.

I converted after 12 or so years of being an atheist. I converted for many reasons but a few stick out.

I made some friends through Twitter. Some of them very good friends who are very dear to me. One of them answered questions and addressed my misconceptions. He did so with charity and patience. There was much I had not understood.

Another person, who wasn't Catholic, kept saying "become good."

I started following more Christians on Twitter. I read conversations and debates over Christian theology and Church history. I started looking up the things I was curious about, usually in bursts of minutes or a few hours.

I attended Latin Mass for the first time, I think on Christmas Eve 2016. It was modest and quiet. I'd been to praise & worship events but I'd never seen a sacrifice.

I tripped over Bishop Athanasius Schneider's Dominus Est. That was my introduction to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. I'd heard about things like transubstantiation but I don't think I'd had a clear idea what believers were encountering in the Mass.

I read about and ruminated on things. It hadn't occurred to me that the deeds of the apostles and martyrs don't make sense unless the apostles saw Christ risen after his crucifixion.

The scandal of the Cross stuck with me. The God who was a man? The God who was a slave?

I'd never heard of or read about the early church fathers. I was shocked to find that everything the early church fathers said and that the ecumenical councils taught sounded very Catholic.

I went to some catechesis and Divine Liturgy at an Eastern Orthodox church. I didn't find their attempts to talk around Matthew 16:18 or the early church fathers convincing.

I shared my concerns about Eastern Orthodoxy with a friend. He told me excitedly of his parish and how I should check it out. I got a feeling. I decided to convert that night, I wasn't going to wait. I signed up for RCIA and started going to Mass.

It wasn't something I'd thought about or anticipated even once, but I was healed shortly after my conversion. Not of everything, but of some things I was struggling with. I cried for the first time in years, it was a relief.

My wife and I married in the Catholic Church in the summer of 2019. I met her shortly after I converted. We're expecting our second child this September.

I don't know how to end this so I'll pull a quote from an interview with Reverorum ib Malacht:

And truly, as we embark on the process of relinquishing ourselves, we must also surrender any pretense that we’re actually capable of attaining this liberation on our own. Only that which needs nothing, that which of its own nature necessarily wants for nothing, can extinguish the desires and affections of limited, contingent beings like ourselves.

Only God can face the darkness of the night and redeem fallen creation.

Our kind is not capable of such virtue alone, we know not these heroic heights of perfection from our own nature -- only through the darkness of humility, the darkness of faith wherewith we cast ourselves upon the depths of the Divine, whose transcendent nature, however certain with regard to its existence, is forever beyond our understanding. The cloud of unknowing.

This is the true darkness: the absolute Otherness of the transcendent Divine, from the perspective of our contingent, utterly limited and fallen selves. The Light of God is entirely antharaz, it is a darkness to us until we die with Christ at the foot of the cross and are raised up into His communion at the wedding feast of the Lamb. Love.

He is the Hero of which the ancient songs are sung, His is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory. Lord Jesus Christ.

I love you all.