¶1He said one sentence about a saint and it shocked me. Whatever she's on, I want some of that. That's what a philosopher named Joe Smith said a few days ago. Talking about a girl named Maria Goretti, who forgave the man who killed her. I'd never heard of him before that night.
¶2I'd been scrolling on a Tuesday night when I suddenly saw his face everywhere. Princeton PhD candidate, published in metaphysics [music] and philosophy of religion, co-author of an academic book on theistic proofs, years spent building arguments against the very thing he just [music] knelt down and accepted. I watched his video expecting more of that fine-tuning consciousness, the usual philosophy checklist. What surprised me wasn't any of that. It was the same line about the saint.
¶3I sat in my apartment in Sapporo >> [music] >> and felt my chest go tight because I know that sentence. I've lived [music] that sentence. I converted because of a Google search. I was 59 years old >> [music] >> sitting in the same apartment, lonely on a Sunday morning, and I typed church services in English near me [music] into a search bar because I didn't know what else to do with the morning. No PhD behind that search.
¶4No years of philosophy of religion. >> [music] >> Just a man who is tired of being alone on Sundays typing eight words into Google. I don't have a PhD. [music] I never read Aquinas cover to cover. When people ask [music] me to defend transubstantiation or explain the Filioque clause, [music] I go quiet because I don't know.
¶5I'm not equipped for that fight and I never claimed to be. So, when I watched a man with centuries of [music] argument behind him walk through his conversion, some old insecure part of me thought, "That's what real [music] conversion looks like." Mine was just loneliness and a search bar, watching Indy stories [music] and The Chosen on YouTube. I went back and found something Joe said a month before any of this had happened. He'd been asked about the Eucharistic miracles, the kind Catholics [music] point to as a physical proof of the faith. And he said the investigations were often marred by bad methodology, exaggeration, and convenient omissions of key facts.
¶6He said it made him more suspicious of the people presenting them, not less. Cut to a month later, he's citing Marian apparitions, exorcisms, room temperature changes, and Eucharistic [music] miracles as part of what carried him into the church. That gap between what he said in January and what he said last week is the most human [music] part of the whole story. I recognize it because my own head and my own heart had never run on the same schedule. The head wants evidence that holds up under cross-examination.
¶7The heart already picked a side months before >> [music] >> the head finished arguing with itself. I wasn't publishing academic papers on it. I was just a man >> [music] >> who kept typing things into a search bar long after the search bar had already answered the only question that mattered. But that first Sunday, something in me recognized [music] his sentence before I could argue with it. I remember the first mass.
¶8I sat in the back row, incense [music] drifting somewhere near the altar, in a language that wasn't even my own gospel language. I didn't understand half of what was said, [music] but I watched a roomful of strangers kneel down together like they knew something I didn't. I didn't know yet if it was the language or the building or the incense. I just knew I wanted whatever was making these people kneel like that. Here's the part that nobody puts in the highlight reel.
¶9Wanting it got me in the door. It didn't get me through the first year. There were 5:30 a.m. wake-ups for daily mass, the kind where the sky outside is still that flat gray Hokkaido color, and the trains haven't fully woken up either. There was studying I didn't know how to do, catechism that felt like homework at an age when I thought that homework was [music] permanently behind me.
¶10I fumbled through a rosary [music] that I didn't know how to hold properly for months. There was a priest running his community more like a tyrant than a shepherd, and for about 6 months, my enthusiasm just dropped. The wanting I'd felt in that first mass >> [music] >> just went quiet. I went back anyway because I'd started something [music] and I didn't know how to explain quitting to myself let alone to anyone else. Joe's video is 28 [music] minutes of head and heart converging into one moment of clarity.
¶11Mine took a year of some [music] very unclear mornings before anything felt settled again. I'm in a version of that same discipline right now. Actually, 34 days into a Marian consecration. Mornings that feel exactly like that first year again. Repetitive, inconvenient, nothing dramatic happening.
¶12I never went through mornings like that completely alone. And if you're headed into your own right now, I'll tell you how at the end. I watched the comments under Joe Schmidt's video [music] the same way I watched them under mine a year ago. Some people said, "Welcome home, brother." Some said, "He's grifting." Or "This is a stunt." Or "Wait for the deconversion [music] video in about 5 years." Apologists were already lining him up next to their arguments like he was proof of [music] something bigger than one man's Sunday. I know what that felt like from the small [music] end of it.
¶13People I'd never met decided what my conversion [music] meant before I had decided what it meant. Some people used it to feel better [music] about their own faith. Some people used it to tell me that I still wasn't Catholic enough. Or that I'd gotten there for the wrong reasons. Joe is getting that on a much bigger stage than I ever will.
¶14I don't envy him that part. Nobody converts because of a syllogism. Even the philosophers don't, not really. They see something in another person's life that they don't have. And it won't leave them alone until they go looking for it.
¶15That's the door. What happens after you walk through it is a different question entirely. And it's the one nobody puts in the headline. If you were the one that's watching someone else's peace right now and thinking, "Whatever they're on, I want some [music] of that." I want to tell you what I wish someone had told me. You don't need the arguments lined up first.
¶16I didn't have mine. I had a phone, a search bar, >> [music] >> and a Sunday morning with nothing else to do. But the wanting [music] doesn't finish the job. It just opens the door. What's waiting on the other side is early mornings, a rosary you don't know how to hold yet, maybe a bad priest or bad 6 months, and the decision to walk back in on the mornings the wanting isn't there anymore.
¶17Some conversions started in a library weighing a hundred arguments against a hundred more. Mine started in the same 5 minutes it takes to look up a restaurant, and it's still not finished. I don't know what Joe Schmo's next [music] 5 years looks like, and neither does he. I know what my second year looked like. It looked like going back the morning [music] after the 6 months I didn't want to.
¶18If you're on the other side of that door right now and don't know what to do [music] with the wanting, that's part of what this channel's membership is for. That consecration I mentioned, I'm on day 34 of 46 and members are walking through it alongside me. It doesn't run on my calendar though. You can start it whenever you're ready and more through it at your own pace. And if today all you've got in you is a subscribe, I'll take that, too.
¶19I'll be here again this Saturday either way. >> [music]