"What God wants is
not your ability,
but your availability."

God calls each one of us to holiness.  But it seems that some of us may take a little longer than others to hear the call.

In 1990, my curiosity led me into a Catholic bookstore near my home in Denver, Colorado. I was thirty-nine years old. It was there that I met for the first time the owners and faithful lay Catholics, Howard and his devout wife, Mary Ann. Howard had guessed right away that I had an interest in books. I was thumbing through, I think, Etienne Gilson’s God and Philosophy—one among many in a rack at the front of the store.
“So you like philosophy?” he asked.

“I studied a little in college,” I replied. “Mostly the moderns, though. But I remember this fellow. I didn’t realize he was Catholic,” I admitted. “You’ll find many of the best thinkers are,” he replied. Howard wandered off to the back, leaving me to ponder these new discoveries. I spent the better part of an hour, looking up and down the aisles—things I might have heard vaguely of before but, not being Catholic, knew nothing about.

In fact, I was a recently converted evangelical Christian and had, for the past three years or so, been reading everything I could find on all matters pertaining to Christianity. I recall now being very intrigued with the different books I saw in the store—stories of saints, spirituality, theology, and of course, philosophy. I bought a book by Hans Urs Von Balthasar entitled Prayer. I had lived the last twenty years of my life without God and I was struggling a little with this matter of prayer. I was looking for answers and this Catholic had written a most extraordinary book about it!

Of course, I would not understand at first very much of what he had to say. But something about the way he thought about things impressed me. He had “something different”, something more than Protestant authors I was reading. As I completed my first purchase from Mr. Clampitt’s Sacred Heart Book Store—he thanked me for my patronage and, with a smile, gave me Gilson’s book as a gift. My visit to this store and making the acquaintance of this pious couple was to change the course of my entire life.

It marked the beginning of my vocation to a life with God.

At this time, I was living in Denver and Hawaii, an airline pilot for Continental Airlines. I was traveling the world, leading “the good life”, as some might see it. But before I was to find comfort in and the peace of Christ Our Lord, I was, inside, a very unhappy young man. Influenced by the hedonistic, modern culture, ‘doing as I pleased’ and engaging in many varieties of self-indulgence had left me empty and lonely. From my late teens, I used drugs and, later, a dependency on alcohol to sedate this loneliness. Everything that I tried or had in my possession left me, in the last analysis, increasingly dissatisfied.

All the while, I held fast to a false image that I had devised for myself—successful, popular, confident, self-sufficient. No one was the wiser—except for me. In private moments of despair, I began to acknowledge a deeper need inside my soul—a spiritual one which cannot be satisfied by anything in this created world. The One who is more than an Idea—the God Who is Really There—was calling to me through the circumstances of my life—and, for the first time, I was beginning to listen.

I decided to give up the worst of the vices that I had accustomed myself to. I laid aside as many false ideals and assumptions that I could identify (all were suspect)—rejecting for the first time some of the ‘knucklehead’ ideas and philosophies that had been at the root of such unhappiness. A period of spiritual and intellectual formation began for me with my introduction to the Holy Catholic Faith by the Clampitts. I soon came to recognize the gifts of knowledge and wisdom that God had given to Howard.

Though not formally trained, his thought, insight and grasp of Christian philosophy and theology were the fruit of years spent in a love affair with the Faith--reading Saint Thomas and others, praying over Sacred Scripture, and steeping himself in the sacramental life and the pious traditions of the Catholic Faith. I watched, as a frequent guest in their home, his saintly wife, Mary Ann, persevere in her duties as wife and mother—her eyesight failing with the advanced stages of diabetes which would eventually end her life. She would still find a way to type out a letter to her archbishop, pleading for the preservation of Eucharistic adoration in the parishes. A former church organist, she would play traditional hymn after hymn—from “Ave Verum Corpus” on, with Howard and I singing along. Her love took no notice of the pain of her effort. I will never forget their example of a truly Catholic marriage. May the good Lord richly reward them in Heaven.

I learned that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar—the Sacrifice of the Mass—was the very center of the true Religion. Through Our Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection—and made present in the Holy Mass—we render to God what is due to him, re-establishing the right order between Creator and creature. The Lord had come to restore all things and save what had been lost at the fall from grace of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Only sanctifying grace could restore this fallen world. This, I knew then, was all I really needed to know about becoming Catholic and embracing the fullness of the Truth for which I had been searching. Are we not all searching for this? “All men are looking for Thee, Lord.”

I was now reading hours a day, when not flying airplanes, and replacing all my Protestant books with new Catholic books. New vistas were opened to me that I did not realize existed. Answers about the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, His mission, the Providence of God, the role of the Church and the saints in salvation history—all previously undisclosed, began to fall into place for me.

With it came the other truths in its train. The history I had learned in school, for example, had been incomplete and according to a mostly ‘secularized’ (Enlightenment) understanding. I would begin to see things with a ‘Catholic’ mind as I was introduced to new discoveries and a new way of looking at the world.

As a “new” adult Christian, I had been bothered by the numerous theological disagreements between the many Protestant denominations, according to their interpretations of the Bible. Would God deceive us? Wouldn’t He establish the means of transmitting faithfully what He has revealed in the Person of His Son? “They can’t all be right,” I thought. “And the content of truth revealed and transmitted by God would necessarily be objective—not a matter of opinion.” These were common-sense assumptions, I think, which were about ready to find their affirmation for me in the unexpected form of the Catholic Church.

A significant step in my acceptance of the Catholic Church came while exploring her teaching on artificial contraception. Shortly after my introduction to Catholicism, I was experiencing some of the social stigma towards Catholic things that those brought up in the Protestant tradition will invariably have, of one degree or another. I wondered, “Why do they teach this?” And I knew this also: “I can’t be a Catholic if I don’t agree with this.”

This led to my discovery of the sublime teachings of the Church on human sexuality. The teaching of the Church on love, sexuality and marriage is founded upon the natural law—God is the Creator, the Author of human nature and knows the whole truth about mankind. When I read the writings of Pope John Paul II on the “theology of the body,” and his reflections on the Book of Genesis, I was stunned. There were profound, metaphysical reasons that this teaching of the Church was not a law arbitrarily imposed upon men and women by a man-made, patriarchal institution but the expression of an unchanging, substantial reality—truth revealed and handed down, taught always and everywhere, one which preceded even the founding of the Church!

When I learned that this teaching had been universally held until 1930 by both Protestant and Catholic Christians (that artificial contraception was an intrinsic moral evil), I was given another shock. The Anglicans had justified the first exception to this practice, within marriage, at the Lambeth Conference and, then, with the invention of the birth control pill in the 1950s, the flood gates had been opened. In the library of the Archdiocese of Denver’s St. Thomas Seminary, I would go on to learn, for myself, the role of Planned Parenthood and the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting population control and its goal of ‘eliminating the poor and unfit.’ Needless to say, I was beginning to recognize and to feel very uncomfortable that I had been, for these many years, arguing on the ‘wrong side of history.’

As I processed these new truths, I was making the Faith my own—a gift of God to a prodigal son! I came across and was challenged by a statement made by His Holiness John Paul II which came from Dignitatis Humanae,2 and no. 2467 in the Catechism:

“Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it: “It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons…are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth.”

These words from the Heart of the Church seemed directly aimed at me at this time of my life. I was both attracted by and being drawn to a life consecrated to God and guided by the following of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This attraction first manifested itself to me by a desire on my part to make reparation, in some way, for the many sins of my life. By choosing to live the way that God intends for me to live—by obedience to His will—I can do what the Lord gives me to do to make a troubled world right and, God willing, to save souls. Doesn’t He know the best way to bring this about? Doesn’t He love us and desire our happiness?

“I know that Thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can be thwarted.” (Job 42:2).

Three years after being received into the Catholic Church, Scott Ferrier joined Miles Jesu in 1995. He professed solemn vows in 2003 in Vienna, Austria. He lives in Miles Jesu Men’s Domus Community in Chicago. He is also a Captain for a major airline.