Spiritual Autobiography

I am a lawyer, a journalist, a teacher, and a writer. I am an amateur photographer and microwave chef. I am a sunset mountain jogger and whimsical world traveler. I am a critical thinker. I am a true friend. But most of all, I am a child of God.

Thus begins my spiritual autobiography. As in Colorado climber Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place and as the Marian apparition appeared to the shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, I am a believer through witness of God’s presence through the tough times in my life.

I have sensed the presence of a guardian angel despite my identity as a freethinker and as a skeptic who is highly intellectual. I have read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God, which are Protestant books that should be required reading for every Catholic.

The process of becoming a lawyer is painstaking, because it involves the bar exam. The exam spans two entire days, twelve hours total, with one-hour lunch breaks each day. It requires intensive study at a consistent pace for two months or so. My rational intelligence told me that studying hard would lead to a successful result.

I failed the exam six times, despite feeling like I was getting closer and closer to passing. The New York bar’s first-time pass rate is about 75%, the second-time pass rate is about 50%, and the third-time pass rate is about 33%. Each time you take the exam, your odds of passing go down. But I worked with incredible tutors who told me to have faith and to get into the right psychological mindset. There is an element of test-taking that we cannot control, like whether we had studied the exact material that shows up on the test and whether we are in the right frame of mind.

When I was taking it for the seventh time, I followed the suggestion of my late father to say an Our Father and three Hail Mary’s as the exam pamphlets were being handed out. That was the time that I passed with a high enough score to waive into four other states. Was it a coincidence or was my prayer answered? My experience made me suspect that I had encountered a miracle, with some aspect of magic that reflects that which I could not control. This experience made me embrace religion.

Deacon Dan Welter of Holy Name Cathedral, a retired judge turned clergyman who has become my Spiritual Director, has encouraged me to seek out what God’s will and plan are for me and to follow that, rather than to be purely motivated by my own will, which is itself a force of nature.

I had taken up going to a program called Alpha at St. Clement’s Parish, which is for a combination and union of seekers, skeptics, and tried and true believers. I told the people there that I had been raised Catholic but felt frustrated with God for not answering my prayers. How did they respond? There are three answers to a prayer: yes, not now, and that God has a better plan.