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The oldest son that turned out to be the lost son. 

The Conversion story of Petra Maass

 

We often read the story of the lost son that came back to his father after things ended up going very wrong for him out in the wild world. Even though we are glad for him when he finally returns home and his father welcomes him back with great joy, we shake our heads about how careless the young man was. Some of us even resonate with the feelings of the young man’s older brother, who when he returns from the field, gets angry about the celebrations for his reckless little brother, while he – who had stayed at home the whole time and cared for the family – gets no recognition. But herein lies our mistake – we are all the lost son, the runaway that sinned, and who, somewhere along our road in life has to make the decision to return to our Father.

 

At school, many of my friends quickly developed opinions about religious matters, which they sometimes expressed quite loudly. I felt that if I just stayed in the church in which I was raised, and believed and prayed a little bit harder, I would also get to such strong convictions. I always convinced myself that I would be like the older brother in the story of the lost son – always loyal, always responsible. I loyally went to church, read Bible every night, I was a group leader at ACSA, and even took a bit of pride in winning prizes for school Bible knowledge quizzes. Still, the restlessness stayed with me – even though I sometimes felt a pure connection with God during church services at Easter or Pentecost, something was still missing, something I interpreted as “I am never enough”. My fear that this feeling would become permanent started growing.

 

After completing my studies in Cape Town, I moved to Bloemfontein in 2017, and became involved with the Dutch Reformed church in the area. In this specific church, I found some comfort and for the first time began hearing God’s voice. Especially on days where I felt figuratively invisible and worthless, the minister’s opening prayer which often ended with “the Lord sees you here where you are”, touched me deeply. Over the next few years, I experienced several holy moments of growth in faith. During the uncertainties of COVID time, the minister’s repeating of Psalm 18 “with Your help I can advance against a troop, with my God I can scale a wall”, gave me courage. During a Pentecost song service, the message that God’s light shines through us exactly there where we, as clay pots, are broken, comforted me. On Good Friday, the sound of nails being hammered into wood caused my heart to ache and shrink in guilt. Little did I know then, but these were just the start of the growth pains in my religious life.

 

In 2024, I actively tried to get more involved at church, but sadly both my attempts at joining the “young working people” prayer group and attending the communion service on the Thursday before Easter left me feeling broken. I could not feel a deep connection with God, and like the brother of the lost son, I felt as if I received no reward for all my effort.

 

At roughly the same time, a friend recommended that I make a deal with God – something simple like me praying more for 40 days and then waiting to hear from Him. The friend also gave me a rosary, which I immediately felt a connection to, even though I had no idea of the “correct” prayers or the meaning attached to it. After a week, it was not going well – my relationship with my family was straining under the isolation and depression that descended upon me. After another week, I learned the Fatima prayer of the rosary and began obsessively praying it whenever I had a moment of quiet in my thoughts. After a few days, I got on my knees and prayed the rosary for the first time with two of my friends, a moment so overwhelming that I was teary and too tired to even speak for some time afterward.

 

At this stage, becoming a Catholic was not even a thought that crossed my mind. I was only borrowing a method of praying from them. Once Ascension approached, I felt the deep need to be in a holy place with other faithful Christians. My own church did not have a service that day, so I went to one in a neighbouring area - with my rosary tightly clutched in my hand. I will not go into much more detail other than to say that the service greatly upset me – it had less reverence than a hangout around a braai, and I spent most of the time with my head hanging low and softly praying the rosary. When my friends heard this story, they insisted on taking me to the Catholic mass that Saturday evening. The church was small and we arrived a little late, so my expectations were quite low at this stage. And then, in the silence and with the smell of old wood in the air, it softly happened – the moment my knees hit the cushioning of the kneelers and I began praying the Our Father, I felt a shift. Was this what I had been looking for?

 

We went to mass again on the Sunday before Pentecost. In the build-up to Pentecost Sunday itself, my friend assigned me a series of Catholic prayers to pray daily and sometimes even hourly(!). Being the faithful student that I am, I prayed these without doubt and thought “here comes my big moment on Pentecost Sunday”. On the Sunday, however, my disappointment was tremendous when, having been so exhausted from the regular and emotionally-loaded praying, I did not have my anticipated lightning strike moment. My friend’s simple reaction was “that’s not how it works”. Despite the disappointment, I continued attending the masses at the Catholic Church and I began to realise that I was experiencing something I had never had before – God’s presence in both the physical and spiritual space of the church. Sometimes, it was so overwhelming that I considered donating money to the church to fix the water damage that my tears were likely causing on the wooden floor. At the same time, I had more and more serious and deeply theological debates with my friends who had Catholic theology backgrounds – some of these debates lasting till 4 o’clock in the morning. In these discussions, I quickly built a fair knowledge of the Catholic view of many things – not through faith alone; sins do not only affect the sinner but also the community around him; and God rewards the sincerity of heart, and does not punish the warped and crooked ways our good deeds appear as a result of our own inadequacies.

 

In July 2024, my friends and I visited the Congregation of the Oratory of St Phillip Neri in Oudtshoorn. We were convinced to join the holy hour in the chapel for Eucharistic adoration – something I have never even heard of. The advice was to just pray for an hour and to remember that God can let miracles happen. In the oratory garden, there is a sign that reads “God’s first language is silence”. I think it was exactly in the silence of that holy hour that the realisation hit me that I was going to officially join the Catholic Church. By the end of July, I joined the local RCIA along with two of my friends, in preparation for receiving the sacrament of confirmation during the Easter weekend of 2025.

 

At this stage, I thought I was well on my way – the good brother of the lost son who simply continued to do the right thing. Little did I know that God was far from done with me. For the first time in a long time, I had friends who were closer to me than family and made the weight of the strained relationship with my own family easier to bear, I had moved into a new house and for the first time bought furniture to have a “grown-up” home, and I applied for a promotion at work. The blissfulness of this time was fantastic and I realised how easily my thought patterns fitted in with the Catholic teachings and traditions and how I was growing in the faith. Then a series of setbacks hit in October – I am informed that the owner of my new place was putting the house up for sale and I would soon need to move again, one of my closest friends becomes estranged from me due to struggles in his own religious life, and my relationship with my best friend is pushed almost to breaking point due to our differences in opinion on how the RCIA process is going. One night, this brings me to one of the darkest days in my faith journey. With running tears and a heart that is ripping apart, I lay on the floor of my room that night praying the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, over and over and over. Again, I expect a lightning strike moment – either in feeling instantly better, or that God should just wipe me from the face of the earth. But the moment does not come, and sleep silently eventually overwhelms me.

 

In the pain of the days and weeks that follow, I discover the writings of both Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. These two saints, who coincidentally were good friends in their lifetime, both wrote about the spiritual maturing of a Christian in the faith. St Teresa used the image of God being in the depth of our souls, living in a crystal palace, with us moving and growing in faith from the dirty, noisy outside of the palace, going from room to room – from occasionally praying to constantly praying – closer and closer to the pristine, blissful centre and union with God. At the stage where St Teresa describes moving from faith that needs a lot of effort to grow to that which grows effortlessly from God’s power, she unfortunately becomes a little vague, offering little advice other than constant prayer. Fortunately, St John’s writings supplement this a little. He describes this period as the “dark night of the soul” – a time of spiritual dryness when it is difficult to feel God’s presence and to persevere in spiritual things for which we seem to not be rewarded for our efforts. The writings of these two saints carried me through the next few months – through the search for a new house, through the loneliness of the end of friendships and the struggle to maintain others, and the resistance to the temptation to run away from the efforts of becoming a Catholic.

 

In January 2025, I am blessed with the opportunity to live and work at the oratory at Oudtshoorn for two weeks. Despite my doubts about whether this would be good for me, I find myself in the oratory garden on the first day, in front of the stature of St Judas Thaddeus – patron saint of difficult and impossible causes. There where I stand, I cannot stop myself from laughing – months earlier when I was here, I prayed for things that have since broken apart so badly that they would not even be a possibility anymore, and now I could not think of something else to pray for – not even something impossible. I walk away and pray “let me just hear God’s calling for me”.

 

My time at the oratory was so spiritually healing. From the early morning holy mass, the work in the soup kitchen, and spending every free moment in the oratory's cool library, the idea starts forming in my head that God does not expect only big and exceptional things to reward us for, but also every single small and ordinary part of our everyday thoughts and deeds, especially where a group of the faithful are together. In the hot afternoons when the January heat of Oudtshoorn is at its worst, I often found myself in the garden, which reminded me of Gethsemane, and like Jesus I pray every day “let Your will be done”, but I spend as little time as possible near the statue of St Judas Thaddeus. In the silence of the oratory, I again become acutely aware of God’s presence, but still struggle with the silence itself – why can I not hear Him? It was only once my knees hit the cushions of the kneelers in the chapel during the first holy hour and the incense fills the cool room that I look up at the altar and realise that in that holy hour that I attended months ago, I did not know that I would ever be so blessed as to be able to return to this chapel. But God did. And the deep prayer that rises within me is “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”.

 

At Oudtshoorn, I truly found my spiritual family, and for the first time I could live a Catholic life in my own language and cultural context. The pleasure of sharing something with each of the priests – either a light joke or a serious discussion – heals many of my spiritual wounds. In the last week of my stay at the oratory, I repeatedly pray for a sign that God wants me to stay there – I was ready to give up my work and life in Bloemfontein immediately. But over and over again, the feeling comes to me that I cannot stay here – that there is still something in Bloemfontein that is part of my calling. So, with a heavy heart, I returned to Bloemfontein and work and the RCIA process and I again feel the intense physical loneliness.

 

During the Easter weekend this year, I finally received the sacrament of confirmation, and I am now officially a member of the one, holy and apostolic Catholic Church. As part of the preparation for this, I went to a priest for the sacrament of confession. Of all the things I expected from it, the story of the lost son was not one of them. After going through my list of sins, the priest answers with “heaven rejoices over you, because you were the lost child that came home”. My first reaction is of disappointment, because I am the lost son’s good, reliable older brother, but then the words of my own act of contrition hit me “I have sinned against the Father”. It is only during the homily on the following Sunday, when a different priest repeats these same words, that I realise – we all think we are the good brother and that we have the right to be angry when we do not get a reward – but we are not! We are all the lost son who left the Father’s home, each in our own reckless and childish manner. We are all the son that out there in the cruel world had to realise that we cannot continue on our own, and that even if we come back to live as slaves of the Father we would be better off. But herein is the lightning strike – God welcomes us back, not as slaves, but as His beloved children on whom He still takes mercy and restores in love to a place of honour in His house. We were dead and through Christ came back to life. We were lost and were found again.

 

The build-up to the Saturday night on which fifteen of us received the sacrament of confirmation during the Easter Vigil was huge, but full of precious moments. During Thursday’s holy mass of the Last Supper of the Lord, I could experience Jesus’ humanity and humility when my friends got selected to have their feet washed by the priest. During the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, I experience a crumb of the pain of Christ’s long road to Golgotha with not only the weight of the cross on His shoulders, but also that of all our sins that we place upon Him. During the stripping of the altar on Friday evening, the coldness of loneliness enwraps me as we silently walk out of the church, though the glimmer of hope of the forthcoming resurrection is also still there. During the lighting of the fire for the Easter Vigil, I see the child-like joy in the eyes of the youngest member of our RCIA group in anticipation for her baptism. During the spreading of the candlelight in the cathedral, I remember all those that kept my spiritual flame alight. During the anointing by the bishop, I try to remember to say “Amen” at the right time. As I walk back to my seat alone with my little candle, I know that I am no longer really walking alone, but that Jesus is with me. During the Eucharist, my prayer repeats “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”. And lastly – when the fog of the late evening settles over the chapel at about the same time as the holy mass ends, I realise that even though I am the lost child and I am not nearly out of my dark night of the soul, and even though I still struggle to hear God sometimes, His first language is silence and that in that language He says to both the lost son and his brother

 

“My child, you are always with me, and everything that is mine, is yours”.