Oliver Pappas

Right above my desk is an image depicting the scene from Matthew 14. Peter was waist deep in rough water and Jesus is before him standing on the waves reaching out to a sinking Peter. It’s a cut-out from the church bulletin from two weeks ago. Reflecting back on where I wandered in my faith, there have always been moments where Christ was reaching out that hand—sometimes I took it, sometimes I ignored it. But this is the story.

I am a cradle-Catholic, my family went to mass every Sunday growing up, my siblings and I altar served, my mom taught the Sunday morning Children’s liturgies, and my dad was always in the pew making sure we were following along in our missals. But outside of these things, we rarely discussed faith in the home. Sure, we prayed before meals, but we never read scripture or prayed a rosary together. So even though we went to mass regularly, we weren’t catechized, and this left a lot of unanswered questions.

Skip ahead to the military. Through basic training and advanced individual training I went to mass, but more for sentimental reasons than much else. It reminded me of home, of family, and of the foundation the Catholic Church provided. But in every practical sense, I was going through the motions that I knew from my childhood. This trend continued into my early college years, trying to navigate a demanding major, ROTC, and the peer pressures of greek life and hook-up culture that ravage college campuses and beyond. As a self-concerned sophomore studying biology, my studies advanced and my faith dwindled. Suddenly the Bible became a great moral storybook which didn’t really have any value past the lessons from its characters. I started reading Dawkins, and looking for answers elsewhere, and flirting with Agnosticism.

Were it not for a conversation with my dad, I would have written off religion and Christianity altogether. It’s been my experience that God places people in our lives when we need them most—for me, this was Lauren. I remember telling her where I was in my rejection of faith, and she told me she would be praying for me over the summer. And that summer between sophomore and junior year, I know she did. Something compelled me to keep going to mass now and again, albeit just going through the motions—I’m convinced it was her prayers. Until one day after mass early in my junior year, I learned about the Alpha program from our priest, and that it would be running that fall. He told me how much he (a priest!) had learned from it. If you’ve never heard of the Alpha Course, I encourage you to look it up and recommend it to a friend wrestling with their faith. It’s a program designed to help bring people back to Christianity through fellowship and answering fundamental questions like “who were the disciples,” “how to pray,” “who was Jesus,” etc. It was such a wonderful experience, very informative, and provided me with the foundation I had never truly gotten from my childhood. This was the first major upshot of faith in my young adult years.

After Alpha, one of my good friends wanted to become Catholic for her fiancé-to-be so they could be married in a church. Having not taken my own confirmation seriously I felt compelled to see what she was learning, and went to RCIA with her—wholy cow did I learn about Catholicism! And like never before I was struck by the rich history of the Catholic faith, and how deep our doctrine and tradition is. It blew me away. However, I was still working on coming to terms with specific Catholic teachings, and one afternoon at a coffee-shop helped to lay the foundation for one of those teachings—chastity. I was talking to Lauren and she was reading Christopher West’s, Introduction to Theology of the Body. She read me a passage and I laughingly brushed it off with a comment about how the book was making too big a deal about sex. In my mind sex was fun and there wasn’t any further meaning—I still remember the expression on Lauren’s face when I told her this; it was sadness mixed with pitty and disappointment. So what do I do? I get a copy of the book and scour it trying to prove her wrong. And the book changed my life.

I took notes on almost every page and photocopied the pages (because it was a library book), and still have those to this day. Never had I read something so logical and beautiful as the Theology of the Body. This was one of those times I grabbed the hand of Christ as He reached out to me. My perception on men and women and their relationship to one another and to God had never been so clear, and this gave me so much peace, because the world and the media puts so much pressure on young men and women to “put out” and always seek that next hook-up, or hit of pleasure, but that’s not what we’re created for, and that realization has made all the difference.

After college I moved to St. Louis. I was pretty lonely not knowing anyone there. I worked almost constantly, and my faith suffered because of this lack of fellowship and not yet having a strong prayer life. I went to mass weekly, but started thinking about going to a non-denominational church (because I liked the music better, the people seemed cooler, and that’s what all my colleagues did), I still had a long way to go. Again, the Lord saw I was starting to sink and He reached out, putting some people in my life that helped me stay on course, get involved with the diocese, and find young adults my age to grow with.

I’ll remember this summer forever, because there were a lot of body and self-image struggles I was wrestling with. But standing in my room one day, looking in the mirror reciting some affirmations, something suddenly clicked. And in my head I heard, “Oliver, you are a son of the Lord, King of the Universe, and nothing can ever change that. This is your identity, and you are loved.” Gosh, that was a powerful moment, and a big victory against lies of inadequacy. Thanks be to God!

The next 6-months at a military school were a test of my faith and resolve. At times I overcame. Sometimes, I regret to admit, I chose sin. Does the story so far remind you of a roller-coaster? It does to me. Following the half-year training I didn’t quite know what was next, I wasn’t in the best place emotionally, but God (as always) had a plan. I received an assignment at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and before I left felt a tug on my heart to bring a book I was given in college—“To Save 1000 Souls.” And once again embarking on a new season of life, I did so while reading this book, and simultaneously discerning the priesthood.

I’ll tell ya what, God really poured out the blessings during this season. I met the best friends I could ever hope for this summer, they were students at a college just north of the base, and they were filled to the brim with the Holy Spirit. I met one, then another, then another, and just like that game “monkey’s in a barrel” they grabbed my hand, and started pulling me up to their level. The growth that I experienced through them in reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, the Blessed Mother, and the Rosary still leaves me speechless. Closing out 2019 with moving away from these friends left me so on fire, that everything since has been peeling back layer upon layer of faith, each time uncovering something more beautiful and intriguing than the previous.

This brings me to the present moment, mid-way through 2020, still excited as ever, and blessed with friends and connections who are seeking first the kingdom of heaven. And they’re such a blessing. It’s truly amazing to see how God’s hand has guided me at crossroad upon crossroad. Since the beginning of this year, the practice of a nightly examination of conscience has produced so much fruit and allowed me to come to understand both myself and my relationship with Christ in a whole new way. If there’s one takeaway in everything I’ve learned from the road so far it’s this, an unexamined life is not worth living.