As a rule, Josephine has only just become catholic: her baptism was at Easter. But faith has played a role in her life for a very long time. As Josephine herself summarizes it: “Faith has always walked beside me, but with my baptism, it is as if from now on it will walk with me forever.”
The priest as an example
As a child, Josephine moved to Limburg, to a place where she and her family were treated as outsiders. “We were ‘the other,’ the ‘weird people.’ But the priest was the only one who didn’t see us that way. He told me a lot about faith and conveyed that everyone is a child of God: everyone deserves respect and love. Because of that, the love of faith felt very real to me: I was unconditionally regarded as a worthy human being in a period when that was not a given,” she says.
God has always revealed Himself in Josephine’s life in this way every now and then. Sometimes with smaller gestures, sometimes with very grand ones. But this man of God is the most important reason Josephine decided to be baptized. Sadly, he passed away a few months before her baptism. “I would have loved for him to have witnessed my baptism. He died on Epiphany. I attach symbolic value to that. It is an important day in the liturgical year, on which gifts take center stage. He gave me so many gifts that it seems fitting that he died on that day. In a similar way, time and again, things happen in my life where I cannot help but think that I am being carried by God,” Josephine says.
Kinship with the faith
Josephine prepared extensively for her baptism. She is taking a Bible course, attends Mass regularly, and wants to know more about various saints and stories from the Bible. During that preparation, she saw many things happen that prove to her that faith is a beautiful enrichment in life.
An example is how she learned about Joseph, and with him, what the word ‘family bond’ can entail. “You don’t have to be a blood relative to someone to fulfill a certain family role. Joseph was not a blood relative of Jesus, but he worked hard to be a good father figure to Him,” Josephine explains. “That touched me deeply, because I experience something similar within the faith and the church community. You don’t have to be a blood relative to be able to mean something to others. You only need to care about people.”
Stability in universal love
Josephine also finds charity in the community of Saint Catherine. “Everyone respects one another, listens to each other , and is there for each other in difficult times. That provides a certain stability in a universal love that I have not experienced before. That why is it’s terrible to me that I sometimes have to justify and even defend myself because I am religious and go to church. I have heard it so often: ‘but do you condone the abuse in the church then?’, ‘You are a smart girl, what are you letting yourself be told there?’ and ‘What is there for you to get out of faith?’ That way, the church is portrayed as something very superfluous and nasty. Of course I do not condone the abuse, geez! And what I get out of faith is simple: love of my neighbors, the ability to grow personally, and the presence of a community that cares about me. But people do not understand that, because they often have a very black-and-white view of the church. That in and of itself is not bad, until they start judging it without understanding the bigger picture of what faith and the accompanying sense of community can also give. Because I am sure they wouldn't say such things if they knew that a faith community like ours can take away the feeling of loneliness that so many people deal with these days.
‘I’ and ‘we all’
Because she’s deepened her faith, Josephine looks at the bigger picture in a comforting way when it comes to grief and suffering. “It is tempting to think ‘why me?’ when you have experienced intense things or when something bad happens to you. But I realize more and more that everyone to some extent carries trauma or struggles with something. There’s a skeleton in every cupboard, as the saying goes. Everyone knows that on a superficial level, but I increasingly see it as an invitation to use that to my advantage. Then it is no longer: ‘why me?’ but ‘that’s all of us.’ I am part of a larger whole. In life, but also within a group of people. If you embrace the connection that creates, there are endless ways to believe, to trust, and to give love.”
Feel free to join us for English mass, every Saturday at 17.15h. St. Catharine's church is located at Kruisbroedershof 4 5211 GX 's-Hertogenbosch.