Why did I become a Catholic? The Longer Version Part 4 Becoming a closet Catholic while being a practising Methodist. Cont'd # 2

Part 4 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Christian Prayer, begins with a startling revelation from John 4, the story of the woman at the well.  I have included 2 paragraphs below.

2560    “If you knew the gift of God!” The wonder of prayer is revealed beside the well where we come seeking water: there, Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God’s desire for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.

2561    “You would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Paradoxically our prayer of petition is a response to the plea of the living God: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water!” Prayer is the response of faith to the free promise of salvation and also a response of love to the thirst of the only Son of God.

I had never thought about God thirsting for us all, and especially not for me.  Jesus thirsts for me that I might thirst for Him.  God's love poured into my soul through this truth and I was lost in grateful wonder for a couple of hours.  The rest of the section on prayer is great, too.  And the Catechism is not dull or dry reading.  You can tell it was written by people with a love for God.

The Lord also provided me with a group of brothers with similar interests and we read books on prayer like Letters from the Desert by Carlo Carretto, a brother, and With Open Hands by Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest.

Our church library also had a book by an Orthodox bishop, Anthony Bloom, called Beginning to Pray which is a good entry level book on prayer.

As I mentioned in  my last post I found the prayer/holy cards handy to carry around in a pocket and to pull out and meditate on the prayers and pictures while talking to God and directing my attention to Him.  And there were many little shirt or pants pocket-size devotional books that focused on one's relationship with God.  These were very handy to carry around and pull out and use when one had a moment of free time.

Another thing I was finding out was that being Catholic meant joining a very large family that transcends space, time and even death.  But more about that later.