Why did I become a Catholic? Adopting a view on baptism vs believing in my baptism

Another milestone in my journey towards the Catholic Church was adopting a view on baptism.

As I studied Eastern Orthodoxy in Oregon and then Catholicism in Colorado, I discovered that they believed that the sacraments actually confer what they represent or signify, that they are channels or means of God's grace and baptism is just one of seven sacraments in those churches.  So the Eastern Orthodox and Catholics believe that God faithfully works through the sacraments to actually change people's lives!  Most Protestant churches and groups only observe two of them, baptism and the Lord's supper or Communion.  Some don't observe any, such as the Quakers and the Salvation Army.

Protestants have a wide range of views on baptism as to the mode (sprinkling, full immersion, pouring), timing (infancy and believers or believers only), what it signifies, what it accomplishes and whether it is necessary or not.

I was baptized twice, once as an infant in the Presbyterian church by sprinkling and once as an adult by full immersion in water in order to join an American Baptist church after I had become a "believer" through a "born again" experience.

After my conversion experience at the age of twenty, I sort of rejected my Presbyterian roots which regarded baptism as an equivalent to circumcision, a sign of the New Covenant to be applied to the children of believers, incorporating them into the Body of Christ, the church.  They point to the households being baptized in the New Testament for Scriptural support as well as the practices of the early church in the first centuries after the New Testament period.

When my wife and I wanted to join an American Baptist church a few years after my conversion and they required a believer's, full immersion (dunking) baptism, I consented to be baptized again and more or less adopted the Baptist view for convenience sake but not because I was convinced of it.  It was a public profession of faith but really didn't do anything according to their view.  A lot of non-Baptist churches hold the post-conversion, by-immersion, profession of faith view as well.  And so for quite a few years, I considered my 2nd baptism to be the valid one with a kind of pragmatic "whatever!?" attitude.  I mean I knew the doctrinal arguments of the various Protestant groups and could argue them convincingly to others but I sort of placed myself "above" them so to speak.

This "whatever" attitude is very prevalent among Christians today. 

Some adopt this attitude because they don't really want to learn and wrestle with concepts, issues, doctrines and the like.  They have sort of a "hakuna matata", "no worries" philosophy.

Others adopt the attitude because they believe that if we believe something strongly we are going to fight with others who don't believe it.  And it is true, it does happen and it can be violent.  We probably have all experienced this truth in our own lives and we see it in history.

Others adopt the attitude as interested but uninvolved, uncommitted observers.  I always wanted to be like Spock in Star Trek and cock one eyebrow and say "interesting" but without getting worked up about things.  So I gravitated towards this group and way of relating more than to the other ways.

There is another way however and that is the way of Love.

During my time searching for a people, a way of life that could help me actually walk with Jesus, I received a Bible from my mother that her father (my grandfather) had given to me when I was baptized in the Presbyterian Church on my 1st birthday.  She had hung on to it.  It was a Revised Standard Version in mint condition.  My grandfather had written a note in it to me.  "To Howard, on the day he was presented to the Lord, from his Granddaddy".  My parents and my grandfather had presented me to the Lord on that day.  Hmmm...  That was their understanding of what they were doing having me baptized as an infant.  I had been offered up to the Lord.  And they were doing it because they loved me and they thought baptism mattered and that I mattered.  They wanted the best for me and so they offered me up to the Lord, the Creator and Giver of life through baptism, initiating me into the Body of Christ.

Then I learned that the Catholic Church believed many things happened at my baptism.

So stay tuned.