Another Installment of The Story of How I Became a Catholic and Why I Wouldn’t Choose Another Church

I’m actually Catholic because of a crow.

I was working full time as a babysitter for the three children of a woman who had just opened a store across the street from her husband’s pharmacy. One day, the children and I were playing in the living room. I looked up from our game and noticed a crow perched on the deck railing. It seemed to be watching us through the big glass doors. That’s unusual, I thought, and I walked over to the doors to see what rodent, perhaps, it was hoping to dine on. There was nothing there but the crow, who cocked his head and continued to look at me steadily. Now, I’d seen enough Alfred Hitchcock movies that I wasn’t real keen on actually going out on the porch to chase it away. So we just watched each other. It was a good twenty minutes before it flew away.

A couple of days later, I was driving home from the same job. The road I traveled to get back to the highway was wooded and there wasn’t a shoulder. I drove up on a crow standing at the edge of the pavement and I didn’t bother to change course for him; birds always fly out of the way in time. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I passed, and that crow still sat complacently at the edge of the pavement. It hadn’t flown, though it had been only inches from my tires. And it, too, appeared to be watching me. Okay, I thought to myself, this is getting kind of weird.

There was no google in those days. If you wanted to find out about something, you had to go find a book, which meant a trip to the library. Back then, even small libraries were well stocked with a broad selection of research materials. What I needed to know about was these crows. What did it mean if a person was being stalked by crows? In a book on the nature symbolism of Native American Indians, I found an answer even more perplexing than the question: crows were an omen, a sign of things to come, neither good nor bad.

I have to tell you now that my mother thought it was somehow wrong to “force” a parent’s religion on a child, but she wasn’t anti-religion. I think she hoped a little that we would find a faith, for she used to tell us that when we grew up, we could try different churches on and find the one we liked. The very idea of that was so daunting, though, and I latched onto these crows and ran with them. I read book after book on various nature-based religions, the most compelling of which was a wiccan book called The Spiral Dance. Those ideas stayed with me and influenced me for a couple of years, and maybe they still do, somewhat, as I see in the Blessed Virgin everything that drew me to the wiccan goddess. In any case, those ideas had the very real effect of opening me up to the God I’d all but rejected, so don’t knock it.

(Milking time again!)