“Who do you say that I am?” welled up inside me as I stood at the foot of Mount Hermon, in the Caesarea Philippi region of the Holy Land, where our Lord asked this question of his Apostles.
It was a pivotal “God moment” for me in January of this year, not only because I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was there, on hallowed ground, but also because it was precisely my answer to this question that kept me from converting from Islam to Christianity for nine years.
I was born in Iran and raised in the Shia tradition of Islam. I came to the United States as a high school exchange student. Because of the revolution in Iran, I was not able to return to Iran for many years. I was initially attracted to Catholicism because of the Church’s teaching on marriage as an exclusive and permanent covenant, a holy sacrament. This doctrine resonated as truth to me.
Because I wanted my children to know God, I continued to explore Catholicism. I noticed a lot of important commonalities. I believed in one loving, merciful, omniscient, omnipotent Creator. I believed that God “breathed on Mary” and she became pregnant with Jesus. I was taught to honor Mary and to revere Jesus as a perfect, pure, sinless prophet. I was taught about the importance of discipline of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. I believed in eternity after death, the existence of heaven and hell, resurrection of the body on judgment day, and was taught that I could rely on the intercession of angels and saints and to pray for the dead. The use of water, incense and candles was familiar to me.
However, there were major departures from my beliefs; the most troubling one was the Catholic insistence on the divinity of Jesus. In my mind, the mystery of the Trinity did not compute and was a major obstacle to my conversion. I was very young and did not have robust apologetics against the divinity of Christ, but it felt as if it was an insult to the almighty Creator to become a mere creature. It seemed impossible, unnecessary and absurd. The more I thought about this, the surer I became that it was not good logic; “three in one, one in three is just bad mathematics,” I would exclaim arrogantly. This intense intellectual acrobatics was happening during one of the darkest, most desperate times of my life. I had been brought to my knees, overwhelmed with life’s struggles and needed God, but I could not cross the threshold to knowing him on my own.
In the ninth year of RCIA (now OCIA), in my desperation, I felt a shift from “I know Jesus cannot be God” to “OK, I give up! I don’t know who Jesus is, but I long to know.” I realized years later, that because God honors our free will, he restrains his own power and doesn’t impose. My surrender was the invitation he had been waiting for. The answer to my prayer came as a dream in which I saw Jesus and I begged him to tell me what to do. He put his hand on my head and heat went through my body as he said, “it’s so simple, just believe in me!” The next day, I called my priest and told him that I believed in Jesus and that I wanted to be baptized into the Church at Easter Vigil, on March 25, 1989.
I am deeply grateful to God for my Islamic formation, which taught me to worship God and love the Blessed Mother and look up to Jesus. I join the Church in acknowledging “the rays of truth” and holding Islam “with esteem,” as a monotheistic, fellow Abrahamic faith. I am passionate about interfaith dialog.
I still don’t fully grasp the mystery of the Holy Trinity, but who does? I have grown to believe that God is perfect love; his essence is relationship; God is one, but not alone. He is a Triunity. He is transcendent, but, out of sheer goodness, chooses to humble himself and be accessible.
Who do I say that Jesus is? He is my savior. He walks with me closely and saves me daily in the details of my life. He shows me to seek to live in the Father’s will; he teaches me to not be afraid of, but rather to be a friend of, the cross. There is no crown without the cross. This gives meaning to my suffering. Jesus is my trusted friend, he is in my corner, wants the best for me, and calls me to be holy, a saint.
Why am I Catholic? It’s simple: Jesus, the Son of the living God, established this Church and personally invited me to believe in him.
Roughead, 63, has four children and six grandchildren. A member of Holy Name of Jesus in Medina who is active in small group ministry there, she is retired from a career in corporate research and development and is a Gallup-certified professional coactive coach.
