A chance phone call for help led to Megan Headley’s becoming Catholic. (Photo by John Feister)
Welcome, Megan! Welcome to the Catholic community, where we gather around the Lord’s table together, where we help one another to live the inspiration that God gives us.
Those words sum up what Megan Headley heard from Glenmary’s Holy Family parish community in Macon County, Tenn., during the last few years as she was becoming Catholic. She found a caring, faithful community, and felt God calling her there.
For this past year she has been a proud, fully initiated member of the Catholic Church. Megan’s journey into the Church started with an observation. “I was working at the health department doing social work,” she recalls. “And I had a family that needed help paying the rent. I had been calling churches, the help center, stuff like that.” She was having no luck.
“I saw the Catholic church [on a list of local resources]. It was kind of my last call, and I just remember praying for the first time in forever.” She bargained with God: “I was like, ‘Hey, if you help me with this family, I’ll go to Mass this Sunday.’”
She heard the pastor, Glenmary Father Vic Subb, reply, simply, “‘We would love to help you out.’ So, of course, I came to Mass—and I made a good offering,” she adds, with a laugh.
“That was how it started. So I really felt like it was a sign God was saying, ‘I’m here to help and I’m here to love you. Now, come.’ Yeah, that was how it started,” she repeats, slowly. “You might call it a God moment—unforgettable.” She was 30.
Rite of Initiation
Each year at this time, many Glenmary parishes receive many people who are becoming Catholic. The yearlong program of preparation and welcome for these new parishioners culminates at the Easter Vigil, the night we begin the Easter season. How people come into the Church, though, starts long before that. And the Holy Spirit works in each one, in his or her own way. The usual process of formation is called the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, RCIA for short.
Megan met with a group of fellow catechumens—newcomers praying and being educated in the faith—over the course of the year. In Glenmary’s small parishes, these groups tend to be small as well; Megan’s group was five.
During that time, she reflected on and shared on her life journey, a journey which brought her to the doors of the Church. “I think I’ve spent most of my life realizing there was a void,” she says. Her childhood home was anything but stable. Both of her parents were addicts, she says. She was trying to fill her void in all the wrong ways. “I was trying to stuff things into my life as a child or adolescent, I guess. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I smoked a lot of pot. I hung out with the wrong people. My life could have ended up very different if I didn’t have good people in my life to support me.” She had dropped out of high school.
“I think that having kids was really the turning point of my void.” She thought, “O.K., you’ve gotta get yourself together now. There’s not a lot of other options.” She thought back on her school experience, on her job as a social worker helping people in the community. She kept pondering: “Now what are you gonna do with all of it? How are you gonna make it make sense?” “And I think that’s when God came in.”
She was one of the majority in Glenmary areas who aren’t a member of any church. She started attending Mass, after her encounter with the Church’s generosity. Eventually, Father Vic invited her to join the RCIA group that was forming.
Time of questions
“It was really helpful as far as my decision making,” she says. “And they made it a safe space so I could ask questions without feeling judged if there was something that I didn’t agree with. I was like, ‘Well, why do we do this?’” She felt free to ask hard questions. “Then I was given explanations that made sense to me, that I could piece together with the Bible.”
Because her experience was at the height of the pandemic, RCIA was via Zoom. This past year it’s been in person again. She admits she is kind of jealous of that, but, on the other hand, it worked well for a busy mom. There was a catechetical textbook that the group used to work through various dimensions of becoming Catholic.
“Anything you could think of, it was talked about [in that book]. I didn’t leave with a lot of questions. Let’s put it that way.” She laughs when she considers how thorough it was!
Then she was baptized last Easter. Alleluia!, the Church surrounding her proclaimed. “It was really exciting! I was really nervous building up to it. I told my godmother, Marge, ‘It’s kind of like getting married, in a way.’ It had that same kind of buildup feeling of this is something that I really want.
“When it happens, it’s very fulfilling. I remember feeling just an overwhelming sense of joy. I held it together, but that night when I got home, I cried tears of joy.”
Today, things are different for Megan than they were before that fateful call to Father Vic. “It’s like I found the community that was a missing piece of me, like a puzzle piece,” she says. “I have a sense of completion.”
Every Glenmary missioner’s dream is to share the fullness of the Gospel with people in counties new to the Catholic Church. Eventually, they hope to gather a faith community and establish a permanent Catholic Church. That starts by trusting the Holy Spirit will work, one person at a time. It continues in public witness, proving to the community that you are prayerful, that you and other Catholics are giving and caring in the community. There’s proof in Megan Headley, praying her rosary at the end of the day, work behind her and children asleep. She’s looking forward to Mass this weekend amidst her new community of faith.
-By John Feister
This story first appeared in the Spring 2023 Glenmary Challenge magazine.