“Are you coming to the 9 o’clock service with us?” I asked my 22-year-old son. It was a Saturday night, a month or so after he had moved home after graduating from college.
“Actually, I’m going to check out the Catholic church,” he replied.
I paused. The fact that he wanted to attend the Catholic church was somewhat surprising, but not shocking. After all, his girlfriend of three years was Catholic. She lived a few hours away, having moved there to attend graduate school.
I felt disappointed that he would rather attend the Catholic church alone than go to our Protestant church. I wondered if he had rejected his father, me, and our traditions.
I’ve been excited to have my son back home again
When my son moved back home after graduating last spring, we welcomed this bonus time with him as we readjusted to sharing a house again.
Gone was the gangly teen who left home at age 18, replaced by a young man focused on his new career. It struck me as surreal that we could chat about work like peers over the dinner table, then seconds later, I’d be nagging him to hang up his towel from the bathroom floor.
It felt like I had my son back, but something had changed.
He was never interested in faith as a teen
While our family had always attended church, finding support and meaning there, my son had not been enthusiastic about going, especially as a teenager. He never wanted to attend the youth group, saying he didn’t click with the other kids. Later, when we dropped him off at college armed with a list of local churches and student fellowship groups to check out, he didn’t speak of them.
He seemed to wander away from his faith for a while, or at least let it simmer in the background.
That changed when he moved home after college. He started coming to church with us again. It felt like another way my son came back to me. But after checking out the Catholic church in town, he started attending mass there regularly.
I saw that my son was taking his faith journey more seriously, and it made me quietly pleased. Still, it continued to bother me that he was no longer attending the same church as my husband and me.
I realized he’s charting his own path as an adult
“Where’s the big guy?” our pastor inquired about our son a couple of months ago.
When I shared the news that my son was attending the Catholic church in town, our pastor nodded thoughtfully. I followed this up with the happy news that my son had proposed to his girlfriend and they were now engaged. When I mentioned his fiancée was Catholic, our pastor broke into a smile.
He expressed genuine support for my son attending a different church, emphasizing how important it was for our son to pursue a deeper relationship with God at the same place his fiancée worshiped. It would only make him a better husband, he concluded.
I felt a range of emotions: surprise, relief, and happiness. My pastor flipped my perspective, and rightly so. I realized my son wasn’t rejecting us; rather, he was pursuing his independence and preparing for a life with his fiancée.
He wasn’t walking away from us, but using the seeds his dad and I may have planted all those years we took him to church to grow his faith along a path that belonged to him.
My son and his fiancée are planning their wedding for later next year. They’ll marry in a Catholic church, and I will be blessed to watch them commit to each other there. I’m grateful he found his faith again, and that what once felt like him drifting away was really him growing toward his own adult faith and future.
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