Part 1: The paradigm change

Dr. Scott Hahn is a theologian who once was a Presbyterian minister before he converted to the RC Church in the mid-eighties.  His wife Kimberley, a mother of six, is also a theologian. She said: Protestants have 3 problems with Roman Catholics: it is Mary, Mary and Mary. I fully agree with her. Mary was for me a major stumbling block in the 20 years that I met Roman Catholics on a regular basis. It took me time to understand that the RC doesn´t teach or wants that people worship Maria, even when some individual people do that! I did find people who earnestly pleaded with Maria to talk to Jesus about a need. They didn´t worship Maria but asked her to pray for them, just like we as missionaries who worked in Thailand have asked people to pray for us. I have learned to accept a different way of looking at the Bible and how to translate this in my ministry within the RC Church. I will discuss this later.

Powerful Peace and the Brain

In the late seventies while studying Educational Psychology I noticed that a student couldn’t learn unless there is an inner calmness. This stimulated my observations as I had seen the relaxing attitude of people who personally experienced the peace of God calming them. This also made it understandable why people who know a lot of factual information, are unable to have that knowledge affecting a change in their behavior. Inner tensions and stressful relations serve as breaks in their healing process.

I had a client who I encouraged to also use the English language based program in the USA in which serious hurt clients are taught to first give attention to safety[2]. It helps them to develop life-strategies to live in the hear and now. They encourage meditation, which creates a sense of calmness. People are given a choice to follow the yoga type of creating inner calmness or to use their own private way of ´finding inner calmness´. We both knew that Gods peace can go way deeper than any peace humans can create for themselves. This peace has helped me as well. It enabled me to face hundreds of ugly stories and still be able to sleep well.

The tragedy is that severely hurt people often keep re-traumatizing themselves through re-living these situations again and again. The last thing I want to happen in my helping approach is that people face issues they can´t handle. In general, I start out with sharing: “don´t dig into the past, unless you have a good archeological tour guide.” For me, that person is Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. In Philippians 4:6-8 we are invited to share:

“All our needs and concerns with thanksgiving to God and the peace of God will protect our hearts and minds”.

If people can experience this peace, then facing the results of traumatic situations (and possibly the actual events which caused that trauma), becomes less problematic. I too need that peace of God in order to handle the ugly stories that I hear, even when they caused at times unpredictable feelings. This “wall of peace” helped me to handle them while my counselees didn´t notice that it troubled me.

I realized that our brain has been designed to automatically discard any not important information or disregard information that is too hard to deal with. I concluded that: “our bodies do remember as feelings, what the mind doesn´t know, as it hasn´t been transferred to our conscious mind”. This automatic blockage is one way that enables us to handle intolerable emotions. One can also decide that it is not the right time to face a certain ugly situation, to lay issues aside, for later, when we can face them. I have found that the Lord is willing to help us to store these pictures away, without bothering us until we are ready to face them[3].

There are memories that can suddenly jump out in front of you, like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. People who are skilled drivers can react with calm and precision. People can likewise be trained to face ´triggers´, situations when a memory suddenly jumps up. These pictures or sounds can be reframed from ´always present´ to ´this once happened but I live in the hear-and-now and it has lost its power´. I was always tense when I heard the monthly siren of the air-raid warning system of the Netherlands being tested on the first Saturday of the month. It reminded me of the WWII warning sounds “planes are coming, bombing immanent”. One day I got the idea to make it my “call to prayer for peace”. Since then, my stomach learned not to react anymore. Reframing ugly incidents like what happened to me in WWII has been a major aspect in my ministry.

My interdenominational background

I have been a missionary since 1963 working and enjoying intercultural communication and understanding. I like to meet new people, new ideas, even different thoughts about God, mankind and the world. These various ways to look stimulated my own thinking. I have had the privilege to be invited to work in what for some are mutual exclusive theological environments, (from Plymouth Brethren to very expressive Pentecostals, and many theological diverse denominations in between). This opened my eyes how the Gospel filled in different needs in various different people and situations. The difference in theological content had not troubled me that much. The rather intense antagonistic feelings that people from different viewpoints felt towards each other were at times hard to face.  Wherever I was invited in the broad theological pallet of Christianity, I found people with a deep love for Jesus. Since the late 1980ties I met Roman Catholic believers more personally. I bracketed theological and practical differences, as I sensed the genuineness of their prayer and love expressed to Jesus. I continued to work for more than 20 years in the Roman Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Austria on a part-time basis, with anyone who was willing to meet me.

Then one morning the Lord surprised me

It was a very early spring morning in 2010 that I had a tremendous paradigm chance. Like young Samuel long before he became a leader in Israel, I was woken up by a voice in my room: I recognized Him as the one who spoke in an audible voice to me, twice before in my life and knew at once: this is the Lord. “Téo”… I said “yes …”. Then I heard his voice again: “ Téo, I want you to become a priest”. I reacted shocked. “What Lord, a Roman Catholic priest”? I looked at a statue of Mary, that I had received from a RC friend. My spontaneous response in this perplexing situation was my first ever question to Mary: “can you talk to Jesus about that?” A deep peace came upon me. I turned over and fell at once into a deep relaxing sleep. When I woke up again, I realized that some serious thinking was needed. Yet, to become a priest seemed logically impossible.

• I had been a Protestant missionary in Thailand for 12 years
• I had been active in various protestant missionary organizations since returning.
• I taught missions and pastoral care for 6 years in a Dutch Bible school.
• I started a Helping Through Blessing Pastoral Course in the Netherlands with a major aim to teach people to be good listeners and to be very cautious what they would say to traumatized people.
• For years I have had a pastoral page in an evangelical-charismatic magazine.
• On top of this, my next birthday would make me 73…
• And I was married, with 4 grown up daughters and 8 grandchildren
• I knew what the reaction of my rather strongly anti-Catholic wife was going to be: “are you nuts Téo”?

I was aware of the fact that married evangelicals who become priest could stay married. There were several of such converted evangelicals in Austria who lived with their wives in the RC parsonage. I decided not talk to anyone, also not to my wife, about what the Lord told me. If He wants me to be a priest, then He will have to clear all the hurdles, I thought. “Lord, if this really is you, then please take care of that”.

There were naturally the many questions. Later, when my conversion to the Roman Catholic Church became known, one off my former Bible school students, now a Baptist leader in the Netherlands, shared his sadness about people who were burned on the stake because of their new found faith in Jesus, as the R.C. Church considered them heretics. We looked at each other with a mutual sadness. Before I tell you how He cleared those ´impossibilities´ let me explain first more about my youth. The miracles He had to do in my life, to make me the person I am now.

[1] See Dr. Bessel van der Kolk 2014.

[2] TopDD/network.org

[3] 1 Cor.10: 13b

“Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name”