My apologies Fr. David, I was having quite a bit of doubts and confusion on the mode of my entrance into the church. As we have been helping Jesse unlearn protestantism, this guy, showing the True Way. I have slowly been seeing the reality of the sacraments and their mystery. Especially the past few weeks.
I needed time to really consider what was going on. This is no one's fault, I just have a lot of bad understandings from my previous spiritual life and it leaks into the next. Not only that my mom told me she saw danger ahead of me in some way and for 3 days she had felt compelled to tell me about that danger. That was what I meant by "family matter".
I take the sacraments more and more seriously as time goes on and it does influence me. As such I needed to grant myself time to think, research and pray for prudence. I don't mean to rebel or press against St. Anthony's or you and know I am in tears.
Its more, and I don't understand it myself, the sacrament has value beyond something we can physically see.
So I decided to share with you in the way I know how, HTML.
I do want to restate my history on baptism. Because this was part of the delay.
Well go chronological order:
#1 As an infant we, as a Mexican family, had me sprinkled and both my parents were not religious. They never returned to that church, were not Catholic and never engaged in sacramental living.
#2 I believed in faith alone at 20 from atheist -> protestant. I attempted "righteousness" henceforth. But was not baptized.
#3 At 23 I had serious mental illness but as someone who believed in Christ I was still attempting righteousness. My father, seeing this struggle, decided to "baptize" me while I was unconscious and potentially dying.
When I ask him how it was done, he says he doesn't remember. Recall he is protestant.
#4 When I am 30 years old my mother, a recent protestant, wants her children baptized. They take me to John Hagee's church to a baptismal service. It is the policy of that church that they be immersed once. However, I recall being triply immersed, being surprised as the other baptizers there were doing other types of dips.
I remember being surprised by the redipping. Example link
The baptismal certificate (I will also email it to you).I want to appeal to you on this baptism about whether my memory is even true and if someone without the intent of remission of sins (that was not my intent as I believed it was symbolic and same for them) and also the person baptizing being a random "staff" not even a sub-pastor of John Hagee's church, without apostolic succession could even truly perform this (they are filioque on top of that).
Not only this, these people reject our sacraments and even the church members reject our beautiful phrenoma passed down generation to generation. Some would even ill treat us for our traditions. I have directly felt/heard this.
The tears I mentioned earlier are more on that fact that how do I know I have the remission of sins without the proper baptism.
So I want to appeal to you and delay my chrismation for this.
I did not know it was so reverential. In my previous understanding godparenting was a simple formality, forgotten afterward. My "padrino" never even visited us nor did we have actual conversations in my recollection.
Steven was telling me about what it means to have a Godparent. In addition he mentioned his struggles in detail and how he is at a "knife's edge" in regards to his struggle and I did not know how to interpret that, which for me was a red flag. Which would have been fine if godparenting were a simple formality.
But as he explained what it truly meant I was realizing it was prudent to perhaps ask his Godparent and make us siblings. It seems like a good middleground to me. And I love Steven to death. I was just surprised, like a lot lol.
