March 18, 2011
Jean Wood
RCIA participant looking to ‘become an active’ Catholic
Jean Wood holds her dog, Buttons. She is going through the RCIA program at Nativity Church in Evansville, and will be received into the Church at the Easter Vigil. (Message photo by Mary Ann Hughes) Click for a larger version.
By MARY ANN HUGHES (Message staff writer)
Jean Wood has come full circle.
As a child, she watched her mother become fully engaged in the life of the her church, and now Jean’s preparing to do that too.
Last Sunday, Jean’s name was recorded during a ceremony at St. Benedict Cathedral in Evansville, and during the Easter Vigil she will be received into the Catholic Church.
As a young girl, she attended the Presbyterian church, where her mother was a Sunday school teacher. “We had to go to church every Sunday,” Jean remembers, adding that “like many children” she hated going to church.
She married “rather young” and during the marriage she and her husband never went to church together. She attended church with her in-laws “occasionally” but felt their church was not her church.
She and her husband divorced after 30 years of marriage, and that was when she began searching both for a church and for someone to go to church with her.
When she met Joe Wolf, he invited her to attend Nativity Church with him.
At first, she said she had to get used to the “church aerobics” during Mass. She found the parish was very “close-knit.” She also found it was easy to attend Mass there every week but not join the parish.
Then she was hospitalized, and asked if she attended a church. As she answered “no” she realized that “maybe it was a good time to become a member of a church.”
She decided to become a Catholic, and this year she’s been enrolled in the RCIA program at Nativity. “The group is awesome,” she says. Her sponsor is Mary Reynolds, someone who “is about the same age” who has “gone through a lot of the same things I have gone through.”
During the years between childhood until she joined the RCIA program Jean said God was always in her life. “I feel that God has always taken care of me. He has gotten me through things. Now I feel like I need to do something for him, like becoming a member of a church, like learning more about the Bible.”
All along, she held on to the belief that “everything happens for a reason.”
She said Joe has always been available to answer questions about the Catholic faith, as have members of his family so by the time she began the RCIA classes “I had a good understanding of it.”
Even so, she often felt like a “spectator in the pew.”
It took her nine years to decide to become a Catholic. She says of herself: “Once I commit myself, I commit, but it takes me a little while to get to that point.”
She recently went to lunch with some women friends, and they talked about the lack of support from their churches when their husbands died or when they went through divorces. She told them about Nativity parish where “people send cards and go the hospitals.”
She sees herself in that role soon when she becomes a parishioner. “I want to be an active member. I want to help with the fish fries and the bereavement dinners.” She sees herself decorating the church for Christmas and being in Bible studies.
“I want to learn as much as I can so I can help others.”
It’s a full circle for her now, she says, remembering the hours her own mom spent helping out at church.
(Related story: Catechumens, candidates prepare to join the Church)