In my imagination, Juliet was waiting on the balcony of her apartment, peering into the darkness, wondering when I would call.

The fourth question the congregation answers when we renew our baptismal promises is “Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth?”

My answer was definitely Yes during my first two semesters in the great books program I told you about.

But then I went home.

When I came home from San Francisco, Arizona looked more like a desert than ever. 

At school I had experienced friendship, studied great thoughts, but hadn’t yet taken the two key classes I described. I had also kept to habits of sin and even expanded my repertoire a little. And when I found myself separated from the community that was the Church for me, I backslid. A lot.

I don’t think I went to confession at all that summer. I went to Mass, but not with much enthusiasm. Worse, I knew I wouldn’t see all those people again for a long time, since I would spend the entire next year at Blackfriars College in Oxford, England, with my program’s study abroad program.

So I was far from my newfound faith when I left for my year abroad.

On the plane across the Atlantic, I sat next to a young woman my age from London. She was pretty, blonde, kind, and attentive. And her name was Juliet. Just like Shakespeare.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m going to go pretend to be Catholic for another year,” I said, surprised by the words that came from my mouth.

We talked for hours and got along extremely well. Finally, she took a slip of paper out of her purse. She wrote down the address of her apartment in London and her telephone number.

Then she said words that shook my romantic 19-year-old heart to its core: “Ring me up and stay in my London flat when you get tired of pretending you’re Catholic.” 

That paper, and that invitation, was a thing of great power in my life. Juliet herself was awaiting me in London. All I had to do was call.

I wanted to. It was true: I was pretending to be Catholic.

I was no longer the atheist I once was, of course. I believed in God when I did Catholic things — while I did them, anyway. I just never thought about him, talked to him, or referenced him apart from that.

So I arrived at my Southmoor Road room near Oxford’s Port Meadow, lay in bed, and stared into the darkness again. I decided I couldn’t possibly believe the creed — the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate and all that. It was too much. Juliet, I knew, was real.

But then that I did something that would change my life forever. I prayed. For real, with intention, from my heart. 

I started tentatively: “God, if you really exist, you should be able to show me that you exist. Right?”

Then I got bolder: “God — if you can’t show me that you are God, then you aren’t God. So show me.”

Eventually, I said, “If the creed is true, make it clear to me!”

Then God did the unthinkable. 

I found myself suddenly thrust into the company of some of the leading lights in Catholic theology.

My roommate was Adrian Walker, who would become the well-known theologian who translated Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth. His good friend who became my good friend was John Mallory, a great brain in his own right. The two of them would start talking about theology as we walked through the ancient streets of Oxford, and I would have to physically restrain them from walking into traffic. But they also answered my hardest questions better than most people in the world could.

Father Richard Conrad, OP, a Cambridge Chemistry PhD, taught my tutorial on the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas.

He made Thomas’ proofs for the existence of God make sense to me. Rather than speaking of movement and the “Unmoved Mover,” he said, “the more things change, the more they are moved forward by things that are more actual.” So a “most actual” thing must be at the source of it all. 

I attended the lectures of Father Brian Davies, author of the classic Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. 

Father Davies treated bad religious philosophy and bad atheistic philosophy with equal derision. He fiercely defended the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” against atheists who wanted to make it inadmissible. He also said, as he would later at Fordham, “If there are good philosophical reasons for believing in God, then evil doesn’t disprove God’s existence” — because God doesn’t have moral obligations judgeable by us. 

Juliet saved me after all.

Every truth I accepted always came with an unspoken caveat: “If not, then Juliet.”

In my imagination, Juliet was waiting on the balcony of her apartment, peering into the darkness, wondering when I would call.

And so, in my imagination, I constantly had to choose either Juliet or God.

I chose God. I believed. But my life needed to match my brain, so the story of How I Found My Faith would have to take more steps forward, in Rome and Fatima.