Accidentally Finding God and Happiness

Jennifer Fulwiler grew up following her father’s atheist belief system. Though she was unnerved by the idea that she and all her loved ones would simply cease to exist someday, she came to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the prospect of death was to distract yourself with as many laughs and good times as possible. And that’s exactly how she lived for many years.

Fulwiler found a good job, got married to a successful man, drove a Jaguar, and lived in a great condo in Austin, Texas. Despite all this material comfort, she felt haunted by spiritual emptiness, a feeling that life was ultimately meaningless.

In light of her husband Joe’s nominal Christian faith, Fulwiler started investigating Christianity, a religion she had rejected a long time ago. This time, she did it with an open mind. Ironically, she credits her atheist father with giving her the foundation for her eventual conversion to Catholicism.

During an interview on Christopher Closeup about her memoir Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It, Fulwiler said, “He was one of my biggest influences in converting to Catholicism, because of his humility and selfless love. Also, what he always taught me was to seek truth above all. Even if it’s inconvenient, even if you don’t like the conclusions you come to, you have to always be focused on what is true.

”Finding the truth in Christianity in general - and Catholicism in particular - took a lot of mental and spiritual effort for Fulwiler, who always thought you needed to check your brain at the door in order to believe in God. And though her husband Joe didn’t believe that, his own biases showed when he said things like, “Catholicism is a corrupt belief system that is not true Christianity.”

Once again, the couple’s rigorous investigation into the teachings of the faith, as opposed to what nonbelievers said about it, brought them to a different conclusion. Fulwiler said, “Joe went to Yale undergrad, Columbia Law School, Stanford Business School, studied in the Master’s Computer Science program at Stanford. So for somebody like me, who was really afraid of this idea of checking my brain at the door, [it was vital] having my husband agreeing with me, saying, ‘This is the most intellectually honest belief system in the world. This moral code is perfectly consistent. This Church is full of wisdom.’”

Converting didn’t just affect the Fulwilers’ beliefs, but their actions and their lifestyle as well. Before becoming Catholic, noted Jennifer, she followed the values of the society in which she lived: make as much money as you can, live comfortably, don’t make too many sacrifices, and don’t have too many children.

Since Jennifer and Joe are now the parents of six children, they obviously moved beyond their old ways. She concludes, “When we first made all these changes and we left the fancy lifestyle, we suddenly had all of these problems and crosses that we didn’t have before . . . And to this day, we struggle so much more than we did when we were living our worldly, secular lives. And yet, our lives are bursting with life and with love and with joy . . . So I think it’s definitely a scary proposition to nonbelievers, when I say, ‘My life is 10 times harder now than it was when I was an atheist.’ And I think it is sometimes hard for them to believe the truth: that it might be 10 times harder, but it is infinitely more joyful.”

(This essay is this week's “Light One Candle” column, written by Tony Rossi, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)

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The Christophers