Nathan of Fides, Spes, Caritas is "digging up roots," i.e., his search for the right Christian community is taking him to back reading the works at the root of Christianity to aid in his search.

It is interesting because I went through something similar myself. In my case from being anti-Catholic and a Pentecostal fundamentalist, I found myself in the unenviable position of believing that Mary was worthy of worship, angels and saints could be prayed too, and that the book of Timothy, especially 1 Tim 6 needed more prominence in the life of Christians. I would not touch the Catholic Church with a 10-foot pole, and but I couldn't go back to being Pentecostal and so I did a similar type search.

Another key point in my search was that I needed address how it was that the Holy Spirit was present in the early Church obviously (Acts) and then vanished and reappeared in Luther.

I was fortunate to have gone a small private school, Daemen College in Amherst, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. It used to be a Franciscan school but had since become a secular non-sectarian school. But the library had all these great Christian history books that no one had looked at for decades.

First, I picked up a Church history book of the first 400 years. Unfortunately, it was written by Catholic priests, but I accepted that eventually. All I wanted was initial context and then references to original documents. This began an entire semester of reading. I was taking a far less course load than my usual and I had tons of time to read. Besides reading the general histories, I then read the writings of the early Church Fathers. Among many things, one thing that stuck out for me, was that their manner of reading scripture was much like mine.

Anyway, skipping over a bunch, two books were extremely important for me. One was The Little Flowers of St Francis which was a recounting of the life of St Francis, done a century or so after his death. The second was a book on the Spanish Inquisition written by Benoit Netanyahu (Cornell historian and father of one time Israeli PM).

The Inquisition book was what you'd expect, it was a very thorough history of the Jews and the situation leading up to the Inquisition. It was extremely enlightening, only because these were suppose to be the "dark ages." He excerpted from many treatises which had bearing on the issues of the day. What struck me was that obviously, Christianity hadn't gone anywhere, because these people were all about Scripture and Christian stuff. Also in reading these treatise excerpts, some of which lasted for pages, you felt that you were reading the thoughts of people who actually did care for their Christianity. The point was that, contrary to what I had held in my anti-Catholic days, the "dark ages" were anything but, and people were just like us and cared for their Christianity like Christians would today. What that did was removed the blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church and reserve that condemnation for those who deserved it. But that was a huge step for me.

As for Little Flowers, I picked it up randomnly at a Barnes and Nobles. The Little Flowers of St Francis is one of those writings that modern historians probably dismiss wholesale because it had accounts of miracles and visions etc. But for me it made the point. Coming from a Pentecostal background, I could relate to just about everything that was going in that book. I think 1 Cor 12:3 says that no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit and this book is one big Jesus is Lord book. For a Pentecostal, here's the reasoning. I had seen miracles happen before my eyes and the Holy Spirit do his thing. Now, if supernatural things are happening, there are two options, it is either the Holy Spirit, or it is demons. The test is not hard. If Christ is exalted AND the fruits of the miracles etc is visibly good, there's no question that it is the Holy Spirit. Little Flowers passed the smell test and if the Holy Spirit was not bothered by this whole Mary and praying to St Peter and St Paul, etc, then I made the decision to be fine with it. And that was it.

At the time I looked very closely in Eastern Churches, especially the Coptic Church with its African roots. But the bottomline for me was that being born and raised Catholic, it is easier to return to the Catholic Church. Besides it is convenient because everywhere I would go, I'd be sure to find a Church, etc.

In reading Nathan's post, I'm not sure what he's looking for and what would be the lynch pin for him. For me there was no compelling argument, it was just a sense first that due to newly acquired beliefs in Mary and saints, I no longer belonged to the Pentecostals (I actually did look at Lutherans but my head spun with all the different branches and i had no appettite for political crap), I agreed with many things the Catholic Church held, and I was familiar with the Catholic Church. I suppose that this is why for me today, the Church per se is not that important, rather it is content of belief that is for me.

I don't believe that there is ever anything that is literally compelling in this type of search. It is always a Newman-ish type thing, different conclusions, points and contexts come together and you feel like you have enough to satisfy your own personal threshhold of certainty.