Personal Testimony

      I, Dibby, would like to further introduce the Christian community of California City with more of the riches and depths of the Catholic Faith. But I know well the blocks in some quarters to hearing something that is from the Catholic Christian Faith.

      So I think it’s time for a bit of my own personal testimony. We all like stories, and testimonies of what the Lord has done in our lives, right? So here goes.

      I grew up in a Christian home, parents and grandparents Presbyterian and Evangelical ministers, missionaries and teachers in England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Colombia, and the USA. My BA degree in Religious Studies came from a good Evangelical school (Westmont College, Santa Barbara), with course work at two other Presbyterian schools. I especially took classes on “Reformation” Theology, so knew where the “errors” of Roman Catholicism lay. My English minister father had always been quite clear on that score also.

      Along the way, I had traveled around to many different churches. At one time I had been a member of a very liberal ecumenical Protestant organization and religious order focused on social concerns and societal transformation. Then I had also experienced and participated in Charismatic and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity.

      Now it was the Fall of 1979. I was accepted as a candidate for ministry in the Presbyterian Church, and had traveled to New Jersey to attend Princeton Seminary. Three eye-opening, transformative things happened there.

     First, John Michael Talbot’s music had become popular among Evangelicals, even though he had become Catholic (and that was a conundrum!). His album, “Come to the Quiet,” had just come out. It was Psalms for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer put to music. I listened to one side every morning on waking, and the other side every evening before sleep.  I discovered there the gentleness, quietness, and stillness of God. Astonishing! Who is this? A yearning grew in me. I had never known, felt, or experienced this aspect of God before.

      Second, I had accepted the Evangelical and Pentecostal assertion that the Early Church was non-liturgical, very informal, exercising charismatic gifts regularly, with spontaneous worship and praise, very little structure. Things like liturgy, rites, apostolic succession, priests, bishops, popes, transubstantiation, sacraments – you know, all those “Catholic” things – were seen as mere human doctrines invented by men in the “Dark Ages.” So for my first paper in the Church History class that Fall, I intended to research the earliest Church Fathers to prove this thesis about the Charismatic nature of the Early Church. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I read the earliest of the Church Fathers. I searched more and more. I kept looking for support of the thesis. But it wasn’t there. I just kept finding these “Catholic things” all over the early Church Fathers. Everywhere. From Day 1.

      Lastly, I was browsing in the Princeton University bookstore and “happened” upon a book titled, “The Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas A. Kempis. It said it was the second most popular book to the Bible. How had I never heard of it?! It was published by Baker Books, a Protestant outfit, and written in the 1400's when the Church (in the West, at least) was still united. So, I figured, can’t be too heretical, and bought it. That night I began reading at my desk. Every phrase was full of Scripture, but with meanings I had never heard before, all ringing true. Moved deeply. I did something completely bizarre for me: I got up, put the book on the bed, knelt down, and read the book on my knees. It was too reverent not to. I entered a whole new world, ever so Biblical.

      I left seminary soon thereafter. One of my friends asked the question one asks when they think someone is confused: “If you could do anything at all, money no issue, what would it be?”

      I answered him with no hesitation. “I want to be a monk!” And I left.

Dibby Allan Green

Originally published in the print edition of the Mojave Desert News of June 19, 2024, corrected. 

Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church is located in California City, CA. Visit our website at ollcalcity.org.

Dibby Allan Green has a BA in Religious Studies (Westmont College, 1978) and MA in Theology (Augustine Institute, 2019), is a lay Catholic hermit, and a parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish.