Erik Curren’s Story (continued)
Erik Curren, who completed the OCIA preparation last year and was received into the Church at the 2025 Easter Vigil, has written an account of his religious journey that may be helpful to anyone contemplating becoming a Catholic and inspirational to those who have been Catholic a while, whether a few years or a lifetime:
Losing an Election Brought Me to the Catholic Faith
I was raised nominally Christian, pursued spirituality most of my adult life, and, for the last few years, was active in my Protestant church. But something was missing, I knew. How would I find it?
It took losing a run for public office to open me to God’s call to swim the Tiber.
I had served on the city council of Staunton, VA (pop. 25,000) for two terms. During that time, I worked with citizens to encourage more bicycling and local food, protect our water supply from a natural gas pipeline, and name a bridge after Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., fulfilling a long-held desire of the local black community. When the pandemic closed restaurants, I proposed that we allow them to re-open with outdoor seating. The city adopted my plan to close four blocks of our historic downtown shopping and dining area, Beverley Street, to vehicle traffic on weekends so that restaurants could set up tables outside. This change has continued through the present, to the delight of residents and tourists alike. The most difficult thing we did was to run a controversial but ultimately successful campaign to amend city regulations to allow citizens to keep backyard chickens. I’m glad to see that dozens of families continue to take advantage of the opportunity to produce fresh eggs at home.
For years, city council elections had been sleepy affairs, where candidates answered questions about tax rates, economic development, and services like trash pickup—not dramatic stuff, but important locally—for a small but well-informed electorate. But as the pandemic wound down, polarization started to spread from national politics into our quiet local races. First, local Republicans banded together on a slate to support gun rights—and their slate won. Then, in the next election, Democrats made their own slate to oust the Republicans, which they managed to do.
Since I was used to serving as an independent, I chose not to run on either slate. And so I was first removed from office and then, two years later, failed in a bid to regain my seat.
I like to tell people that losing an election can really spoil your evening. It’s not like getting fired from a job, where HR keeps everything quiet and discreet. Election results are all over the news. So everybody knew that I’d lost not just one election, but two.
I hung my head in shame for a while. Then I started to ask myself what I was going to do next. This led to big questions that have come up in my life whenever something big has gone wrong: What’s my purpose in life? Is my value in what I accomplish or in something else? Is there a higher authority with a plan that I could tap into?
That’s when I started feeling the pull towards the Catholic faith. I was born and raised in Chicago, a city with lots of Catholics, but somehow, it just seemed like the church there was an ethnic club for certain groups, but not for me. Soon after I moved to Staunton, I’d started attending an Episcopal church. Though they were more energized by political issues than by orthodox Christianity, their traditional liturgy, music, and aesthetics prepared me to look deeper into traditional Christianity.
After I lost that second election, I started reading the Bible, looking for answers to the dilemma of my life. I decided to make that year the one I’d read the Bible all the way through—and I did. Looking for Bible commentaries on YouTube, I found today’s famous Catholic internet evangelists, especially Father Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron. In particular, Bishop Barron’s casual preaching style that weirdly connected traditional theology with the history of ideas and also with current events struck a chord. I couldn’t get enough. I subscribed to his daily Bible reading emails, I watched his Sunday sermons, I ordered half a dozen of his books, and even joined his online Word on Fire Institute.
After that, a young friend who’d left my Episcopal congregation in Staunton a few months earlier invited me to the next session of OCIA. He even helpfully signed me up for class before I had decided to join, which though a bit presumptuous turned out to be a blessing. From my first class, I appreciated the learning and teaching skills of the instructors and found the catechism readings sensible. I learned firsthand that the old myth about Catholics being told not to ask questions but just to “shut up and believe” was not true. In reality, it was the opposite. No issue seemed off limits, and the Church seemed to have good answers for all my questions.
In the end, I could see that being Catholic wasn’t going to be easy. Maybe it wouldn’t always be fun either. I might have to change some things that I believed and some ways I behaved. But I was convinced that this would be for my own good because it would comport with the truth of life that God is in charge, not me. The more I learned and prayed, the more I saw my own story as, well, not that interesting. I wanted to be an actor in God’s story, which now appeared to be a dramatic and heroic adventure.
After a first confession that was scarier in theory than in practice came a long but joyful Saturday night in April of 2025 at the Easter Vigil Mass when I committed to the Catholic faith in front of hundreds of my new brothers and sisters in Christ. And since then I have come to see that, as they say, the church is bigger on the inside than it appears from outside. I am just now discovering the riches of the church: understanding the Mass and taking joy in it; receiving the sacraments and learning more about them; reading about the lives of saints and selecting a few to connect with; visiting churches and holy sites around the country; and even, while seeking a ministry of healing within the church, discovering the exuberance of charismatic Catholics who seek to connect with the Holy Spirit.
At this point, there seems to be no end to ways that the church can help me get closer to God. And for that, I am grateful to the church and to the kind friends who encouraged me to heed her call.