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March 2007 Issue
Coming home to the
Church
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One afternoon,
Leslie and Jim Coerper’s then-3-year-old daughter
secretly let herself out of the house when her mother
thought she was napping. The Coerpers’ next door-
neighbor, Ellen Murray, spotted the little girl wandering
down the sidewalk and promptly led her back home. Later,
Ellen would be instrumental in leading Jim and Leslie
“home” to the Catholic faith.
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As a couple, Jim and Leslie had remarkably
similar faith backgrounds: both were baptized Catholics as
infants, but their parents stopped going to church shortly
after their children had received first Communion. And so,
a faith truly practiced was not something Jim and Leslie had
fully lived.
It was only many years later – after
meeting each other, marrying and having two children –
that they began the process to return to the church. They
joined with those seeking to become Catholic through the Rite
of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). For Jim and Leslie,
this process was the catalyst for reconnecting to the faith
into which they had been baptized.
They participated in a one-year course of
study, dialogue and reflection through
St. Stephen Parish in East Grand Rapids beginning in 1997.
At the Easter Vigil
in 1998, they received the sacrament of confirmation, signaling
their full return
to the faith. For Leslie, this was the beginning of a strong
experience of community that she has found in the church.
“I really had no idea just where the
experience would take me but knew that I needed to be there,
needed to find out what my life was missing being away from
the church,” she recalled.
A journey of faith
Leslie was born in Saginaw, Mich., and studied
at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. After college,
she moved to California where she met Jim. The couple married
in 1991, and their daughter, Shea, was born a year later.
But the desire to be close to family led them back to Michigan,
and they moved to Grand Rapids in 1994. Leslie currently works
as a manager of clinical informatics at St. Mary’s Health
Care in Grand Rapids. Jim earned a business degree at Aquinas
College and works as an account representative for J. Bos
Vending.
They welcomed a second child, a son, Harrison,
a year after moving to Grand Rapids. Leslie and Jim were settling
into life. They had good jobs, two young children and a house
across from St. Stephen’s in East Grand Rapids. But
they felt that something important was missing from their
lives. Then they got to know Ellen Murray, the elderly neighbor
who lived next door. After they had developed a friendship,
Ellen asked if they attended a church. When she learned that
they didn’t, she encouraged them to come with her to
St. Stephen’s and to talk with Father Mark Przybysz,
the pastor at the time.
“God was working through her for us,”
Leslie reflected. “We were not going to church when
we moved here, and we felt that we were missing a big part
of life. We wanted our children to grow up with a strong faith.”
Initially, they were a bit hesitant about
going to St. Stephen’s. Living right across the street
from the church, they thought some “anonymity”
might be good. However, they had visited other churches before
meeting Ellen and didn’t feel quite connected to any
of them. With Ellen’s encouragement, they decided to
meet with Father Przybysz at St. Stephen’s. Then, with
Ellen as their sponsor, they enrolled in the parish’s
RCIA process in the fall of 1997 and began to study the faith.
Leslie remembers their weekly meetings as
being thorough, “like a college course.”
Undaunted, they plunged ahead. To this day,
they’re glad they did.
A sense of community
Jim and Leslie joined a group of about 25
catechumens and candidates, each at a different stage in their
journey to the Catholic faith. The group quickly established
a sense of community, fostered by discussions about the faith.
The community aspect became “so much more profound by
the sharing of our doubts and feelings and hearing other people’s
stories,” Leslie said.
For many candidates, the catechumenate can
be a period of question and enlightenment. For Leslie, it
was mainly “an experience of joy. At that point in our
lives, we were ready for the faith.”
She and Jim began to feel at home with the
parish. They started going to Mass every Sunday with Ellen
and also had their children baptized in August 1998. During
Lent, the catechumens and candidates in the RCIA enter a final
stage of spiritual preparation. It is a more intense period
of study, prayer and reflection as they prepare to receive
the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and Eucharist at the
Easter Vigil. However, because Leslie and Jim had been baptized
and had received Communion as children, it remained only for
them to be confirmed.
Leslie found the Easter Vigil that marked
their full return to the church “very moving.”
In fact, she still goes to this Mass every year and said she
cries when the song Come Holy Spirit is sung in Latin during
the confirmation of the newly baptized. The Litany of the
Saints, chanted by the congregation just before the candidates
are baptized, also never fails to move Leslie. It reinforces
her sense of community in the church, a community
that unites both the living and the dead.
“It’s so moving to be asking the
saints for all this help,” she said.
Since then, Leslie and Jim have been actively
involved in parish life. Leslie became a catechist for the
RCIA and also has taught CCD to fourth graders. She worked
on the parish stewardship committee, seeking ways to get more
parishioners involved in church activities. Currently, she
and Jim volunteer at St. Stephen’s monthly interfaith
hospitality dinner for members of the neighborhood who are
in need. Once a month, the couple works as sacristans, getting
the church ready for the late-afternoon Saturday Mass. Leslie
also brings Communion to several home-bound parishioners.
The sense of community at St. Stephen’s
was strengthened for Leslie during a particularly difficult
year. In 2002, her father and Ellen Murray both passed away.
Then, less than two weeks before Christmas that year, Leslie
and Jim’s house was gutted in a fire. One of the firemen
who came to her house looked familiar – he was one of
the catechumens in the RCIA process she was helping to lead
that year.
Later, during a talk that she gave at Mass
for the stewardship committee, she shared her experiences
of loss and the spiritual support that she received from the
parish community. Afterward, a woman who had been at Mass
approached her and told her that she had not previously been
interested in the faith but was moved by the talk. The woman
later entered the RCIA process and eventually was baptized
a Catholic.
Just like her neighbor, Ellen Murray, Leslie’s
words helped to lead this woman home to the church. Leslie
feels that since her return to the church, she has continued
to grow in faith because she stepped out of her comfort zone
and got involved. She considers her faith journey as a continuous
way of saying “yes” to God.
“He is going to tap you on the shoulder,
and what are you going to say to him?” Leslie said.
“It’s too easy to say, ‘I don’t have
time, I don’t feel comfortable.’ I always try
to say ‘yes.’”
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