It all started when the parents of the girls I played with down the street asked if I’d like to come to church with them on Sunday. “Sure,” I said. No one in my family went to church. I got up early and trotted down to their house (they weren’t even up) and went with them to Mass. It was all in Latin. They gave me a rosary; I thought, “Wow. Jewelry in church.” But I saw the people coming back from communion—whatever they had, that’s what I wanted.

I was ten.

When I told my parents I wanted to be a Catholic, they said, “That’s nice, dear.” Two years later, I was still persisting—and some good Jesuit priests convinced my father (the renegade son of a Methodist minister) that Catholic was not a bad thing to be. So I wound up being baptized in the chapel at Loyola University in Los Angeles.

This was long before anyone had even heard of the RCIA. If you weren’t a cradle Catholic, you “took instructions” from a priest for a while (yes, the Baltimore Catechism) and then you got baptized. So there I was at 12—hardly infant baptism, but certainly not RCIA material. Somehow it all stuck.

But without a note of music. Granted, that was long before Vatican II, and music wasn’t considered normative. Only choirs sang.

I’ve often wondered whether I would have made it through the long RCIA program and its various rites and rituals. But I probably would have stuck with it anyhow—because apparently this was where God wanted me to be.