My story

Member of Beatitudes Community.

My name is Katarína – today I am sister Veronika from the Beatitudes Community.

I always have wonderful memories of my return to God; still today they are pretty important. Everything happened during my university studies at times of normalizing Communism. Back then I was neither unbeliever nor atheist; I think I was a good girl who was born in a Catholic family.

I did believe – although life with God – during adolescence – didn’t mean too much for me. I mean I wasn’t taking God too seriously... But what about Him? Was He taking me seriously?

In my early years as a university student, I managed to completely obscure the notion of the existence of God.

I felt I could happily live without God. I wasn’t missing Him.

At home – where we had a very sorrowful family experience – I used to pray. I prayed as a child, then as an adolescent girl. I asked God to intervene. But it looked like He couldn’t hear me. Was he powerless...?

School was over, far away from home... I rapidly started to take all this as a sort of liberation. I felt I was finally experiencing real life. I just wanted to taste every bit of “joy” life gives us. Nothingness and frustration were gradually filling up my existence, although in those early stages I refused to admit it. Once, after we spent the night having fun, I went to bed and fell asleep. I suddenly woke up and realized I felt quite bad. It had happened before – on several occasions. I usually have arrhythmias... But then, my heart was out of control. I thought I was going to faint. I felt that it was my last night and that I wouldn’t be alive in the next morning.

I was in a student residence, but I was alone in my room. I reached the corridor and sat on the stairs waiting for my last breath.

I said to myself: “If I have to die, at least somebody will find me in the morning”.

I was just sitting there. I was not realizing what was going on. Then, for the first time after quite a long while, I thought of God... God from the times of my childhood. This thought was accompanied by one only sentence: “If God really exists, and if I die now, I will certainly go to Hell” (later on, I realized that this is not a positive reason for conversion – but back then, I experienced just this).

I am not really able to describe what happened to me – all my repressed emptiness, my disgust against the way I lived, all my shallowness that led me to pretension and insincerity (for example, showing that I was strong enough to play with my wooers, just because I could do it) – all this stuff emerged in front of my eyes together with its nakedness and ugliness.

I survived. But something changed for good and forever. Unfortunately, I lived among students with strong bonds; I was not able to abandon them all at once. At the beginning, I started to secretly flee discotheques – at least something... Just like the publican, I silently slipped in the church in front of our student dormitory. Inside the church, I stayed in the back rows, in the most complete darkness, hidden behind a column – in order not to be seen by any of those “holy souls” who went to church. Indeed, young believers used to go to that church. I knew them by sight. I thought they were going to recognize me. We met them many times in front of the church, when me and my partygoer friends were going to the pub (or coming back from the pub).

In my mind, I used to call them “good church children” (partially making fun of them).

Later on, when God was strongly pushing me towards a complete change in my life, I prayed Him (still an unknown God, but at least I found Him...) to give me a chance to be noticed by those good church children... Indeed, at that time, I also needed human help in my new road. And they noticed me. It was my first fulfilled prayer... They welcome me in their community without judging me and without prejudices. Still today, I am extremely grateful to them for their gesture of acceptance.

They invited me to their meetings in the parsonage. What a courageous act! During harsh Communist period it was a very common thing to lay information against somebody. They actually didn’t know me. During my first visit in the parsonage I saw a huge book. I opened it. I read the following sentence:

“...Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love...” (1 John 4, 8).

I was amazed. It was the Bible. I knew. But I never read it before.

I remember that I immediately wrote down this sentence. It was always inside me. It was echoing within me – day and night: God is love – Whoever does not love does not know God... To know God means loving Him..., to love truly means to know God – and vice versa... Love and God cannot be separated... And this thought was always leading me! I was more and more realizing that all my previous life was not love... and it wasn’t even God! I really longed for love – to love, to be loved. But my previous life was nothing but hedonism and jugglery. My old life lasted until when something flashed into my mind! God told me that he is Love. He teaches me how to love: Him, people, and life!

But who is God? My desire to discover Him, to know Him, was like a fire inside me. It was such a strong desire that nobody could stop me. A wonderful phase of my life had just started: in quest of God – and through Him I was discovering myself, my new own dignity. I found myself in all those people (described in the Gospel) who were with Jesus: sinners, Pharisees, disciples... Through God I had a chance to rediscover the whole world, people, and the stars at night. I never thought before that those stars could witness of the beauty of God... I looked at them so many times before. Now, I couldn’t believe how it was possible that I perceived them as “simple stars”. It was just the beginning. I’ll never forget it. Week after week I went to the parsonage to read that Book. Just a small explanatory note: at that time, it wasn’t so easy to get a Bible. Nobody sold copies of the Bible. That’s why I wrote down all those wonderful words about God revealed in the speeches of Jesus or in the letters of St. Paul and St. John. I had a special workbook – the nicest workbook on the market. I learned those words by heart. That workbook was my Bible. And it was always with me.

As for the suffering within our family and in the whole world, I stopped asking God why... I was happy to know only one thing: I can live with Him – if I am with him I can experience everything, incl. suffering... God offers this chance to each single individual. When thinking about suffering I intuitively realized that the Devil exists as well and he aims to destroy what God created, incl. myself and my dears... When I understood this, I screamed against the Evil:

“I am not going to cease – you won’t win! God is here – that’s all! You have got no chances!”

Does it look childish or rude? Well, just try to take conviction away from somebody... And I invoked God’s mightiness to descend on me, my dears, and more and more people...

Plenty of good things followed up... I would sum them up in one only sentence:

God started to teach me how to live, how to be really glad – not just looking for pleasure.

Many of the past common pleasures remained. God made them purer – He transformed them. Even today, thirty years later, I live the same experience: with my God I will survive. ONLY with him I will survive! To live with Him, to suffer, to fight, to walk during the day or at night – all this is one only life that is worth it to live. This life is never-ending, just like our encounter and knowledge of God’s beauty – love...