When Jacob Rivera arrived at Stanford in 2022, the post-pandemic world seemed to be in upheaval. He remembered, “Every institution seemed to be making competing moral claims, and my classmates and professors held wildly divergent views on what was true, what was just, and what a human life was for. I needed to get to the bottom of what was actually true.”

He enrolled in philosophy and theology courses, and he read the early Church fathers. Very soon, however, Christianity ceased to be merely intellectual. It became an encounter with a God who entered fully into human experience. “That assurance is something no philosophy on its own could give me,” he reflected. “It required a God who became man.”

He also discovered his yearning for spiritual companionship. “I found that I needed the embodied Christian community,” he shared. His sponsor, Luke Smith, accompanied him throughout the process, and other OCIA participants’ stories deeply inspired him as well.

“Sitting with people who had wrestled with doubt, family resistance, and the simple difficulty of believing made my own reasoning feel less like a private achievement and more like one thread in something much larger.” Jacob said, “Hearing these stories week after week made the Church feel catholic [universal] in the literal sense, as something wider and stranger than I had expected, and exactly large enough to hold all of us.”

Story originally published in the Valley Catholic